The good thing about the 2026 World Cup draw is that you don’t feel as though Ireland have already been knocked out before a ball has even been kicked.
Last time, when we were put in a group with France and the Netherlands, you knew from the moment the balls were drawn that it was over for us, qualification-wise. This time, qualification doom seems very likely rather than certain.
We know that Portugal, Denmark and Hungary will all have been delighted to get Ireland too. The absurdly packed football calendar means that we have to wait until March to find out which of Portugal or Denmark will be the top seeds.
Denmark, of course, got the better of Ireland in qualifying for both the 2018 World Cup and Euro 2020. Still, of the six matches between the sides in recent years, five were draws.
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The Danes smashed us 5-1 in the play-off second leg in 2017, but the star of that night, Christian Eriksen, is no longer the brilliant player he was then, and none of the new generation has yet proved they can reach Eriksen’s level. Denmark are better than us, but not by as much as Portugal are.
Which is why Ireland should probably get used to the idea that their top-seeded opponents in this group will be Portugal. They are generally formidable in qualifying, winning all 10 of their matches in 2023. But the last Euro finals were a brutal disappointment. Portugal were knocked out in the quarter-finals on penalties after playing three games – more than 5½ hours of football – without scoring a goal.
The main reason for their failure in the Euros was Roberto Martinez’s failure to usher Cristiano Ronaldo out of the starting XI. Ronaldo, grimly determined to cling on and play a record sixth World Cup in 2026, will be 40 when these qualifiers begin next September.
With or without Ronaldo, Portugal are a team with the talent to make Ireland feel and look small – unless you catch them on one of those days where they convince themselves the ball isn’t going to go in.
The second seeds, Hungary, are arguably Ireland’s football opposite. If Irish football has been subsisting on the poverty line since the 2008 crash, Hungarian football has had billions pumped into it over roughly the same period, both through direct government spending and through various tax incentives that encourage business to donate to sporting associations.
The clearest evidence of this is can be seen in the new stadiums, of which the gigantic new Puskas Arena in Budapest is merely the biggest. Ten of the 12 stadiums in Hungary’s top division have been built since Viktor Orban’s current stint as prime minister began in 2010.
The national team results also seem to have improved, with three consecutive appearances at Euros finals ending what had been a 30-year tournament qualifying drought.
Ireland’s economy is more than 50 per cent larger than Hungary’s even though Hungary has nearly twice as many people, so why does Hungary have so much more money available to invest in football?
The difference is priorities. Ireland’s (centrist liberal) government thinks about sport as an economic activity, seeking to justify investment with reference to economic returns expressed in euros and cents. Hungary’s (illiberal national-conservative) government sees sport – especially football – as the stage on which the national community dramatises and displays itself. How do you put a price on that?
The Germany-Hungary Euro 2024 match in Stuttgart was memorable mainly for the hair-raising prematch spectacle of nearly 15,000 black-shirted Magyars, solemnly holding up their tricolour streamers and singing about how one day they’ll take back the provinces they lost in the Treaty of Trianon. These moments of nationalist theatre are what Orban is getting for his money, and who knows what might happen if Hungary ever actually made it past a tournament group stage.
Expectation might be Hungary’s biggest problem. Some of the younger generation of Hungarian coaches think the team can go against the mainstream orthodoxy of the Guardiola era by playing an associative relational style that could channel the brilliance of their 1950s Golden team into the 2020s.
One problem they have run into is that the 2020s Hungarian players don’t seem to be as good as their 1950s counterparts. At the Euros Hungary looked a quite ordinary smaller European national team that seemed unlikely to muster any very memorable riposte to Guardiolismo. But could this have been the fault of their Italian coach, Marco Rossi, whose conservative tactics prevented the Hungarian team from giving full expression to their national genius?
You can imagine what Rossi thinks about that, but even he would accept that it is reasonable for Hungarians to see the group as a duel with Portugal or Denmark, with Ireland and Armenia just meat in the room. It’s up to Ireland – and hopefully not Armenia – to provide the surprises.
