Given the conditions during the Club World Cup in what was unofficially a warm-up for the 2026 men’s World Cup, it gives a good indication of what can be expected during next summer’s tournament across the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Compared to the 32-team Club World Cup, there will be 48 nations at the World Cup. This will mean more daytime matches and additional challenges to players when it comes to dealing with the weather.
“Certainly some sort of proactive cooling intervention,” Dr Tyler replied when asked if cooling vests will be a necessity at the Club World Cup.
“The best way to avoid it is to not play in those conditions, but we know that’s not going to happen for lots of reasons.
“There could be some proactive scheduling. I’ve seen people talk about very early kick-offs or very late kick-offs, and they do that in La Liga – that tends to kick off very late, for example.
“We saw players struggling this summer, there’s no reason to think we won’t see them struggling next summer as the teams will be more likely to be adopting cooling strategies to try and combat that.”
Dr Tyler added that he expects cooling jackets, or at least some form of cooling equipment will be used widespread across the World Cup.
“Definitely. All the teams that can, will. Those teams that have huge support behind them certainly will and teams are already preparing for next year’s World Cup with an eye on the heat,” he explained.
“Some of those might be off the shelf measures, some of them might be bespoke measures.
“The better teams generally are impacted less by the heat because they can control the tempo, they can make the opponent run, those sorts of things.
“I think every national teams should be able to have the resources to have something and not to sort of be overlooked.”
