The news that a UK-led infrastructure consortium is bidding for contracts in the 2026 World Cup is a spectacle that would make even Gibbon blush. We are, it seems, in the grip of a collective delusion that hosting a global sporting event is akin to building a new Rome. The costs mount, the debts accrue, and yet we persist in this orgy of expenditure as if the Empire were still solvent.
The Victorian engineers who built our railways would marvel at the sheer profligacy, the monumental waste. They built for the ages; we build for the television cameras. The consortium’s bid is merely the latest symptom of a decadent age that mistakes largesse for greatness.
One must ask: are we constructing stadiums or mausoleums for a civilisation in decline? The parallels to the late Roman Empire are unavoidable: the bread and circuses, the inflation of currency, the erosion of civic virtue. We shall pour billions into concrete and steel, while our schools crumble and our hospitals groan.
And for what? A fleeting moment of national pride, a few weeks of manufactured euphoria. The Victorians at least had the decency to build actually useful things: sewers, bridges, libraries.
We build monuments to our own vanity. The consortium will no doubt make a tidy profit, and the taxpayer will be left with the bill. It is a story as old as empire itself: the triumph of the speculator over the citizen.
But let us not pretend this is about sport. It is about identity, about a yearning for a lost grandeur. We are like the Byzantine emperors, commissioning mosaics while the barbarians gather at the gates.
The World Cup will come and go, and we shall be left with the debt and the hollow echo of cheers. The only sensible response is a stoic refusal to participate. But that, of course, would require a wisdom our age has long since abandoned.
