FIFA World Cup 2026: The beautiful game in an unbeautiful world - opinion

For a month, grown adults will rearrange their diaries around kick-off times.

Reasonable people will shout at television screens, argue with referees who cannot hear them, and become temporary experts on teams they barely knew existed.

Offices will empty early. WhatsApp groups will explode. Families will negotiate screen time with the seriousness of international diplomacy.

And I will love every minute of it.

I write as someone deeply connected to two football-mad countries: England, the land of my birth, where football is a national language, and Israel, the land of my home, where football is discussed with the same passion and certainty as politics, religion, and the best way to make shakshuka.

England, of course, will be there. Israel, of course, will not. That sentence, for Israeli football fans, has a painfully familiar ring to it.

England enters the tournament carrying that unique mixture of hope, dread, and trauma. Every tournament begins with cautious optimism, proceeds through wild overconfidence, and too often ends with the national liturgy of “what if?”

English football is, in many ways, a masterclass in theological tension. It has faith, ritual, sacred songs, inherited suffering, unreasonable expectations, and occasional redemption.

“Football’s coming home” is not really a sporting prediction. It is a messianic hope.

Israel’s relationship with the World Cup is different. We rarely arrive at the party, but we still watch as if invited. Israeli children will wear Argentina shirts, Brazil shirts, France shirts, and, inevitably, Messi shirts (including my five-year-old grandson, who refuses to take his off even for bed!).

That is one of the beauties of the World Cup. It belongs to whoever qualifies, but emotionally it belongs to everyone. You do not have to be Brazilian to understand that when Brazil plays football, something different is happening.

In Israel, we enter this tournament in a very different emotional landscape. We watch with one eye on the match and one eye on the news, with family in uniform and friends in the North or South, knowing that normality here is always provisional.

But I think that misses something important.

Human beings do not live by crisis alone. We need moments of ordinary joy precisely because life is not ordinary. A football match does not solve war, heal grief, or redeem suffering.

But for 90 minutes it can give a tired people permission to breathe. It can place old friends and new immigrants, religious and secular, Left and Right, in the same room, shouting at the same screen.

Judaism understands this better than we might realize. The Torah does not ask us to deny pain. Jewish history is brutally honest about suffering: slavery, exile, destruction, persecution, and loss.

That is not a contradiction. That is Jewish life. The world is broken, and still we sing. We remember Jerusalem in ruins, and still we build Jerusalem. We know redemption is not yet complete, and still we make kiddush.

Perhaps sport, at its best, offers a small secular echo of that truth.

It creates a shared drama in which the result matters enormously – and not at all. It lets us care passionately about something that is, in the grand scheme, unimportant, and precisely because of that, it becomes a relief.

There is another Jewish angle too. The World Cup is a celebration of nations: flags, anthems, languages, and histories converging on a single field.

In an age when nationalism can become ugly, football reminds us that identity need not prevent fellowship. I can cheer England, live in Israel, fear France, enjoy Morocco, and still feel part of a global conversation.

Judaism has always lived in that tension. We are a particular people with a universal message, yet we pray for all humanity.

The prophet Isaiah imagines not the erasure of nations, but their moral elevation. “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,” not because nations disappear, but because they learn how to live differently.

A World Cup is not Isaiah’s vision. FIFA is not the Sanhedrin, and footballers are not prophets.

But for all its commercialism and excess, the tournament still contains a glimpse of something noble: competition need not be hatred, identity need not be aggression, and people can love their own colors without despising someone else’s.

For England, this World Cup will once again be an exercise in national psychology. Can hope survive history? Can talent become triumph? Can a country that invented the modern game finally stop talking about 1966 as if it happened last week?

For Israel, it will be something else. We will watch from the outside, but with full emotional participation. We will adopt teams, argue tactics, and perhaps secretly enjoy watching England suffer.

The world is not beautiful at the moment. But the “beautiful game” still has the capacity to gather people, distract people, delight people, and occasionally inspire people.

So yes, the World Cup matters. Not as much as life and death, peace and war, or the safe return of every soldier. But it matters because human beings need more than survival. We need joy, story, color, play, and hope.

And who knows? Perhaps this time football really will come home. Though as a man who has lived long enough to know both Jewish history and English football, I am not getting carried away.