Miguel Delaney

In Qatar, because I remember I was obviously writing about all these issues a lot, I think a lot of the kind of...

the noise, but everything off the pitch, it really kind of stayed live for at least a week into the tournament and then regularly bubbled up throughout just because there were so many issues.

I mean, remember the kind of controversy over the one love armband.

I think that's going to happen here.

Also, like I did a piece in this during the week that about basically how, despite his obsequiousness to Trump, Infantino has basically got nothing off him.

The visa issue, one of the biggest illustrations of that.

Um,

But, and because of that as well, because of that proximity, the Democrats, this is where usually Infantino and FIFA, they see kind of the tournament starting as the safe space.

Well, this time it might be.

This time he might suddenly be going from a kind of an area, someone put to me in football, an area of kind of relatively low scrutiny, which is remarkable to say, to high scrutiny because the Democrats are really focused on it.

And you can see that with even the kind of the subpoena last week from the

the states of New Jersey and New York, the blue states, Democrat states, about ticketing practices.

So all of this could swirl around.

Then you've got also a connected issue, which I think is actually the size of the tournament.

Like I was thinking about this when, and this is kind of a trivial example, but I do think it's illustrative.

I was doing something from a kind of newsletter for The Independent last week on managers and the different profiles of managers.

Now, like in 2018,

there wasn't a single coach of the World Cup that had won a major league or a Champions League.

Now there are several.

And I'm kind of going through like the coaches, I've gone through that squad page in Wikipedia to go through.