Squires on the World Cup: cartooning the second week
A Guardian cartoonist's week-two round-up offers a useful reminder that the World Cup is told as much through caricature as through commentary.
On 23 June 2026 the Guardian published the second weekly instalment of David Squires' World Cup cartoon strip, a fixture of major tournaments since 2014. The piece gathers the heroes, villains and signature performances of the tournament's second week into a single panel, doing the job that editorial columnists usually do — but with sharper deadlines and better drawing. The cartoon ran as part of the Guardian's ongoing World Cup coverage and was accompanied by a link to purchase prints and to Squires' most recent book, Chaos in the Box.
Squires matters because he is one of the few working cartoonists in British sport with a national-platform weekly slot. He has drawn every men's World Cup since Brazil 2014 for the Guardian, turning the cycle of group-stage drama into something the paper's readers can scroll to before the post-match analysis videos even load. The week-two strip is, in effect, a stylised highlights package: who over-performed, who under-performed, and which talking point the cartoonist judged too good to leave alone.
What the format does
A weekly tournament cartoon is, structurally, an aggregator. It does not pretend to break news; it summarises the consensus reaction and gives it a frame. The reader arrives already knowing the results and the controversies, and the cartoon's job is to make them feel seen. That is also its limitation: by the time the strip is drawn, approved and published — typically a day or more after the events it depicts — the viral moment has moved on. The strip competes less with breaking-news desks than with the morning-after columns.
The Guardian is the only British paper that has sustained this kind of weekly tournament cartooning across the last three men's World Cups and the women's tournaments in 2019 and 2023. The slot has become a small institution of its own: readers expect it, and the paper has built a commercial loop around it through print sales and book tie-ins, of which Chaos in the Box is the latest example.
The visual economy of the week
Tournament week twos tend to produce a recognisable cast: a breakout star whose name nobody knew a fortnight ago, a major nation already calculating how to spin group-stage elimination, a refereeing decision replayed until the tape wears thin, and a manager whose body language has become a subplot of its own. Squires' week-two strip works through that cast with a deliberately high density of references per panel — a choice that rewards the already-engaged reader and mildly alienates everyone else. The Guardian's own description of the piece frames it as coverage of "the heroes, villains and superstar performances in week two of the tournament," which is a fair summary of the editorial brief the cartoonist is working to.
The commercial furniture around the strip — the prints, the book link, the Chaos in the Box promotion — is not incidental. The cartoon's value to the Guardian is partly reputational (it sets the paper's tone for the tournament) and partly transactional (it drives a steady, low-volume trade in original art and back-catalogue books to the kind of reader who already buys both).
What it tells us about tournament coverage
The persistence of the format is itself a small piece of evidence about how broadsheets cover a World Cup. Wire copy, video, live blogs and analytics dashboards now do most of the descriptive work; what remains for a staff cartoonist is judgement, tone and the occasional joke too inside-baseball for the newsroom. A weekly strip also gives the paper a way to assert a viewpoint without the columnist overhead — a cheaper, faster editorial signature.
The trade-off is that a cartoon is only as good as the week it depicts, and week twos of World Cups are unusually compressed. The strip has to land decisions that may look different in retrospect — who is the hero now may be the cautionary tale by the round of sixteen. The cartoon freezes the moment; the tournament does not.
Desk note: Monexus treats this as a culture-and-sport desk piece on a recurring Guardian feature, not as tournament match-reporting. The hero image is a screenshot of the published cartoon via the Guardian's image CDN.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Squires_(cartoonist)