World Cup countdown: Six weeks and closing fast

Six weeks. That is all that separates us now from June 11, the day this extraordinary tournament kicks into life.

The World Cup has left the realm of anticipation and entered something more urgent: the final weeks of preparation, the last auditions, the closing of doors on dreams deferred. The machinery of the greatest sporting event in human history is fully engaged, and if you have been meaning to pay attention, the time has arrived.

Tickets at the door

FIFA launched what it is calling its Last-Minute Sales Phase last week, releasing millions more tickets for all 104 matches on a first-come, first-served basis. More than five million tickets have already been sold for what will be the largest World Cup in history.

That number is not a boast; it is a measure of the scale of what is coming. If you have been quietly telling yourself you might go to a game in Atlanta or Seattle or Boston or New York or any of the other cities hosting matches, the window is narrowing.

But the window extends beyond American borders. Matches are also being played in Guadalajara, Mexico City and Monterrey — three storied footballing cities where the game is not a novelty but a near-sacred inheritance — and in Toronto and Vancouver, two of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Western hemisphere.

This is, in the most literal sense, a North American World Cup, and the full breadth and depth of that phrase deserves full respect and awe.

FIFA has had to remind attending fans that a match ticket does not automatically guarantee entry into the host countries. Visa requirements for Canada and Mexico must also be sorted in advance, a logistical reminder that this tournament is a genuinely global gathering spread across three sovereign nations.

People are traveling from every continent to be in our stadiums. The question is whether we will join them.

America’s moment of reckoning

The U.S. men’s national team manager Mauricio Pochettino is about one month away from announcing his final 26-man roster, a process he has already described as “painful.”

He is working from a shortlist of 35 to 40 players, and the conversations in football circles this week reflect the agonies and calculations of that narrowing. The roster announcement will take place at a celebratory event in New York City, and the party atmosphere feels both earned and slightly precarious, because the squad selection carries real stakes, and several positions are still genuinely unresolved.

The goalkeeper question is one such puzzle. Matt Freese of New York City FC appears to have moved ahead of the experienced Matt Turner, yet Pochettino values Turner’s 2022 World Cup experience and locker-room presence.

Veteran defender Tim Ream, 38, continues to defy actuarial logic by staying in contention, though some observers suggest Father Time may finally be sending a memo.

And in the forward line, the devastating news of last week has been the confirmation that Patrick Agyemang, a powerful, dynamic striker who had broken into the squad picture, suffered a serious Achilles tendon injury that ended his World Cup dream entirely. He is 23 years old, and this was to be his moment. The game can be breathtakingly cruel.

Against that heartbreak, there is an exhilarating counter-narrative. Folarin Balogun has scored in seven consecutive league matches for AS Monaco. Seven. His form has been the kind that turns a fringe candidate into a genuine tournament threat, and his emergence gives Pochettino options for his U.S. squad he may not have fully expected when the year began.

Christian Pulisic, the beating heart of this American generation, spoke publicly this week with characteristic directness: “The team’s in a good place. People should be excited and hopefully ready to cheer us on.”

He is right. The USMNT opens against Paraguay on June 12 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California — in front of what will surely be a sold-out, expectant, flag-waving American crowd — then Seattle for Australia and back to California for Turkey.

The group is genuinely manageable. The knockout rounds are not a fantasy; they are a reasonable ambition, as I have noted before.

England: Beautiful uncertainty

I confess, as a lifelong supporter of the England national team, that I see the current state of the Three Lions through fingers pressed half across my eyes.

Thomas Tuchel’s side ended their pre-tournament friendlies in late March with a draw and a loss against Uruguay and Japan, respectively, bucking seriously the winning trend they have spectacularly accomplished over the past two years. The lackluster performance prompted England’s coach, who is German, to remark, with characteristic bluntness, that in the absence of Harry Kane, England simply do not carry the same attacking threat.

He is not wrong. Kane is the fulcrum around which everything turns, and his fitness and form between now and June will be the variable that defines England’s tournament.

Jude Bellingham, who had been conspicuously absent from the October squad amid some well-publicized turbulence, is back firmly in Tuchel’s plans and being positioned as the creative engine at number 10. Reece James is the unquestioned first choice at right back. The spine of the team — Jordan Pickford in goal and a settled central defensive pairing in Declan Rice will anchor the midfield and give England genuine structural solidity.

England are ranked among the tournament favorites, second in the betting markets behind Spain, and that assessment is not wishful thinking from a partisan supporter. The talent is real. The squad depth is real. But so, as any England fan of a certain vintage will quietly tell you, is the capacity for inexplicable self-sabotage at the worst possible moment.

The team opens their Group L campaign against one of their most feared rivals, Croatia, a top-notch team, in Dallas on June 17. I shall not be taking any calls or responding to any emails that evening, friends.

The world assembles

FIFA confirmed its full roster of referees on April 9 — 52 officials from around the globe appointed to adjudicate 104 matches across 11 American cities, three in Mexico and two in Canada.

It is worth pausing on what that continental canvas means. The Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, one of the most iconic and atmospheric grounds in football history, will host group stage matches before roaring crowds that have followed this game for generations. Monterrey and Guadalajara bring the heat and fierce footballing pride of northern and western Mexico.

In Canada, BMO Field in Toronto and BC Place in Vancouver will welcome fans from communities with deep football roots, especially their immigrant populations from every footballing nation on earth who have carried the game with them across oceans and decades. These are not auxiliary venues. They are part of the tournament’s soul.

Forty-eight national squads are completing base camps, tactical preparations and the ten thousand logistical details that go with a six-week tournament spanning a continent.

Spain arrive as defending European champions and, as noted, the bookmakers’ favorites. Argentina, the reigning world champions, have Lionel Messi playing his final World Cup. If they win their group, they will likely play in the knock-out rounds in Miami, the city that has become a second home to Messi and his adoring fans.

France and Brazil lurk with the quiet menace of those who do not need to announce themselves. I am quietly watching Brazil, if I have to tip my hand. But the tournament’s expansion to 48 teams means that stories will emerge from places we did not expect — like Japan beating England in that recent friendly.

What comes next

Six weeks is both a long time and no time at all — long enough for injuries to change the complexion of squads, for form to shift, for the final pieces of the puzzle to fall into place or fall apart. It’s short enough that the tournament feels, for the first time, genuinely imminent and not a distant calendar event, but something approaching fast, filling the horizon.

I am getting anxious about finding those tickets myself, since the days of searching for them are shortening fast.

As I wrote in these pages back in February, the World Cup is humanity’s game. What strikes me now, in these final weeks of preparation, is how completely that truth is embodied in the breadth of this particular tournament — five million tickets sold even before last week’s release of millions more, 48 nations, 104 matches played in American stadiums, and Mexican cathedrals of football and Canadian cities built by the world’s peoples.

The whole magnificent, imperfect, irresistible spectacle of it, distributed across three nations, whatever their political complexities with one another at this moment in history. 

As the USA celebrates its 250th birthday, it also joins with its northern and southern neighbors at the same time, uniting the continent of North America in welcoming the human family from across the planet to share the beautiful game in an epiphany of the best of life when people play sport. 

This is arriving in just over one month — bags packed, ready to sing.

Best we open the door.

Christopher Blake is president of Middle Georgia State University. He is a passionate supporter of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and the men’s and women’s national football teams of England and the United States. Read more of his World Cup commentary here and here.