Nathalie Iannetta Looks Back on Images, Songs and Great Goals Ahead of the World Cup Final

East Rutherford – 19.07.2026: Before the 2026 World Cup reaches its sporting conclusion with its 104th match, Nathalie Iannetta turns her attention away from tactical boards and results lists. The sports director of Radio France tells, in a personal World Cup photo album, of what lingers between kickoffs: supporters in the stands, songs in the streets, exhausted helpers, tears of joy and images that no league table can fully explain.

The setting is enormous. The tournament began on 11 June 2026 and is the first men’s World Cup with 48 teams and 104 matches. Canada, Mexico and the United States are the hosts. On Sunday, 19 July 2026, the final between Spain and Argentina is set to take place at New York New Jersey Stadium in East Rutherford. Kickoff is scheduled for 3:00 p.m. local time.

Iannetta’s retrospective does not begin with the trophy, but with the movement around the game. She describes a World Cup made up of many small scenes: crowds streaming through stadium corridors, voices swelling into chants, and the quiet exhaustion after long tournament days. Especially in a competition of record scale, these in-between spaces become a contest of their own against time, heat, distance and expectation.

The rowers who also appear in her album represent this other perspective. They are not part of the core of the game, yet they underscore the immense logistics of a tournament spread across three countries and 16 venues. The World Cup is not merely a sequence of passes and duels. It is a moving cosmos of transport routes, security zones, fan marches, media areas and the many working hours behind the scenes.

Of course, football remains at the center. Iannetta recalls extraordinary goals, those moments when a shot lifts the stadium out of time for a few seconds. In retrospect, such strikes are more than statistical events: they concentrate risk, technique and courage into a single movement. Yet their impact only emerges through the echo all around them – the roar, the disbelieving silence, the hands over faces.

That tears are also part of this selection fits the drama of a long tournament. For some teams, a few centimeters, a save or a mistake meant the end of a project years in the making. For others, a path opened that they had previously hardly thought possible. Iannetta’s album therefore captures not only images of winners, but also the vulnerability behind every great football night.

Ahead of Spain vs. Argentina, this retrospective is therefore not a substitute for the final, but its human foundation. When the world champion is decided in East Rutherford that evening, a result will bring the chronicle to a close. But the voices, gestures and faces of a month in which football was told far beyond the 90 minutes will remain in memory as well.