Football fans may have to savour Qatar World Cup with bloated finals on horizon

Once we hit November we can expect every supermarket, shopping centre and coffee shop to swap their pumpkins for whatever festive songs they can license. However, this winter they could throw in a Three Lions or World in Motion just to mix things up.

The first-ever winter World Cup is almost upon us and even six weeks out - with a hectic run of Premier League and Champions League games to come - it’s hard to not feel our collective attention turning to Qatar.

We all know the tournament is coming and the havoc it is causing for the domestic game, but that seems to have clouded us as to how we’re really going to feel about it.

The Qatar tournament isn’t short on issues, with major French cities announcing this week that they’re scrapping planned screenings of games in protest. Even Parisians have decided this particular involvement in football isn’t for them which is ironic given Paris St-Germain are owned by ... yes, the Qataris.

It is true that we tend to head into every major tournament with concerns. The last two were obvious, a cross-continent Euro 2020 during a pandemic and the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil faced a lot of domestic protests, while the phrase 'white elephant' could have specifically been designed for the months of debate in 2010 around South Africa’s stadiums.

Those issues faded once the football started, but it remains to be seen if that happens this time and whether broadcasters drop the issues as soon as the opening ceremony begins. It will be interesting to see whether anything else can be fitted in at half-time alongside the obligatory ten-minute half-time England camp update because the pundits don’t have enough to say about Japan against Costa Rica.

Even outside of the clearly bigger issues, this tournament promises to be completely different to what we’re used to.

For many, major tournaments spark reminders of holidays, barbeques and dragging your TV into the garden. This time around we’ll be swapping the tongs for tinsel.

I still can’t get my head around the idea of watching World Cup games with a Christmas tree in the corner. It pains me to think of just how many knockout matches will be labelled a Christmas cracker – the undisputed worst cliche in all of football.

The other side of the coin is that as football fans we almost have to savour this tournament because the greed continues past Qatar.

The 2026 tournament in North America will be the first to feature 48 teams, a number so awkward that Fifa apparently still don’t know what to do with them.

The initial pitch was collusion-friendly three-team groups, which could leave us watching a final group game where two teams play for the result that would send them both through to the 32-team first knockout round.

The latest idea is a Euros on steroids, with 12 groups of four. That ups the total number of games from 64 to 104, leaving a tournament so bloated that it could almost start in June and finish at Christmas.

Can you wait for a Kansas crowd going wild, or maybe mild, for Algeria and Peru’s fight for third place in 2026?

I’ll admit it’s a cop-out, but I will put the blame for this World Cup on those who voted for it in the first place and will still be glued to the tournament all winter.

Football should be an escape from bigger issues, not a battleground for them. Recent years have seen football debate move from whether Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard can play together to their stance on the morals and investments of their employers.

The hardest thing we should have had to deal with in football over the last ten years was Manchester United fans thinking they’re somehow hard done by. Not epidemiology, oligarchs and breakaway leagues.

While the issues bigger than football should dominate the tournament, I think fans can embrace the sport's biggest spectacle, even at the wrong time of year.

There’s no doubt that no previous major tournament has had as much noise to cut through as this one. However, for just this winter, grab your eggnog, crackers and any scarf bar a half-and-half one and embrace a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime Christmas World Cup.

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