After a year in which the U.S. sports business absolutely boomed — ratings up everywhere, billion-dollar rights deals signed one after another, perhaps the most exciting World Series this century — 2026 will undoubtedly have a more global bent, with two massive international sporting events on tap, including one right here in America. Here are five big questions about what’s to come.

The biggest sporting event on the planet — sorry, Olympics, that’s not you — is coming to America (as well as Canada and Mexico, but mostly America), and as we all saw during that World Cup Draw at the Kennedy Center, during which the president accepted his “FIFA Peace Prize” with disturbingly earnest appreciation, it’s already a bit of a shit show. Putting on a World Cup is an overwhelming endeavor in the first place, and that’s before you account for a travel ban that includes multiple nations in the Cup, Trump administration officials essentially discouraging foreign fans from attending, and the president’s threats to pull games out of “Democrat-run cities.” (Which is, of course, an impossibility, not that he knows that.) The possibility of Trump blowing up the event is the primary reason FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been so, uh, solicitous of the president, but if we’ve learned anything from the first year of Trump 2.0, it’s that flattery can only get you as far as Trump’s attention span will take you. The World Cup........

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