The World Cup is meant to spark joy. One week in, I’m worried joy might not turn up

The photo is of the tube station and a bus shelter. Someone shirtless atop the shelter, waving a Croatian flag. Two women, one in a hijab, walking past with shopping bags. A buggy parked in the road; a black boy and a white girl sat on top of the bus shelter, their trainers dangling. A bloke in a tracksuit, kids in red shirts, everyone in their own world and nobody bothered about anyone else's. I showed it to my 17-year-old and he said Photo Of The Year.

He's right. It is one of those frames that looks staged because real life rarely composes itself this well. A hotchpotch of backgrounds and beliefs and religion and colour and dress codes, all coming from somewhere, all sharing one strip of pavement for an evening, completely uninterested in dividing the air between them.

That image is what the World Cup should be. And now the tournament is here, we are finding out whether it still can be.

It began on June 11, first in Mexico City, and for the rest of us, the day after. I've been saying since the back end of last year that this would be a World Cup like no other, and not in the way the marketing departments had in mind. Some of the concerns I had then are being realised in real time.

Geopolitics has colonised every timeline. The shadow of ICE raids, with the Department of Homeland Security confirming agents would be stationed at stadiums on matchday. Haitian fans weighing up whether attending their country's first World Cup since '74 is worth the risk of being detained on the way to the ground.

And Iran's involvement, which hung in doubt for months because of a war that somehow looped its way back into a football tournament, only resolved ten days before their first game when players got visas and more than a dozen federation officials, the president among them, did not.

Their original training base in Tucson was scrapped, and the team relocated to Tijuana, crossing the border to play their matches before returning to Mexico. Their opener ended in a draw, played out against protests and the manager saying plainly that the visa denials had hurt the squad.

And the searches. This is the part that flies hardest in the face of everything the tournament is supposed to stand for. Videos circulated of Uzbekistan's players, making their World Cup debut, lined up outside their team bus while sniffer dogs worked through their luggage and staff ran metal detector wands over the coaching team.

Iraq's Aymen Hussein, the forward who got them there, was held at Chicago O'Hare and had his phone inspected before he was cleared; the team's photographer waited over ten hours at the same airport and was sent home.

And before a ball had even been kicked, Omar Artan, the Somalian referee named Africa's best of 2025 and set to be the first from his country to officiate at a World Cup, was denied entry at Miami and sent back. He was detained and questioned for eleven hours before being put on a flight home. He arrived in Mogadishu to a hero's welcome, thousands packed into a stadium not for a match but for him, hoisted onto shoulders and draped in the sky-blue flag. A man turned away by one nation, carried through the streets by his own.

Even Bielsa, in his way, has been telling us something. During Uruguay's official pre-tournament photoshoot, the 70-year-old stood with his head bowed, refusing to look down the camera lens, a small mutiny against the whole sanitised, sold-for-parts machinery of it. The head hanging in those images is that of someone who has seen how the thing gets packaged and wants no part of it.

And then there are the prices. A seat at the final was listed at $2 million at one point. The cheapest final tickets are seven times what they were in Qatar. Following your country from the group stage to the final, before flights and hotels, starts at five grand. FIFA's panic response was a tier of $60 tickets for every game, which existed, in theory, until they vanished.

So you can understand why a person might look at the Holloway Road photograph and feel something close to despair, because the thing the World Cup is supposed to do, the thing that really justifies its existence at this scale, is hold the door open for that exact kind of unity and accidental joy. And one week in, I'm nervous it might not turn up this time.

I was in Russia in 2018. People had told me it would be tense, joyless, locked down. What I actually saw was Russians and Colombians and English and Japanese fans drinking together in streets and squares in cities that had been written about as forbidding.

I'm rewatching the Italia 90 documentary at the moment too, with my teenage son, about that strange, beautiful summer when English football pulled itself out of the hooligan years and Cameroon arrived to introduce the rest of the planet to African football. The tournament can do this. We have evidence.

What I'm clinging to is that the photograph from Holloway Road might multiply. That somewhere between Manchester and Margate and Cardiff and Croydon, a version of that scene plays out every other night this month. That our love of the game together becomes the most boring, ordinary, unremarkable thing in the country for a month.

That photo is an answer to people like Farage, Lowe, Musk, or Robinson's mob, everyone whose business model is anger, who bait us for clicks and harvest our rage. Town by town, terraced street by terraced street, an antidote.

I have to hope this. There isn't really another option.

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James Kirkham is the Founder of ICONIC.

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