FA to pay £19M bonuses to England players and staff if they win the World Cup

If England lifts the World Cup trophy in 2026, Thomas Tuchel stands to pocket around £3 million. Each of the 26 players in the squad would walk away with roughly £577,000. The Football Association has structured its bonus plan around half of the £38 million prize money FIFA awards to the tournament winner, meaning a successful England campaign would trigger approximately £19 million in payouts to players and staff.

It is the kind of number that sounds enormous until you remember FIFA’s total prize pool for the 2026 tournament sits at $871 million.

The money behind the beautiful game

FIFA has steadily inflated its prize pools over successive tournaments, and 2026 represents the largest commitment in the organization’s history. The tournament, co-hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, expands to 48 teams for the first time, which partly explains the ballooning prize money.

On June 9, 2026, FIFA confirmed Kraken as its first Official Crypto Exchange Supporter. The designation is new territory for FIFA, which has historically kept its sponsorship categories within traditional financial services.

Kraken’s sponsorship targets fan adoption across North American and European markets simultaneously, which is a logical play given the tournament’s tri-nation hosting footprint.

England’s curious absence from the fan token market

While national teams including Argentina and Portugal have official fan tokens, England has no equivalent presence on platforms like Socios.com or through Chiliz. That absence means there is no direct crypto instrument tied to England’s tournament performance, no fan token that spikes in value when Jude Bellingham scores or crashes when a penalty shootout goes wrong.

FIFA Collect, the organization’s NFT platform, has registered activity from more than 85,000 unique blockchain addresses. The platform offers dynamic NFTs and Right-to-Ticket products.

What this means for crypto markets and investors

The FA’s bonus structure illustrates the financial scale of the event Kraken has attached itself to. A £577,000 per-player bonus pool, a £3 million manager’s bonus, and a £19 million total payout are all downstream of a prize fund that FIFA has built through exactly the kind of commercial partnerships that now include a crypto exchange for the first time.

The teams with fan tokens will have a measurable on-chain metric for supporter engagement. England’s will remain entirely off-chain, which either represents a missed opportunity or an open door for whatever platform moves first.

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