Bogotá, in mid-May, sits at 2,640 metres and smells of wet concrete and coffee from the street vendors who set up at dawn along the carrera séptima. The Colombian Football Federation announced this week that James Rodríguez will leave Minnesota United FC after Wednesday’s match and report to the national team’s training camp, a full thirteen months before the opening match of the 2026 World Cup. The call-up, reported by ESPN FCT2, ESPN FC, is not unusual by the standards of Colombian football history. What is unusual is the timing, the context, and what it quietly says about the calibration of expectations across South America’s federation structures in the months before the expanded forty-eight-team tournament kicks off in Mexico City, New York, and Los Angeles.
Colombia’s camp, according to the ESPN report, is not a friendly-window obligation. It is an extended tactical gathering, the kind of pre-tournament immersion that the federation’s technical staff has planned for months. James, thirty-four in July, is not being called because he is the future. He is being called because he is the present’s most intelligent passer and because Néstor Lorenzo’s midfield, without him, lacks the tempo-setting figure that makes Colombia’s wide forwards, Luis Díaz and Jhon Durán, functional. The camp is a signal: Colombia are treating this World Cup as a generational opportunity, the first hosted on their continent since Brazil 2014, and they are preparing with an intensity that most European federations will not match until January.
The contrast with England’s preparation timeline is instructive without being directly comparable. Thomas Tuchel’s Football Association contract runs through the 2026 tournament and his stated preference, in press conferences since his appointment, has been for short, concentrated windows rather than extended camps. England’s players, scattered across the Premier League, Champions League, and, increasingly, Saudi and American leagues, arrive at St George’s Park with bodies shaped by a ten-month club season that now runs, with the expanded Club World Cup, into mid-July. The FA’s medical department has, for the last three cycles, produced fatigue audits that quantify the injury risk of each player at tournament call-up. The model is reactive. Colombia’s model, with James leaving Minnesota in May, is pre-emptive.
The expanded format changes the arithmetic. Forty-eight teams means a longer group phase, more rest days between matches, and a tournament that runs, in the 2026 calendar, from June 11 to July 19. The thirty-eight-day span is the longest in World Cup history. For South American federations, whose players are often based in Europe and whose qualifying campaigns are more physically taxing than their European equivalents (twelve away fixtures across the Andes, the Amazon, and the Atacama, each at a different altitude), the expanded calendar is not a scheduling convenience. It is an invitation to begin preparations earlier, to integrate tactical ideas across a longer runway, to treat May and June of 2025 as the first phase of a thirteen-month project.
James’s departure from Minnesota is, in this frame, a practical decision dressed in symbolic clothing. Minnesota United, mid-table in the Western Conference, lose their most recognisable player for an indefinite period. The MLS calendar, unlike the European calendar, does not pause for international windows in the same structured way, and the player’s club obligations sit, uncomfortably, inside a federation’s tournament ambition. This tension, between club and country, between league economics and national-team preparation, is not new. What is new is the scale of it: a federation pulling a player out of a domestic season thirteen months before a ball is kicked in the World Cup, because the technical staff has decided that thirteen months is not early. It is on time.
England’s equivalent move, if it happened, would be unthinkable. The Premier League’s broadcast contracts, the Champions League’s commercial structure, the sheer density of the English football calendar, all conspire to make an early camp in May 2025 a contractual impossibility. Tuchel’s players will gather, as they always do, in the days before a scheduled window, play two fixtures, and disperse. The preparation will be compressed because the system demands compression. Colombia’s preparation will be extended because the system, and the player’s age, and the federation’s ambition, demand extension.
The question for England is not whether to copy Colombia. It is whether the compressed model, which has produced three consecutive tournament semi-finals and a European Championship final, is sufficient for a forty-eight-team tournament that rewards tactical coherence over individual talent across a longer, more punishing schedule. Tuchel’s answer, when he has been asked, has been that preparation happens at the club, that the national team’s job is to integrate, not to build. This is a defensible position. It is also a position that, in the summer of 2026, will be tested by teams like Colombia, who are building now.
James Rodríguez, on a Wednesday flight from Minneapolis to Bogotá, is thirty-four years old and carrying the weight of a country’s expectation into a training camp that most of the football world will ignore. The camp itself is not the story. The story is what it represents: a South American federation treating the expanded World Cup not as a distant event but as a project that began, for them, this week. England’s project, whatever shape it takes, will begin later. Whether later is soon enough is a question that the next thirteen months will answer.
