Andy Burnham is exploring a bid to host the men’s World Cup in the UK, alongside plans for a Northern Olympics, The i Paper can reveal.
The move would bring the World Cup back to the UK for the first time since England hosted in 1966 and forms part of a growing push by Burnham to use major sporting events to drive investment, tourism and regeneration beyond London.
Burnham told colleagues at a Friday morning meeting at No 10 North in Manchester that he is looking at how Britain could host the tournament and is already in talks with the nation’s footballing bodies about how a campaign could be delivered.
English is lit! Great Expectations rewritten by AI in Gen Z slang
‘I call myself Pip. It’s not a name with much rizz’
One of the great classics, written by Charles Dickens, has been modernised – but it’s not aimed at children studying the text in class.
- The Dickens classic has been fed into the AI model Claude Opus 4 to produce “Bare Expectations”.
- The shortened adaption uses the slang of teenagers today, using words like “ick” and “drip”.
- It was made by Tesco Mobile, in partnership with author Chloe Combi, to help parents better understand their children and keep them safe online.
- It was also read as an audio book by Allan Mustafa, from Kurupt FM.
Classic for the modern age
You’d think the best MC in the galaxy would know all the latest slang, and I do. If any kid tells you otherwise, they’re lying. Any words I don’t know are just not cool enough for me to care about!
Allan Mustafa, MC Grindah from Kurupt FM, told Retail Times.
Thousands of children will receive their first phone when they start secondary school
But 77 per cent of parents worry about their online safety. One in four parents felt unprepared when giving their child their first phone. More than half are confused by their child’s language at least once a week.
But campaigners say the best way to keep children safe online is by not giving them a smartphone in the first place.
Are Channel crossing numbers down?
The French authorities have become more “effective” at stopping migrants crossing in dangerous small boats across the Channel, the UK Government has said.
The numbers
The figures compared with last year
5%
The increase in the number of small boats intercepted in the last three months compared with last year
The Home Office said, citing French figures, that since April, 61 per cent of small boats have been intercepted
This includes £161m in performance-based targets
Channel crisis
In the past few weeks, three boats were stopped – two of which were at sea.
Numbers falling
Some 15,897 migrants have crossed the Channel, 43 per cent down on the same period last year.
Last month, a record 165 migrants reached the UK in a single boat.
The deal ‘is already having an impact’
“People smugglers should be in no doubt, we’re taking down their operations, seizing their equipment and breaking their business model for good,” said Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.
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British rapper Yung Filly to face retrial on rape charges in Australia
The rapper and YouTuber who appeared on Celebrity Bake Off will face a retrial after a jury could not reach a verdict during trial.
Yung Filly denied all charges
The Colombian-born rapper, whose real name is Andrés Felipe Valencia Barrientos, was charged with raping and assaulting a 20-year-old fan after his show in Perth 2024. He denied all 10 charges and a jury last month found him not guilty of three charges of rape.
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He was accused of raping a fan
Barrientos was accused of having consensual sex with her until he turned violent and didn’t stop when asked. His lawyer said the evidence was full of “inconsistencies, embellishments and outright lies”.
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Jurors unable to reach verdict
- Last month, a jury found him not guilty on three counts of rape.
- He was cleared of one assault charge and another of strangulation.
- But he was found guilty of two counts of assault. Jurors were unable to make a decision on three counts of sexual penetration without consent.
Could El Niño make next year even hotter?
The naturally occurring phenomenon known as El Niño, which can drive up global temperatures and is brewing in the Pacific, could be the strongest in living memory, the Met Office has warned.
What is El Niño?
It is a climate phenomenon which occurs in the Pacific Ocean every two to seven years.
Normally, trade winds blow east to west across the equator – during and El Niño period, these weaken or reverse.
This pushes up global temperatures as warmth is taken from the ocean into the atmosphere.
El Niño’s impact has already been seen
It has already started to affect weather systems in other parts of the world, with below-average monsoons in India and suppressed hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean. In the UK, El Niño is usually felt later in winter.
A particularly strong El Niño coupled with global warming has left scientists worried that 2027 could be even warmer.
El Niño is strongest in living memory
We should be clear that this is an unprecedented event. I have never seen an El Niño signal this intense in our forecasts.
Professor Adam Scaife, head of
long-range forecasting, the Met Office
Risk of most intense El Niño in 1,000 years
- El Niño is declared when the sea temperature in the tropical eastern Pacific rises 0.5 °C above the long-term average.
- But currently it’s over 2°C and could reach 3°C later this year.
- Some have suggested it could go above 4°C – meaning it would be the strongest El Nino in the last 500-1,000 years.
Next year could be hottest ever
The precise effect El Niño has on global weather can be unpredictable. But Met Office climate scientist Dr Nick Dunstone told the BBC average global temperatures could rise next year. This would make 2027 the hottest year on record, after 2024.
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Why children’s eyesight is getting worse – and what parents can do about it
More and more children are becoming
short-sighted, but scientists have discovered it can be reversed through behaviour change.
Rates of short-sightedness are rising across the world – and we now know why
- In the UK, short-sightedness is rising at a rate of 0.7 per cent per year.
- This means that by 2050 about four in 10 British children will be short-sighted and need glasses.
- But contrary to old myths, we are not (exactly) becoming more short-sighted because of too much screentime.
Short-sightedness is linked to the outdoors
Large research studies have found a lack of time outside causes short-sightedness. This could be because children are simply not using their long-distance vision as their eyeballs develop.
The other theory scientists are considering is that our eyes need the brighter light that we are exposed to outdoors to develop properly.
How to combat
short-sightedness
- Randomised trials suggest more outdoor time reduced the development of new short-sightedness.
- For children who were already
short-sighted, using eyedrops with atropine every night until age 16 helped reduce the degree of
short-sightedness. Specialised glasses can also help.
A source familiar with the discussions said the bid was raised as part of talks on “stadium regeneration”.
Hosting the world’s biggest football tournament would form part of his push to make the north a destination for global sport – an agenda that also includes plans for a Northern Olympics and a bid to bring the 2035 Ryder Cup to Bolton.
The next available World Cup is in 2038, followed by tournaments in 2042 and 2046. Fifa has yet to begin the formal process for awarding the 2038 tournament, and the Government has not said whether its ambitions are focused on the earliest available opportunity or a bid further into the future. A bid for the 2042 tournament seems the most likely due to Fifa rules.
The i Paper understands that formal discussions are yet to take place with football’s governing bodies. The UK is already the sole bidder for the Women’s World Cup for 2035, with the hosts of that tournament set to be confirmed in November.
The World Cup plan is being considered alongside the previously reported ambition to bring the Olympics to the north, possibly in 2040, with Burnham understood to be pursuing both projects as part of a wider push to attract major sporting events, investment and tourism to the regions.
Burnham has already made clear just how strongly he feels about the UK’s absence from the tournament. Earlier this month, he agreed that it was “insane” that the country that invented modern football has hosted the men’s World Cup only once, in 1966.
“It makes you wonder whether the authorities at the European and global level have something against us,” he told Ellis Platten, host of the podcast.
“The country that invented the game, you’d think we would have had a bit more of that attention.”
His frustration is rooted partly in personal experience. As culture secretary under former prime minister Gordon Brown, Burnham was involved in England’s failed bid for the 2018 World Cup, which was awarded to Russia after England received just two votes from Fifa’s 22-strong executive committee.
He has since become an outspoken critic of football’s governing bodies. In recent weeks he has called Fifa president Gianni Infantino the “wrong man” to lead the organisation and attacked plans to sell a stake in a new commercial business built around Fifa’s competitions.
That proposal was subsequently abandoned after a furious backlash from European football authorities.
The latest World Cup thinking is closely linked to Burnham’s other major sporting ambition to bring the Olympics to the north.
A coalition of northern mayors has been pressing for a multi-city Olympic and Paralympic bid, arguing that the Games should be used to rebalance the distribution of major events and investment away from London.
Burnham has said it would not be “fair or right” for London to host the Olympics for a fourth time and has backed a Northern Games as “what Britain needs right now”. Northern leaders have argued that much of the infrastructure is already in place and that a Games could accelerate investment and regeneration across a region of around 15 million people.
Burnham is already backing the bid to bring the Ryder Cup to Bolton and is enthusiastic about Euro 2028, which will be hosted across the UK and Ireland.
A source close to the Prime Minister said: “He is behind the Olympic bid and was the driving force in persuading us to back the bid to bring the Ryder Cup to Bolton.
“He’s excited about the Euros 28, which we’re hosting.”
The source said Burnham was keen to support hospitality and tourism, although the detail of how a World Cup bid would fit into that had not yet been worked out.
The hurdles Burnham would face to host World Cup
The Prime Minister’s proposal already faces a major stumbling block. Fifa’s rotation rules prevent countries from a continental federation – such as Uefa, which governs European football – hosting a World Cup if another nation from that continent has hosted either of the previous two tournaments.
The 2030 edition is already being co-hosted by Spain, Portugal and Morocco under a joint bid from Uefa and the Confederation of African Football, with additional matches held in South America to mark 100 years since the first World Cup. That would appear to rule out a UK bid until 2042, but Fifa can make an exception if no other valid bids are made – with nations having to prove they meet specific requirements around finances, stadiums and other infrastructure.
As it stands, only the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football – which hosted this summer’s tournament – and the Oceania Football Confederation would be eligible.
Australia are seen as strong contenders for 2038 after pulling out of the 2034 bidding process, which effectively allowed Saudi Arabia a free run as the sole bidder.
Burnham has called on current Fifa president Gianni Infantino to resign, but the governing body would be under new leadership by the mid-2030s regardless due to limits on the number of terms allowed.
A UK bid for 2042 would be more realistic but the process has not yet begun for nations to express an interest and hosts would be unlikely to be appointed until well into the 2030s.
The World Cup idea was raised against the backdrop of a broader push by Burnham to put mayors at the centre of decisions on regional growth.
Friday’s meeting was the first virtual “situation room” held through No 10 North, his new base for bringing Whitehall and local leaders together and was focused on giving mayors more power, expertise and resources to deliver investment in their areas.
The meeting brought together mayors from across England with the Prime Minister, Chancellor John Healey, First Secretary of State Louise Haigh, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner and Housing minister Sally Jameson, with Exchequer Secretary Dan Tomlinson and other regional leaders joining remotely.
Alongside the wider devolution measures, the Government announced a new Stadium Regeneration Accelerator, under which the ministers for Growth and Sport will work with mayors on major sports projects designed to unlock jobs, investment and housing. The Government also said every mayoral authority would initially receive between five and ten civil servants on six-to-nine-month secondments, while new programmes will expand local access to leadership, data and AI expertise.