The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, that peculiar American institution where sideline pom-poms are elevated to an art form, have announced their intention to grace the 2026 World Cup with their presence. I suppose we should be flattered. The World Cup, after all, is a global festival of football (the real kind, not the armoured version they play across the Atlantic). And now these sequinned ambassadors of Texan kitsch wish to import their brand of entertainment to our sacred turf. But before we roll out the red carpet, let us pause to consider what they are bringing, and what they are leaving behind.
First, a confession: I have nothing against cheerleaders. They work hard, they smile relentlessly, and they somehow maintain perfect hair in stadiums that resemble blast furnaces. But to equate their craft with the visceral, tribal, unscripted theatre of a British football crowd is to confuse a can-can with a Shakespearean tragedy. At a Premier League match, the drama is in the stands: the roar of the Kop, the gallows humour of the away end, the ancient chants that date back to the era of cloth caps and rattles. It is spontaneous, often profane, and utterly democratic. One does not need a choreographer to generate atmosphere when you have men in replica shirts singing about Steve Bull and his tractor.
Now, the Americans are coming to our party, and they want to bring their own DJ. The cheerleaders are merely the symptom of a deeper malaise: the creeping corporatisation of sport, where every moment must be monetised and every silence filled with a jingle. The World Cup already suffers from this blight: the incessant goal-horns, the piped-in music after every goal, the relentless push for 'fan engagement' that often feels like a patronising lecture. Adding precision dance routines to the mix is like putting a golden roof on a Chartres cathedral. It misses the point entirely.
Yet I am not so churlish as to dismiss the entire enterprise. There is something undeniably charming about the earnestness of American popular culture: its belief that louder, brighter, and more organised is always better. The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders represent a certain kind of innocence, a conviction that entertainment can be engineered and that joy can be manufactured. But football, at its core, is a game of chaos and unpredictability. The best moments in a match come unannounced: a last-minute winner, a terrible refereeing decision, a streaker evading stewards with improbable agility. These are the moments that become legend. They cannot be scripted by a squad of pom-pom wielding dancers, however athletic their routines.
Consider the cultural chasm. American football (the gridiron sort) is a stop-start affair, a game of brief explosions punctuated by advertisements. Cheerleaders fill the commercial breaks. Football (the global sort) flows like a river, uninterrupted, for 45 minutes at a time. The intervals are for breath, not for entertainment. To insert a dance number into this continuum would be like placing a jazz solo in the middle of a Gregorian chant.
And yet, there is a part of me that welcomes the challenge. Let the cheerleaders come. Let them shake their tassels on the hallowed turf of Wembley. They will discover, perhaps to their dismay, that British sporting culture is not a passive audience waiting to be entertained. It is a living, breathing organism that demands participation. The crowd will not sit quietly and admire the spectacle. They will sing over the music. They will chant their own songs. They will, in all likelihood, drown out the choreography entirely. That is our gift: the ability to create a wall of sound that no amplifier can match.
So go on, Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Bring your pom-poms and your perfect smiles. Stage your routines in the shadow of the twin towers (or their replacements). But do not be surprised if you are upstaged by a thousand blokes in flat caps singing about a left-back who once played for Coventry. That is the beauty of British sporting culture. It cannot be replicated, only experienced. And it is, for all its grumbling and cynicism, unrivalled.
