The World Cup: Collector's Edition | Issue 16

Our 16th magazine takes the planet’s most-watched tournament, in the Football World Cup, and quite deliberately shoots around the edges of what you’ll find elsewhere.

To kick things off, a comprehensive timeline of the Copa Mundial maps nearly a century of history and covers the birth of modern football at USA ’94.

There’s a strong Scottish thread running throughout this celebratory magazine, inspired by an interview with 1978 World Cup skipper Don Masson and a lyrical profile of Napoli’s Scott ‘McFratm’ McTominay.

Elsewhere, we meet the first-time qualifiers – there’s four of them – before taking a broader look at football across the Americas, with postcards from Clube Atlético Mineiro to boot.

That covers the good, we’ve also the ‘bad’ in an extract from No Show: The World Cups that Never Were, and the ‘ugly’ as Paul Simpson writes about five World Cup campaigns that turned sour.

There will be 104 games at the 2026 World Cup. Consider this your invitation to join us for the journey.