W1A icon Ian Fletcher tells Radio Times all about his Twenty Twenty Six role: "This wasn't just any other job"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

If someone had told me a few years ago that I was going to be living and working in Miami as part of the team delivering one the greatest sporting events the world has ever seen, I’d probably have laughed.

I’d been lucky enough to be involved in the widely unforeseen success of the London 2012 Games, and I’d spent six long years at the BBC as head of values, before that came to an end when values were outsourced as part of a financial review. But nothing could have prepared me for what was just around the corner.

There’s the sheer scale of it for a start. Sixteen host cities in three countries – the US, Canada and Mexico – across the whole of the North American continent, some of them further apart than you can possibly imagine. And then there was the nature of the role I’d been asked to play at the centre of this huge and ambitious enterprise. This wasn’t just any other job.

The idea of putting integrity front and centre in football and in the 2026 tournament could surely not be more timely. Here was a unique opportunity to make a difference on the world stage and in the context of an America where literally anything felt possible from day to day, some of it even probable.

It’s sometimes said that great footballers already know where they’re going to pass the ball before it comes to them, or even if it doesn’t come to them at all, as can sometimes happen in life as well as in football. And I wonder if the same isn’t true off the pitch as well, especially in the era of 24-hour social media. In a public-facing management role, you can expect to have all manner of balls coming at you virtually all the time.

But with the role of director of integrity comes a sense of responsibility from day one. We live in a complex, often troubled world and perhaps for that reason sport seems to mean more to us now than it has ever meant. In the end this was to be 48 nations from across the globe, united by the power of football and brought together in one really big place to compete against one another until eventually there would be one winner and the other 47 would be defeated.

That’s surely a story we all need to hear today, whether we want to or not, and it’s certainly been one of my own goals to try to tell it.

Written exclusively for Radio Times by Twenty Twenty Six, W1A and Twenty Twelve creator John Morton.

Twenty Twenty Six begins on Wednesday 8 April at 10pm on BBC Two and iPlayer.

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