The 2026 FIFA World Cup is doing what every major international tournament does to Premier League clubs: borrowing their most expensive assets, running them into the ground, and returning them with a polite “thank you” note and, occasionally, a torn ACL.

The workload problem

Manchester City players logged somewhere between 5,027 and 5,319 minutes across the tournament, the highest total among all 20 Premier League clubs. Arsenal wasn’t far behind at 4,285 minutes. Every single Premier League team had at least one player in the tournament, meaning no club escaped the fatigue tax entirely.

The physical toll isn’t theoretical. Aston Villa’s Amadou Onana suffered an ACL tear during the tournament, the kind of injury that doesn’t just affect one match or one month. It reshapes a club’s entire season.

Here’s the thing about World Cup workloads. The clubs paying the wages have zero control over how their players are used. A manager in charge of a national team chasing glory has very little incentive to manage minutes for a player’s club season that starts weeks later. The incentive structures are fundamentally misaligned, and they have been for decades.

Fan tokens catch a wave

Fan tokens associated with national teams saw notable price action, with some tokens, like Spain’s, posting daily gains of up to 37% as the group stage wrapped up in late June 2026.

Fan tokens are digital assets that give holders access to voting rights on minor club or team decisions, exclusive merchandise, and other perks. The infrastructure behind many of these tokens runs through Chiliz (CHZ), which powers fan token ecosystems and historically sees trading volume spikes during major football events.

Kraken, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, is serving as the Official Crypto Exchange Supporter for the 2026 World Cup across North America and Europe.

What this means for investors

The fan token trade is a momentum play, not a fundamentals play. Tokens like those for Spain and Argentina can spike dramatically on match results, but those gains tend to be short-lived. Anyone who bought Spain’s token after a 37% daily gain and held through a knockout-round exit learned that lesson the hard way.

Chiliz is the more interesting long-term bet for investors watching this space. As the platform powering most fan token ecosystems, CHZ benefits from aggregate volume across all tokens rather than the fortunes of any single national team. With the 2026 World Cup being the largest ever, spanning the US, Canada, and Mexico with 48 teams, the addressable audience for fan engagement is substantially bigger than previous cycles.

Kraken’s sponsorship deal deserves attention beyond the branding exercise. When a crypto exchange becomes an official FIFA partner, it signals regulatory comfort. FIFA doesn’t attach its brand to companies operating in legal gray areas.