The 2026 World Cup has been pretty decent as a football tournament. I’ll leave aside the politics of the US, Trump and FIFA.
The TV coverage has been mostly excellent too, even if during the first semi-final, we got a good look at the Sony mirrorless camera settings that FIFA is using for some of its crowd reaction shots.
The referee-camera is decent. Not as game changing as drones at the Olympics, but still sometimes genuinely useful.
But here are four things I’ve really disliked about FIFA’s TV coverage of the World Cup. Most of these are not new:
- Cutaways to FIFA chief Gianni Infantino at every game. Yes, he’s often sitting near heads of State (or Arsene Wenger), but it feels like it’s there to show how important he is as an individual. Are we supposed to be pleased that he’s actually going to the games?
- Similarly, the cutaways to various celebrities in the audience, often sitting behind a desk in what the US calls “Sky Boxes” sipping drinks from their air-conditioned eeries. I’d be much more impressed if they cutaway to someone famous who was in with the regular fans. I worry that there will be so much of this at the final, that we may miss actual play on the pitch.
- The attractive female fans. I don’t know what the demographic make-up is of the attendees at a men’s World Cup fixture, but I’m willing to bet that it is significantly more male than female. Yet in every game, an eagle eyed camera operator manages to pick out a “hot” female fan or two to concentrate on. When you think about it, that’s quite a creepy job. During the England/Norway game, the same pretty blonde Norwegian fan was covered multiple times. Broadcaster Danny Baker once noted that during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, organisers were actually paying for models to be in the crowd and to cheer wildly on cue when the cameras cut to them. It’s sleezy and it should stop. Show fans as they are, not who some male TV director wants (or has been told) to show.
- Cutting to crying children. When France went 1-0 down to Spain in the first semi-final, after some replays of the penalty, a camera cut to a slow-motion replay of a crying child in their parent’s arms. They were French fans, and Sam Matterface on ITV did say that it was probably a bit early to be that distraught. Although the way France then played for the rest of the match suggested that all the French fans should have been distraught. Nonetheless, why do we need to see children crying on TV? Aren’t there enough adult fans who are disconsolate at being in a losing position without tugging at our heartstrings and cutting to crying kids? It’s cheap, and it’s not fair on the children themselves either.
The majority of these gripes are not new, and have been around for a long time. But FIFA is pretty old fashioned in many respects, and playing in a country where cheerleading is still a thing that is somehow aligned with men’s team sports, I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised.