England Forum - FIFA World Cup 2026: Other Teams Thread

I read that they ran out after 15 minutes.

 

Wonder who will get sent off for them in 2046.

 

I know the refs have to speak a certain level of English, but asking them to make announcements in a second or third language in a stadium of 80k is something else.
Have an announcer who the ref relays the decision to - the match is already delayed so another few seconds isn't going to make any differences.

 

Given how popular football is in South Africa, how relatively strong the domestic league is, there population and relative wealth, they are absolutely bang average!

 

The Azteca is some Stadium.

 

Korea off to a good start

 

South Korea v Czechia has been dreadful

 

?? Far better game than that dross of an opener.

 

But yeah both those teams are better than Mexico.

Can see South Korea winning that group now, with Mexico and Czechs fighting for second.

 

Looked a better game than the first one. Korea are regulars and Czech Republic are sometimes there so it doesn’t really give us a good idea of the quality going forward.

 

The weakness of the South African football team is curious. 66m population and the richest nation in Africa by GDP (7th by GDP per capita). You'd expect it to be a lot more competitive than it is.

 

Aren’t they more of a Rugby nation and Cricket to a lesser extent? Their Rugby team is the best in the world and they’ve been historically great at cricket and are still a decent side.

 

The England of Africa

 

I think there's still a legacy from the apartheid era where rugby and cricket were seen largely as sports for whites, and football for blacks - https://businesstech.co.za/news/lifestyle/103113/blacks-like-soccer-whites-like-rugby-in-sa/

 

This is quite true. And Football has always been the black sport, with Cricket (and to a lesser extent Rugby), the white sport. And also alot of white South Africans are big followers of football esp the Premier League. Also Anglos tend to play more Cricket and Dutch/Afrikaaners prefer Rugby.

Therefore Football is the dominant sport in the country and always has been, in spite of the over-achievement of the Springboks.

 

Yes. What they suffer from, however, is that the infrastructure for years was geared towards the "white" sports, so it's always been there for rugby and, to a lesser amount, cricket. With that structure in place, it was always going to be easy to integrate the black players into the sports that are better supported.
It is, however, difficult to generate new interest and investment in one sport when the country is performing much better in two others.

 

I guess that the lack of a significant black South African diaspora in European countries plays a part too. If Nigeria didn't have a diaspora in England or anywhere else in Europe they'd be a lot weaker.

 

First World Cup match day for the USA could’ve been spicier.

The last time the USMNT met Paraguay this happened 🍿 pic.twitter.com/8OyQNkl5ma

— B/R Football (@brfootball) June 11, 2026

 

In South Africa, because these things are more race and class ridden, it makes it difficult to generate big changes from investment alone. Football is the sport for black kids from broader society and will unlikely ever change. Rugby is the sport for white Afrikaaners and (interestingly) the increase in black south africans playing rugby have nearly all come from niche, black middle class families (post apartheid). Cricket is overwhelmingly played by Brits or Indians.

In England/Scotland (for example), we never had anything even remotely like apartheid. But even here, we see a similar pattern to South Africa where sports are played among class and ethno-linguistic lines. Rugby union will always be a middle class sport here and working class (both white and black) kids will always prefer Football over Rugby. If the government started investing in building more rugby pitches in our inner cities, I wouldn't be convinced that it would transform things like some would expect it to.