One battle after another: Kunal Pradhan writes on 2026 as the Year of Sport
2026 is the Year of the Horse in the Chinese zodiac calendar. But if wishes were horses, they may well have agreed to call it the Year of Sport. It’s the year of the football World Cup, two cricket World Cups, the World Chess Championship, an Asian Games, and a Winter Olympics.
The year when a new tennis duopoly will cast its rivalry in stone, when Formula 1’s young new icon will face his true test against a marauding former winner, and the year when Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo will bring their miraculous two-decade-long dance to an end.
All this while the regular tugs-of-war continue in club football, world athletics and the golf Majors; on courts, circuits, tracks, pitches, greens, velodromes, arenas, rings and rinks around the world.
Since we’re talking about wishes, here’s what a 2026 sporting wish-list might look like.
Football: The Cup of the World
The FIFA World Cup envelopes the world in a way no other sporting event can. Whether your country is in it or not, somehow you always are. This time, the expanded tournament will feature 48 teams instead of 32 (still no India, though), 104 matches instead of 64, a 32-team knockout stage instead of 16, and will run for 39 days instead of the usual 32.
It will be the last dance for Messi, who won the elusive title on his fifth attempt in 2022; and for his great rival Ronaldo, who could become the only player in history to score in six successive World Cups (and still not win a single one).
Amid their swansongs, France will seek retribution, Brazil will covet redemption, Spain will be eager to announce its revival, and England to herald its renaissance.
My wish is that a South American team wins it all in Mexico-Canada-USA — if nothing else, to honour Diego Maradona’s magic at the Estadio Azteca in 1986. Let’s just say we won’t complain if Messi gets another one for Argentina.
Cricket: Foresight is Twenty20
This year, a revamped men’s cricket team led by Suryakumar Yadav and a triumphant women’s team led by Harmanpreet Kaur will enter their respective T20 World Cups as the ones to beat.
Since we can rarely have everything, I wish for the women to win it all in the English summer, to prove their 2025 triumph was a proclamation of a power shift. The men, who play the World T20 at home in February-March against 19 other teams over three stages, travel for a challenging Test tour to New Zealand later in the year — and we might also want to save our wishes for that.
Asian Games: The Indian invasion
The 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou became the new touchstone for Indian sport as our athletes surpassed what appeared to be an unrealistic “Abki baar, 100 paar (This time, over 100)” slogan by winning a staggering 106 medals. India was fourth on the table — its best finish since Jakarta 1962 — and the 27 golds it won were higher than the tally in the previous two editions combined. These medals included an unprecedented 29 in track and field, the showstopper at any multi-discipline event, and the men’s hockey gold as the icing on the cake.
The Asian Games is the only true barometer of where Indian sport stands two years into the Olympic cycle. The Commonwealth Games, held in the same year, are an exercise in futility that should have been abandoned decades ago (perhaps more on this in another column later). The wish for Aichi-Nagoya 2026, then, is simple: more medals for India than at Hangzhou to prove we’re on the right path, even if consistent Olympic glory remains a bridge too far. And the men’s hockey gold, of course.
Formula 1: Speed thrills
After a season where personalities and styles clashed in a furious three-way battle on the world’s fastest tracks, Englishman Lando Norris emerged as champion over Dutchman Max Verstappen, setting the stage for a fiery 2026 in which the former will try to hold off the four-time World Champion hungry for revenge. The cars will be lighter and more agile this season, with a 50-50 split between election and combustion engines, and the controversial Drag Reduction System will make way for an equally contentious push-to-pass Overtake Mode.
My wish is that the drivers race cleanly, that no one gets hurt in the heat of battle, that the duels are on the track and not in the pits, and that Verstappen and Norris (and/or his teammate Oscar Pistorius) cement their 2025 rivalry by keeping the title hanging in the balance until the final race in Abu Dhabi on December 6.
Tennis: The Two Towers
Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner didn’t just split the four Grand Slams in 2025, they, as mentioned in my previous column, won exactly 1,651 points each of the 3,302 they played against each other.
I hope this incredible statistic repeats itself in 2026. If that’s too much to ask, let them split the Slams between them; let one not dominate the other; let Sincaraz be the rivalry that defines tennis in the post-Federer-Nadal-Djokovic era (though Djokovic is still in the hunt for his 25th Slam).
Chess: A new paradigm
D Gukesh is world chess champion. R Praggnanandhaa is among the eight who will vie to challenge him for the crown.
The wish: More power to Pragg at the Candidates in Cyprus to set up an all-Indian world championship final that would mark a historic turnaround in the sport where only the Soviets could ever have hoped for something so audacious. Then, once it’s Gukesh vs Pragg, may the best man win.
(The views expressed are personal)
