United victory
Canada will host 2026 World Cup with U.S., Mexico
MOSCOW— Alphonso Davies strode across the stage at the Expocentre and treated it like every other stage he’s stepped up on to in his remarkable footballing life — a place to own, a place to shine.
Davies is the wunderkind of Canadian sports. Everything he has done — and he’s done plenty already — he has been the youngest to do. On Wednesday in Moscow, he might just have become the youngest man to win the World Cup.
The iconic Pele has been the holder of that most cherished record for half a century now. The Brazilian raised aloft the greatest prize in world sports at the age of 17 years and 249 days in Sweden back in 1958.
Sixty years on, Davies was 17 years and 223 days old when he stood at the dais in the darkened convention centre Wednesday and helped clinch the World Cup in a whole other way. In 57 stirring seconds at the 68th annual Congress of world soccer’s governing body, he recounted his life story to the more than 200 critical delegates and ensured the vote to host the 2026 World Cup would only go one way.
The bid of Canada, Mexico and the United States won in a landslide, seeing off challenger Morocco 134-65. It was a rout that ensured the biggest sporting event in the world will come to Canadian shores for the first time, the U.S. for the second time and Mexico for a record third time. All in all, not a bad Wednesday at the office for Davies.
Of course there was more to it than that. Any time spent around the bloated global sports bodies such as FIFA or the International Olympic Committee is enough time to turn a saint into a cynic.
So of course it is highly likely that when the 200 eligible voters moved their hands to push a button for the United bid or a button for the Moroccan bid, it was dollar signs that flashed brightest in their minds. The North American bid had promised profits of US$11 billion, the Moroccans a mere US$6 billion. That kind of math isn’t difficult.
But all along this journey, the most difficult conundrum that had tested the North American bid team was the Trump equation. No matter which corner of Earth the senior members of the bid team — Canada Soccer president Steven Reed, his U.S. and Mexican counterparts, Carlos Cordeiro and Decio De Maria — pitched up in hopes for an ear and potentially a vote, it was the divisive, discriminatory tendencies of the U.S. president that presented itself as the foremost roadblock.