The 2026 World Cup Is an Experiment Like No Other

One way to understand the modern World Cup is to think of it as an experiment in capitalism. How much will customers put up with if the product is good? Every four years, FIFA rolls out a new iteration of the biggest sporting event on the planet. Every four years, the organization gets more transparently corrupt, keener to lease itself out to sportswashing authoritarians—Putin, the Qatari royal family, and Donald Trump in the past eight years alone—and more callous to the human rights abuses that seem to follow wherever it goes.