Even before their players set off at the start of this week, some of the Premier League’s best managers already noticed the difference. The anticipation. The trepidation. The superstition of stopping themselves even dreaming it. “Just imagine…”
This is not a typical international window. When many players usually depart for such breaks in the modern game, there’s a sense of going through the motions; from one match to the next. Not this time.
Many are going to make history, to try and achieve a unique feat that brings rare universal feelings in football. To qualify for the greatest show of all, the World Cup.
It is striking when you look through interviews from the time or autobiographies years later – from Egypt in 1990 through Ireland in 2002 and even Ecuador this time around – how common certain phrases are when players strive to articulate what the moment feels like.
“Pure joy.”
“Release.”
“It meant everything.”
“I’ll always be part of a squad of players who got their country to a World Cup and nothing will ever change that.”
Even Thomas Tuchel had a beaming smile on his face in Latvia last month, as he willingly told the attendant media he found himself quite nervous on the afternoon before an otherwise routine win – because of the very idea of qualifying.
That feeling is obviously going to be greatly accentuated if it goes down to the wire, as so many countries are going to endure this week.
Up to 36 teams are going to play in high-tension fixtures that could secure one of the 14 places to be decided in this window. A further six are fighting for the right to make the intercontinental play-offs in March, with Oceanian minnows New Caledonia already waiting there.
Even before those spring eliminators, as many as 13 of this break’s matches may end up replicating play-offs, as the two teams involved could directly face off for a place in the World Cup.
They may depend on other fixtures first but the picks of such potential fixtures already look like Germany-Slovakia, Switzerland-Kosovo, Scotland-Denmark and Jamaica-Curacao. The truth is that any of these remaining fixtures can suddenly reverberate into life because of the way that the high stakes cause strange things to happen, which leads to incredible drama.
This is not an international break to be dismissed, or just endured, simply because it isn’t the Premier League. It is one to be relished, especially since it only comes around once every four years. You don’t usually get to see football like this, where players will give everything exclusively because of the prestige of the prize.
Expect genuinely epic emotion, and potentially wild football, especially in those final fateful minutes.
Think Diego Maradona’s Argentina conceding to Peru and then scoring in rain-soaked stoppage time in 2009. Think Christian Vieri’s header flashing past David Seaman’s post in 1997.
If this seems a touch overblown in a modern game constantly undercut by cynicism, it is entirely warranted because what this is really about is the purity of it all. That’s a purity of achievement, and a purity of emotion.
Players aren’t playing for money, and the prize isn’t a product of super club wealth or financial stratification. You can’t transfer your way to this level.
You just have to play it, to push yourself through it. Even Erling Haaland, who has the world at his feet, is all too aware of what this final step will mean for his own country.
There’s suddenly a grand levelling between the Norwegian star and any notional journeyman you care to pick from North Macedonia to Suriname.
They’re all just playing for the glory, for the meaning. Every single player involved will have grown up seeing the effect that mere participation can have on countries, right up to nation-building moments, and all on the path to the most elusive and illustrious prize of all; that means the world.
That purity persists no matter what the World Cup becomes; no matter how greedily bloated Fifa makes it.
As the representatives of one star enthused, “even though winning a Premier League is much bigger for their careers, and most of them actually have a better chance of doing that, it is striking how they all dream of being at a World Cup and winning it”.
“They speak of World Cups as if there’s nothing better,” another says.
The depth of this can be seen on the other side, too. After missing out on USA 94 in the final seconds of qualifying, Denmark’s Flemming Povlsen said: “I cried with an anger every bit as intense as the joy I’d felt the year before after winning the European Championship”.
That famous night in 1993 has gone down as the most epic in international football, and the grandest illustration of everything being spoken about in this article, that can be read about here. Lamentably, it’s also true that Fifa’s suspect expansion of the World Cup means it’s virtually impossible to have a night like that again.
There isn’t even the same build-up. That’s partly down to the modern fixation on the club game, but also because there isn’t the same jeopardy.
Too many of the biggest nations have safety nets. The increase in South America’s places means it’s virtually impossible for world champions Argentina to suffer the long nights of the soul they did in 1993, 2009 or 2017. Even the iconic Brazil stumbled badly in qualifying this time around, sacking a manager and losing six of their 18 matches, but a fifth-place finish still comfortably saw them through to the tournament proper.
The qualification stakes just aren’t as high, something that is always going to be the case when the threshold is lowered. Over a fifth of Fifa’s total membership will end up qualifying, gradually diluting how special it is to qualify.
But, of course, not fully eroding it. You can’t. It’s still the World Cup, with all that mythology. This is what you might be writing yourself into.
That purity remains. Even more so for the likes of Cape Verde, Jordan and Uzbekistan, who have all qualified for the first time.
So, even if a November 1993 isn’t possible in the same way, the moment has nevertheless arrived for so many countries to try and make 2026 the year they always look back on.
It’s why everyone should watch. There’s nothing like the World Cup, which means there’s nothing like this week of international football.
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