Thailand has never qualified for a FIFA World Cup, and the fans here have made their peace with this in the most pragmatic way available: by adopting someone else's team and following it with the kind of devotion that qualified nations' supporters spend a lifetime building.
The Premier League has been a weekly religion in Bangkok for decades, and when the World Cup comes around, the allegiances are clear even if the flag on the shirt belongs to a country the fan has never visited.
Argentina, Brazil, England, France: the Thai football public distributes itself across these loyalties with genuine feeling, and the World Cup, every four years, is the moment those feelings are supposed to find their fullest expression.
This year that expression comes with significant friction. The 2026 World Cup is being held at venues across the United States, Mexico and Canada, and for a Thai fan who wants to be in the stadium rather than in front of a screen the path there is considerably more complicated than it has been for previous tournaments.
Thai passport holders are required to obtain a B1/B2 visitor visa to travel to the United States, and while the FIFA Priority Appointment Scheduling System gives ticketholders access to prioritised visa interview slots, priority access to an interview is not the same as a guaranteed visa, and the current US immigration climate has introduced a level of uncertainty that makes the investment of buying a ticket feel riskier than it used to.
The 2026 World Cup arrives amid rapidly evolving US immigration and security policies, with some restrictions directly impacting short-term visitors including potential World Cup attendees.
The ticket itself is its own obstacle. Dynamic pricing, which FIFA has applied to this tournament, means that the face value of a ticket is a floor rather than a ceiling, and resale prices for high-demand matches have reached levels that put the in-person experience firmly in the category of luxury travel rather than fan pilgrimage. The tournament has expanded to 48 teams and spread across 11 US cities, which means more matches but also more logistical complexity and cost for a fan trying to follow a specific team through multiple rounds.
What this amounts to for the Thai football fan is a World Cup that is technically more accessible than any previous one, with more teams, more games and a priority visa system designed to smooth the path, but in practice more difficult to attend than most. The barriers are financial, bureaucratic and atmospheric, and the combination of all three means that watching from Bangkok is not simply the default option for fans who cannot afford to travel but the rational choice for many who could.
This is not unique to Thailand, and the Bloomberg documentary examining the tournament's economics makes clear that the ordinary fan has been progressively priced out of the in-person World Cup experience globally, replaced by corporate hospitality packages and high-spending tourists for whom the football is secondary to the event.
What makes it specific to a country like Thailand is the additional layer: the fan is already watching someone else's team, already operating at a remove from the tournament's primary emotional narrative, and now also navigating a visa process and ticket market not designed with them in mind.
Bangkok will watch this World Cup the way it always has, in sports bars and living rooms, through screens, with genuine feeling, and the experience will be real regardless of whether anyone in the room has ever set foot in a stadium in New Jersey.
The fan who loves football without a team in the tournament has always understood that team spirit is something you carry with you, not something you travel to. This year just makes that point more clearly than usual.
