Over the next few days, something unusual will be happening across Spanish soccer. Nearly 40 men’s professional clubs in La Liga’s top two divisions will take to the field wearing retro-looking uniforms inspired by their respective histories. The kits were first unveiled at Madrid Fashion Week and are part of a campaign celebrating the country’s love for the sport. It is a fitting prelude.

Ten weeks later, the largest World Cup in history will be held across the US, Canada and Mexico — 48 teams, 104 matches, the most expansive commercial stage the sport has ever assembled. And many players will be wearing nostalgia-laden gear: Adidas recently unveiled new away kits embracing a “90s aesthetic” but designed in a “modern, contemporary way.” They will also bear the brand’s famous trefoil motif — for the first time in more than three decades.

The past is no longer just being collected, but worn, remade and reimagined.

The shirts that changed everything

To understand how soccer arrived here, you have to go further back than expected. “Proper fan replica shirts weren’t widely available until the 1970s,” said Alex Ireland, author of “Pretty Poly: The History of the Football Shirt.” “It was really only in the nineties where they became more broadly acceptable to go to the pub in.

Umbro’s England away shirt for Euro 96 arguably led the shift from uniform to everyday wear. The two-tone blue striped shirt was designed to pair with jeans — an early acknowledgement that the its life extended beyond the pitch. Technology did the rest. Advances in fabric printing allowed designers to embed complex graphics directly onto material, turning shirts into moving canvases. The result was the most visually inventive decade in the sport’s sartorial history.

“Everyone remembers their first World Cup,” said Sam Handy, General Manager of Football at Adidas. “Those kits get embedded in your memory structures — this is what football looks like.”

Mine was Italia 90 and the West Germany home shirt (pictured at the top) — black, red and gold geometric abstraction across the chest — what remains the holy grail among collectors. Norwegian collector Even Nesset describes something close to involuntary recall: “That shirt gives me a kind of false memory of 1990 — from seeing it, from watching YouTube clips of it being worn on the pitch.” England’s third shirt from the same year — sky blue with distinct geometric patterns, and inseparable from New Order’s hit song “World in Motion” — is listed on Cult Kits’ for $480.

While England didn’t wear the shirt on the pitch itself, its fan favorite status and the team’s semi-final run and subsequent penalty shootout defeat to West Germany, who would go on to win the World Cup, helped ensured its legacy, alongside the more classic white home shirt.

“When a brand takes risks in design and embeds it with a decent run for the team, you have a chance of creating something very visually sticky,” said Handy. Nesset distills it further, classifying “the crazy shirts, bold enough to seem wrong at first (USA 1994, Jamaica 1998, Mexico 1998), and the beautiful shirts, quietly perfect (Colombia 1990, Italy 1994).”

Those shirts spent decades in the margins — traded through flea markets and early eBay. Then, over the past two decades, something structural happened. Dedicated platforms — Classic Football Shirts, Cult Kits, Vintage Football Shirts, Saturdays Football and others — transformed an informal network into a scaled, trusted, global market. Founded by fans who couldn’t find the shirts they wanted, they built what they needed, evolving passion projects into lucrative businesses.

David Jones, co-founder of Cult Kits, describes a buyer base that has transformed. “Seventy percent buy for nostalgia — the players you pretended to be growing up. The rest have discovered soccer kits in a fashion sense.”

But this movement runs deeper than celebrity adoption. Psychologist Clay Routledge calls it “historical nostalgia” — a documented longing for eras you never inhabited. His research found 68% of Gen Z adults experience it, and far from being regressive, he argues it is future-oriented: a way of resolving present dissatisfaction by reaching toward something that feels more real. Football shirts are not alone in this. “It’s the same reason we see 100 different Marvel films,” Ireland explained, “you’ve got instant buy-in, a connection that means you don’t need to figure out if you like it. From rebooted franchises, fashion houses mining their archives and generation alpha raised on blended noughties pop, the same force is reshaping culture more broadly.

Cultural critic Simon Reynolds describes the broader condition as “Retromania” — we live in a state of atemporality where 1994 and 2026 exist on the same screen simultaneously. The World Cup crystallizes this. Each tournament is a sealed, re-watchable world — a month of soccer frozen in time. A generation that wasn’t alive for France 98 can spend a weekend inside it on YouTube, emerging with genuine emotional attachments to objects they never encountered in real time.

The summer everything arrives at once

“This is a defining era of soccer culture,” said Handy, “and the jersey is perhaps its clearest expression.” The trefoil — last seen on a World Cup shirt in 1990 — has recently appeared on special edition shirts and now, 25 World Cup competition kits.“We’re just trying to do it all — the past and the future — and letting it all exist at the same time,” Handy added.

Mat Davis, founder of Saturdays Football, has watched the arc from the inside. As the vintage market for men’s soccer jerseys commoditized beneath him — “you search by price, not ‘wow, that’s a unique shirt’” — he pivoted toward original product and, most recently, a partnership with Adidas, embroidering mini versions of the newly released away shirts onto Saturdays Football’s signature caps. Amplification for him, authenticity for Adidas.

Nowhere is that more resonant than with the then-divisive, now cult-classic Adidas-designed US men’s national team’s (USMNT) 94 away shirt. That shirt — a washed-denim effect with diagonally placed white stars — was reportedly met with silence when Adidas first unveiled it to the squad, followed by nervous laughter. Retailers were equally unsure, yet all 50,000 replica kits produced were sold. The bold design would eventually stand the test of time, partly because the team surprised many by reaching the round of 16, wearing the jersey during some of their biggest tournament moments. More than three decades later, the brand has recentlyreleased a lifestyle collection of jerseys, jackets, shorts, hats and even a pair of Samba trainers basedon the memorable design. Nike, who have dressed the team since 1995, designed its 2026 kits in close collaboration with players. They will be worn by all 27 US Soccer teams — men’s, women’s and youth — unifying players under one cohesive, visual identity for the first time. In some ways, the curvy red and white stripes have a similarly bold, visual language to those scattered stars of the Adidas 1994 shirt.

Rather than legacy, Handy says design becomes aninfinite loop: iconic styles becoming part of the visual canon, to be drawn from in perpetuity.

This summer, that loop closes on home soil. Major League Soccer, founded in 1993 as part of the US’ bid to host its first World Cup the following year, has helped the sport reportedly overtake baseball as America’s third favorite sport, according to a survey by The Economist. The World Cup returns not to a country where professional soccer is a novelty, but to one that has quietly, irreversibly, made the game its own.

USMNT midfielder Tyler Adams put the stakes plainly: “I want to have that kit you look back at in 30 years and you’re like, that’s still the best one.” This summer, someone in the crowd will be wearing a vintage jersey from 1994 or a reissue, while others will be wearing updated ones designed to be coveted decades later.

Inside the collar of Belgium’s Adidas away shirt, a hidden line of text aptly reads: “Ceci n’est pas un maillot.” This is not a jersey. Well, not just a jersey anymore.

CNN

What was Al Nassr goalkeeper Bento doing there?

Nobody could write this script.

Cristiano Ronaldo could not believe it. Al Nassr fans inside Al Awwal Park could not believe it. Honestly, almost nobody watching the Riyadh derby could believe what had just happened.

Al Nassr were literally seconds away from winning the Saudi Pro League title for the first time since 2019 and handing Cristiano Ronaldo his first major domestic trophy in Saudi Arabia. It was the 8th minute of added time. Al Hilal launched one final long throw into the box and Bento came off his line to claim it with his defender already covering the situation.

But instead of collecting it comfortably, the Al Nassr goalkeeper completely made a howler and spilled the ball behind him and into his own net.

That was it. Final whistle. 1-1.

One bizarre moment completely changed the mood inside the stadium and suddenly the title race was alive again.

Ronaldo looked devastated after the match. Cameras showed him still sitting on the bench while members of the coaching staff tried to comfort him following the dramatic collapse.

“The dream is close. Heads up, we have one more step to take!” Ronaldo posted on Instagram and X after the match.

“Thank you all for the amazing support tonight!” he added.

The match itself was not really an out and out entertainer to be honest. There were not many big chances created by either side as both teams played with caution knowing what was at stake. But there were still some interesting moments.

Bento was already under scrutiny in the first half when he rushed out of his box trying to deal with a dangerous situation at 0-0. Al Nassr escaped there unpunished.

Ronaldo had one early chance, but it was quickly pulled back for offside, while Al Hilal also had a Benzema goal ruled out by VAR after Milinkovic Savic set him up. That Benzema offside decision also sparked debate online. Many fans on X argued that the ball came off an Al Nassr player deliberately before reaching the crosser and claimed it should not have been given offside. But those debates will now be left to the fans.

Mohamed Simakan eventually gave Al Nassr the lead in the 37th minute after reacting quickest to a loose ball from a corner, sending Al Awwal Park into eruption.

Kingsley Coman was gifted a huge opportunity in the first half that he could not take to make it 2-0. People are even saying that is the miss of the season. He had only keeper to beat but he hits the post rather.

Ronaldo had another decent chance after the break but fired over the crossbar. The big man did not really have a great game overall, but while getting subbed off later in the match, he handed over the captain’s armband, turned towards the fans and started cheering them up, urging them to raise the noise inside Al Awwal Park. You could clearly see the passion and the crowd answered with incredible noise around the stadium.

Still, Simakan’s goal looked enough for most of the night. Al Nassr protected the lead well and the score stayed intact until the final seconds.

Now the equation is simple.

Al Nassr remain top on 83 points and if they beat Damac at home in their final game, they can lift the title.

Al Hilal, meanwhile, still have two matches left. They must win both and hope Al Nassr drop points against a Damac side still fighting for survival.

GN

FIFA has increased payments to teams competing in the 2026 World Cup, raising the total distribution to $871 million, making it the most lucrative edition on record.

But the increased financial distributions, announced last Wednesday at the 36th FIFA Council meeting in Vancouver, Canada, come as the governing body faces criticism over ticket pricing and its commercial partnerships.

Under the new financial distribution structure, participating associations at the 2026 World Cup — set to be held across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada from 11 June — will each receive an additional $2 million, across:

• Preparation money: $2.5 million, up from $1.5 million at the 2022 World Cup, and
• Qualification money: $10 million, up from $9 million in 2022

That brings the minimum payout for each team to at least $12.5 million upon qualification, with additional prize money tied to performance in the tournament.

These payments are meant to defray some of the costs associated with qualifying and preparing for the quadrennial sporting tournament, including travel, training facilities and staff remuneration and are expected to be particularly meaningful to teams outside of the sport’s traditional powerhouses, according to Ricardo Fort, founder of sport consultancy Fort Consulting.

“This incremental contribution to the national football associations reinforces FIFA’s role in redistributing the commercial success of the tournament back into the global football ecosystem,” Fort said.

The 2026 edition of the World Cup is set to be the largest-ever, expanding to 48 teams, up from 32 in 2022. Four national teams — Cape Verde, Curacao, Jordan, and Uzbekistan — are set to make their debuts at this year’s edition.

FIFA said more than $16 million has also been set aside to cover the costs of participating delegations and team ticketing allocations, bringing the total pool set aside for participating teams to $871 million.

Football’s governing body previously announced a more than 50% increase in the tournament’s prize pool in December.

In December, the FIFA Council approved a “record-breaking” prize pool of $727 million at the 2026 edition of the tournament, a 65% increase from the $440 million allocated to teams in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Ticket pricing concerns

Despite the higher payouts at this year’s tournament, fans have expressed gripes over ticket pricing and the sources of FIFA’s revenue.

Under FIFA’s new “dynamic” pricing system, ticket prices fluctuate on demand. Some fans have reported that ticket prices have risen by more than tenfold from the 2022 tournament.

A CNBC review of ticket prices revealed prices ranging from $380 for a Category 2 ticket for a group stage match between Curaçao and Côte d’Ivoire in Philadelphia, to $4,105 for Category 1 tickets to a game between the U.S. and Paraguay at the Los Angeles Stadium.

On FIFA’s official ticket resale platform, some listings have reached extreme levels, with one such resale ticket for the final listed at $11.5 million. While FIFA does not control the prices of resale tickets, a 15% fee on the value of each transaction is collected.

A FIFA spokesperson told CNBC that the organization was “focused on ensuring fair access to our game for existing but also prospective fans, and offered group stage tickets starting at $60.”

These lower-cost tickets, however, were allocated “specifically to supporters of qualified teams, with the selection and distribution process managed individually by the Participating Member Associations.”

The spokesperson added that the variable pricing system “aligns with industry trends across various sports and entertainment sectors,” and ensures a “fair market value for events.”

Despite outrage over ticket prices, demand for tickets at this year’s World Cup ostensibly remains high.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino previously told CNBC that the organization has received around 508 million requests for the seven million tickets on offer across the tournament’s 104 matches.

If true, in-person viewership at this year’s World Cup would dwarf attendance at the 2022 tournament in Qatar, which drew more than 3.4 million spectators across all 64 matches.

“Ticket pricing is always a sensitive topic for mega-events of this scale,” Fort said. “There will always be segments of fans who feel priced out, especially for premium matches.”

Still, he said FIFA’s pricing strategy “has worked in the American market,” given the high demand.

Fans appear to have paid little attention to FIFA’s other controversies, including a sponsorship deal with Saudi Arabia’s Aramco — which drew calls from players to end the oil deal citing humanitarian and environmental concerns — and the awarding of the FIFA Peace Prize to U.S. President Donald Trump.

“Historically, what we’ve seen is that fan engagement with the tournament itself remains incredibly resilient. Once the competition starts, the focus shifts very quickly to the football,” said Fort.

FIFA’s finances have also grown alongside the tournament. In 2025, the governing body’s revenues totaled $2.66 billion, with television broadcasting rights accounting for a large portion, followed by marketing rights.

Its total assets rose to $9.48 billion, up 54% from the year before. Total reserves, however, fell to nearly $2.7 billion, down by 8% year over year as total liabilities more than doubled in 2025.

Officially a not-for-profit, FIFA’s investments are funneled to infrastructure across its 211 member nations, as well as the organization of tournaments such as the World Cup and Club World Cup, according to the Association’s 2027-2030 budget.

CNBC