FWIW, while its fun for a woefully weak Cape Verde to get a point against one of the favorites, its a long ways from there to endorsing including 14 mediocre sides that did little to earn their way in to.the tournament. In case you didnt actuslly see the game, Cape came out of the locker room, parked 10 guys in the box and stayed there for 90 minutes. They hardly ever even pretended that they were trying to win the game,, they simply hung on like grim death until the whistle. They had 29% posession and got 1 corner as opposed to 12. That's not to say that it wasnt fun, particularly at the end when Spain went to the bench for a couple of the best players on the planet in a desperate bid to score.a.goal against a pipsqueak squabble they surely figured they would roll over without working up a sweat. Who doesnt love a spunky underdog? But it sure wasnt world class soccer. We've all seen weak team's park the bus against better ones dozens of.times, but you can throw a dart at the world team list and send any random side out to do the same thing
CONCACAF got 6 spots in this World Cup because of the 3 host nations. Even if the qualifiers are bad to mid ... CONCACAF won't be satisfied going back to 3 in 2030. Morocco, Portugal and Spain get 3 in 2030. Europe isn't getting its allocation cut. Expansion to 64 is the way.
Will they? I thought the talk was having two groups in the final round of qualifying with the US and Mexico in separate groups then having the top X number of teams from each group qualify.
Agree with your statement, but usually when a team plays bunkerball they usually break mentally and/or get overly physical while trying to slow the game down. It was outside the norm for a team to defend as a unit for 90mins with out getting mentally exhausted. I also think the hydration break helps the smaller teams. The fact that there was barely any storage time shows how clean the game was. Cape Verde lacked any cohesion in their passing outlets to their "forwards". I don't think they can repeat this because their goalie played lights out, and there is no way goalies can consistently make 7+ saves a game. Spain will most likely roll on and win the group but what Cape Verde did should be appreciated for the one off that it is.
This is what bothered me. Spain barely saw the occasion (a WORLD CUP OPENER) as worth paying attention to really. They clearly thought they could just show up and Cape Verde would hand them the game. Which made for a pretty brutal watch for the rest of us. Nice story for Cape Verde at least.
To be fair, nine times out of ten, that'd be the right call. It's like when we play a team two divisions beneath us in the Open Cup. We start a lot of bench players because we expect to be able to take care of business without burning the big guys.
Pretty sure concacaf is getting 6 spots for 2030 plus a potential 7th. These results are going to create a fun MD3 with teams trying hard to win groups. There is a new tiebreaker formula too
Correct, CONCACAF gets a minimum of six in every 48-team tournament. I don't need to see Honduras and Guatemala competing to get our region's 9th auto bid in a 64-team field.
Since we're discussing formats, somebody help me out with something here. I was trying to help answer a genuine question on social media about the format, and I realized that I couldn't find an answer to this one. There's a bracket that shows exactly where the #1 and #2 finishers from all the groups get placed. But it's a little unclear how they place the 3rd place finishers. Each spot for the third place finishers have like five letters (meaning five different possible groups), and those letters repeat in different spots in the brackets. I assume there's going to be an element of trying to continue the policy of geographical separation for the round of 32, but I have no idea what the procedure is.
If that’s what he wants. Recall, he spent is entire pro career in France before signing with the Crew. So it’s not as though ‘playing in Europe’ is a career goal he’s yet to achieve. And he turns 32 in August. I imagine re-signing him would be very doable, if that’s what both Bez wants and Moreira isn’t set on wrapping up his career elsewhere. Edit: the rumors of Nancy being the front runner for the Lorient job muddy the waters a bit. Moreira played there for two years. And by far his greatest successes as a player have come under Nancy. It’s not a stretch to see Nancy trying to bring him back to his former job. If he wants to leave. Lots of ifs in that theory, but still.
There is video on The Crew tiktok of Moreira coming up into the stands to embrace Abou Ali after todays match. I seem to recall some trying to spin the narrative that there was locker room beef with Wessam and pretty sure this puts a pin in that. Nagbe and family were at the game with the kids all rocking Cabo Moreira jerseys. Great to see the team supporting their mate.
My guess would be they apply all the tiebreakers to rank the 1st place teams and then match up the #1 ranked group winner with the #8 ranked third place team, etc.
There are very few, very few countries that have all the infrastructure (stadiums, hotels, transportation) to single handedly host a 64 team WC. It would almost certainly call for multiple hosts (maybe on multiple continents) every WC unless and until they shrink the number down again.
I once heard that England is a (the only?) permanent "emergency backup" if something goes south in the last minute and the previously-assigned host has to step aside. Obviously they have the stadia ready to go with other suitable ones spread around the UK. I'm surprised they're the only one, but somewhere close to GMT would make sense from a time zone point of view. (OG soccer nerd and wacko Oliver Tse once said the reason why some of those big-name English teams play at 7:30am ET Saturday is because it's prime time in Asia, aka all that money.)
Those 5-letter possibilities are all evenly split out among the 12 groups. When the exact 8 3rd-place finishers are known, there will only be one possible permutation for where those 8 teams can go in the next round.
This World Cup is so much fun. What a joy to have the beautiful game at this level, with so many games, for 39 days.
I figured that much. But that doesn’t really answer the question. Is @ColumbusFTW right that they’re going to give the lowest 3rd place team the toughest opponent and go from there?
I think the other rule they're obviously factoring is to avoid immediate rematches. So if #8 wild card is from the same group as the top seed, they'd assign the #7 wild card and give the #8 wild card to the second-best group winner. That's what makes the most sense to me anyway. It theoretically gives some incentive to teams who are already through after two matches to still take the third group stage game seriously.
Fox likely making upwards of $250M on hydration break ads during World Cup The network will likely cover more than half of the $485 million it paid FIFA for World Cup rights from hydration breaks. https://awfulannouncing.com/fox/making-250m-hydration-break-ads-world-cup.html This is such low-hanging fruit for MLS with the new schedule. Sadly. There is likely to be a multi-year drop in revenues from shifting the business model partially from ticket sales to player sales. (If that model is even viable for MLS).