Watching the 2026 World Cup as a Gazza Fan

World Cup 2026

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has come and gone, and like millions of football fans, I spent a month glued to matches played across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It was the biggest World Cup ever staged — 48 teams, cities from coast to coast, stadiums that felt more like small towns. And yet, for all the spectacle, I kept finding my mind drifting back thirty-six years, to a very different tournament and a very different player.

Because that's the thing about being a Gazza fan. Every World Cup is measured against Italia '90.

The Ghost at Every Tournament

Paul Gascoigne played in exactly one World Cup. One. It seems impossible when you consider how completely he owns the tournament in English memory. The surging runs, the audacity, the yellow card against Germany, and the tears that turned a footballer into a national story. No England player at this summer's tournament — however talented — carried the game the way Gazza did in 1990, with that mix of genius and vulnerability that made you feel like anything could happen whenever he had the ball.

Watching the 2026 group stages, I kept playing the old fan's game: who here is the Gazza of this World Cup? There were candidates — players with flair, players with cheek. But flair alone was never what made Gazza, Gazza. It was that he seemed to be experiencing the football at the same emotional pitch as the supporters. He wasn't performing joy; he was in it. That quality is almost extinct in the modern game, media-trained out of players before they ever reach a World Cup squad.

An English Game in American Sunshine

There was something surreal about watching this tournament unfold in the United States. Football — soccer, as the hosts insist — in NFL stadiums, in summer heat, with halftime shows and highway traffic reports. Gascoigne himself had his own brush with American football culture once upon a time, and I couldn't help wondering what a 23-year-old Gazza would have made of a World Cup like this one: the noise, the scale, the cameras everywhere.

Honestly? He'd probably have loved it and been overwhelmed by it in equal measure. That was always the duality. The bigger the stage, the brighter he burned — and the higher the cost afterward.

The Name That Follows Him

Regular readers of this site know the story I come back to: Gascoigne once described the jolt of hearing the word "Gaza" on the news and, for a split second, thinking the bulletin was about him — "Gazza" and "Gaza" separated by a single letter and a world of meaning. I wrote about it in When "Gaza" Sounds Like "Gazza", and this summer brought the strange resonance of that story home again. A World Cup is a rare month when football pushes its way to the top of the news — when, for once, a fan flicking on the television is more likely to hear about a match than anything else.

For Gazza, that confusion was a symptom of fame's paranoia, the sense that the whole world was talking about you. For the rest of us, it's a reminder of how small football's dramas really are — and why we treasure them anyway. The stakes on a pitch are gloriously, mercifully low. That's not a weakness of the game. It's the whole point.

What 2026 Taught Me About 1990

The final whistle of a World Cup always leaves the same hollow feeling — four more years. But this summer clarified something for me about why Gascoigne still matters. Modern tournaments are bigger, faster, richer, and more polished than anything the 1990 squad could have imagined. What they aren't, very often, is personal. Gazza made a World Cup feel like it was happening to someone you knew — a mate who'd somehow ended up on the biggest stage in football and was feeling every second of it.

Thirty-six years on, that's still the standard. Not the trophies he didn't win, but the connection he did.

Here's to the next tournament — and to the memory of the one player who cried for all of us.

If you're new here: this site is a fan tribute to Paul Gascoigne, written by Jake Burkons. Have a look at the blog for more on Gazza's story.