Mexico City, on the morning of England’s opening World Cup fixture, will smell of diesel and frying tortillas and the particular humidity that settles over the valley in June. The players will have been awake since six. They will have eaten breakfast in a hotel whose name the press has already forgotten, travelled in a coach whose windows they will not look through, and arrived at a stadium whose tunnel they will walk down in the knowledge that the next ninety minutes will define the next four years.
What they will not yet know, because it has never happened to them before, is what it will feel like to stand in the centre circle with every member of their squad, substitutes included, while the anthem plays.
FIFA’s decision, reported by The Athletic on Thursday, to require all twenty-six squad members to line up together for the national anthem at the 2026 World Cup is a change that sounds administrative and is, in practice, psychological. The substitutes’ bench, that zone of enforced passivity where players in tracksuits watch their teammates represent the country, will be dissolved for the four minutes before kick-off. The players will walk onto the pitch through a dedicated arch. They will stand behind a flag banner large enough to be visible from the upper tier. They will sing, or not sing, in a formation that includes the goalkeeper’s backup, the third-choice centre-back, the winger who has not started a competitive match in eleven months.
The detail matters because the anthem ceremony is the last private moment a footballer has before a match becomes public. Everything before it, the warm-up, the team talk, the walk from the dressing room, is internal. The anthem is the threshold. It is the point at which the player stops being a member of a squad and becomes a representative of something larger, and the body knows the difference even when the mind has been trained not to show it.
England’s relationship with its own anthem at tournament football is a relationship that has been shaped, over sixty years, by the particular weight the country places on the pre-match ritual. The 1966 squad sang “God Save the King” with a fervour that the television cameras of the time captured in black and white. The 1990 squad, in Italy, sang with a nervousness that was visible in the way some players’ mouths moved without sound. The 2018 squad, in Russia, sang with a self-consciousness that belonged to a generation raised on social media and aware that every lip-sync would be GIF’d by morning. The 2022 squad, in Qatar, sang in a tournament whose anthem ceremony was already the most produced piece of television in the sport, with cameras on every face, drones above the circle, a sound mix that made the singing louder than the crowd.
What the 2026 squad will experience is a ceremony that has been designed, by FIFA, to be more inclusive and that will, by being more inclusive, be more exposing. The substitute who has not played a minute of the tournament will stand three feet from the television camera. The player who knows he will not come off the bench will sing the anthem with the same volume as the player who knows he will take the first corner. The visual grammar of the ceremony, all twenty-six faces in one frame, will erase the hierarchy that the bench normally enforces.
Gareth Southgate, in his final tournament as England manager before Thomas Tuchel’s arrival, spoke at a press conference in May about the importance of squad cohesion. He did not mention the anthem specifically. He spoke about the need for “every player to feel part of the journey from the first day of camp”, which is the kind of thing managers say when they are trying to keep twenty-six professional footballers content with the knowledge that only eleven of them will start. The new ceremony does, in theory, what Southgate’s words attempt to do in practice. It makes the substitute visible at the moment when visibility matters most.
The question is whether visibility is the same as belonging. A substitute who stands in the centre circle for four minutes and then returns to the bench for ninety is a substitute who has been given a photograph and a memory and a seat in the stands. The anthem ceremony, however grand the flag, however wide the arch, does not change the fact that the match is played by eleven players and that the other fifteen are spectators. The emotional build-up that the ceremony creates is real; the question is whether it creates a build-up that helps the eleven who play or a build-up that makes the fifteen who do not play feel the distance between the circle and the bench more acutely.
The wider World Cup context is relevant. The 2026 tournament, hosted across three countries, will be the largest in history, with forty-eight teams and a format that extends the group stage and adds an extra knock-out round. The anthem ceremony, with its arch and its giant flag, is part of a broader FIFA effort to make the tournament feel monumental at every stage, to resist the dilution that a longer format might otherwise produce. The ceremony is, in this reading, a piece of stage management. It is designed to make the opening match feel like an event even when the opening match is England against a team the public has not heard of, in a stadium the public cannot find on a map, at a kick-off time chosen for a television market six time zones away.
England’s players, on the morning of that match, will not be thinking about FIFA’s stage management. They will be thinking about the first pass, the first tackle, the first time the ball moves and the match becomes a match and the anthem becomes a memory. The ceremony will last four minutes. The build-up to it will last a career. The difference between the two is the distance that every tournament footballer learns to walk, from the centre circle to the first whistle, and the new ceremony, for all its flags and arches, does not shorten it. It only makes the walk more visible.
What it changes, perhaps, is the walk for the player who has never made it before. The young substitute, the late call-up, the player whose name is on the squad list but not in the starting eleven, will stand in the centre circle and hear the anthem and feel, for four minutes, that the tournament is his. Whether that feeling survives the walk to the bench is a question that no ceremony can answer.