Final thoughts on the 2026 World Cup...

 

A game of two halves

Or rather, perhaps, a game of four 'quarters'... The insane Third-Place Play-Off game between England and France was divided rather neatly by the drinks breaks and the half-time interval into four mini-matches - which went mostly to England: 2-0, 2-0, 0-3, 2-1. And this after I'd said that these games were often lame and boring affairs, especially in recent years, and might not be very high-scoring! Oh well, it's not as though I were a lone freak in expressing such misgivings; that was a reasonable and pretty mainstream view. That crazy, crazy game produced more goals than the last three Third-Place Play-Offs combined!!! It was the highest-scoring Third-Place game ever; it was the highest-scoring game in the World Cup for 44 years; it was the 5th highest-scoring game in World Cup history, and arguably the highest-scoring one that was actually quite closely contested (the other big goal-tally games were nearly all pretty one-sided clobberings). And all of that came completely out of nowhere.

Now, to be fair to myself, I had also observed in my post here on Friday that there was a chance this game might prove to be a bit more competitive than most play-off matches of the recent past because both teams - or more particularly both coaches - had more than usual at stake this time. Both were looking to atone for spectacularly disappointing semi-final performances; and for both coaches it looked like it might be the last game in charge - for Deschamps because he had long planned to retire now, after an extraordinary 14 straight years in the job; and for Tuchel because he was fighting to save his job amid the fallout from his abysmal capitulation to Argentina. And so, yes, we had two pretty good attacking teams who were enjoying their football again, with all real pressure removed from their shoulders; two teams who were looking keen to show what they were really capable of after their damp-squib exits from the tournament proper.

Hugely entertaining as it was to watch, though, we can't really say that it was a great game of football. Partly because there were no real stakes in it, and it was played more like an exhibtion match; and also because both sides simply omitted to defend for long periods! Argentina's thrillingly narrow wins over Cabo Verde and Egypt, and Colombia's strangely exhilarating goalless draw against Portugal were the standout games of the tournament. This one, despite being a rollicking good time, just doesn't register in the same way, it doesn't really seem to count.

Has Tuchel saved his job???

I rather hope not. It may have done him a lot of good to have been able to end the tournament on such an unexpectedly positive note with this high-scoring win - to secure "3rd Place" for us for the first time in our history. But there were still a lot of worrying aspects about this match: we didn't show any control in the middle of the park, we were again often flakey at the back, we were completely bulldozed by a re-energized France for much of the second-half and nearly surrendered a 4-goal lead, before rallying again at the end - and once more relying on a solo goal from brilliant Bellingham to rescue the day for us. And the strongest performance of the game for us came from hattrick hero, Bukayo Saka - who, despite having supposedly had 'fitness issues' all tournament, here was able to play the full 90 minutes without any apparent problem at all; indeed, he hadn't shown any signs of discomfort, failing stamina, or shaky form in any of his one-half-only cameo appearances earlier in the tournament; and he insisted after this game that he'd been 'fine' all along. So, what the hell was going on there?? How can you possibly prefer Noni Madueke or Morgan Rogers to an even half-fit Saka,.... let alone a possibly fully-fit one???

So, although that last game was a nice performance and a fun time for all, it had no bearing on the assessment of our overall performance across this tournament - which was mostly at least a little disappointing, and in the semi-final just catastrophically self-harming. And it raised a number of other alarming questions about what's been going on in the camp with selections thus far.

I said last Friday that I thought Tuchel's tactical blunder in giving the game away to Argentina on Wednesday was so egregious that it must surely be unforgivable. And, for me, he made things even worse through his subsequent responses. He initially refused to acknowledge any possible error, insisting that he made the best decision he could in the circumstances. Then, a day or two later, he ramped up his self-defence by claiming that he hadn't told the team to drop into such a low-block, that they just naturally did it of their own accord. This seems obviously disingenuous, dishonest; they really had no other tactical option, after the personnel changes that Tuchel had made at the second drinks break. So, Tuchel was now not merely trying to wriggle out of taking the responsibility himself, but was trying to throw his players under the bus. Even if this really had been true - and I find it absolutely unbelievable - a manager should not do this. He should defend his players as far as possible in public, and take the bulk of the blame on his own shoulders - even if he doesn't feel he deserves it. And he made things even a little bit worse still by implying that it was a problem of the players' mentality, that they get too cautious and too fearful in defending a lead for their country; he even used the horribly tactless phrase that there seemed to be "a problem in the country's DNA." Again, not something an England manager should saying in the wake of such a painful - and avoidable - defeat.

And as I observed the other day, it wasn't just the overwhelmingly defensive substitutions, the stripping away of any possible easy out-ball or counter-attacking options, and the retreat into the very deep 5-4-1 block that were the problems; it was how rigid and how narrow that block was: we again and again left Messi completely unchallenged, allowed him to roam around the edge of our penalty area wherever he liked. In particular, he kept on executing a very obvious short-corner routine on the right to put him into a good position to float in outswinging crosses from just outside the corner of the box. It would have been very easy to stop this; you just have to send one player out to block the passing-lane between the corner-taker and his support player - this is usually automatic when you see that a short-corner is being planned. But we kept failing to do that; and that is where the goals ultimately came from. That is a straightforward problem to fix from the sidelines; but Tuchel apparently did nothing.

Tuchel's failure in that match was not a single error of judgement, but a whole string of them. I've seen a lot of folks online coming to his support and suggesting that you can't condemn a man for 'one bad game'. Well, I don't think you can forgive a national team coach one bad game when it's that bad; and especially not when it's in the semi-final of the World Cup. You don't get any 'free passes' in a game of that magnitude. But his subsequent statements to the press have solidified my opinion from one of viewing his sacking as a regrettable inevitability to seeing it now as a matter of urgent necessity. I felt that his pathetic dodging of responsibility and his inept remarks about the players' supposed psychological failings marked him out not just as a very flawed tactician, but as a liar, a coward, and a shitbag. I don't want a man like that in charge of our national team for one more week. I hope the FA will call him in for a review of his World Cup performance in the next few days - and ask him to resign, or else sack him.

The 'Golden Boot' - does anyone really care??

Remember back in 2018 when Harry Kane won the World Cup 'Golden Boot' award? He only notched a very modest 5 or 6 goals, nearly all of them in the group stage; and I think 2 of them were penalties, 2 were free headers when poor defences forgot to mark him at corners, and one was an inadvertent deflection - which probably should have been credited to the original shooter, Jesse Lingard. The 'best forward' in the competition had done basically bugger-all, and in fact had been so off-the-pace and anonymous in most of the knockout matches that there was a rising clamour in the British press to drop him. But that's the 'Golden Boot' for you; the primary goalscorer with a side that progresses a long way into the tournament is likely to win it, regardless of how well or badly they've played. And while it is a nice little trinket to add to the mantelpiece, I really don't think most players care about this sort of thing very much at all. Well, not once you've won one, anyway! One - however trivial it is at heart - might still be coveted as a career accolade for 'completeness' sake.

Kane was in the hunt for it again this year, but didn't mind sitting out the Third-Place Play-Off to give some of his squad-mates a chance. Bellingham was in the hunt for it, but didn't mind being used only as a late substitute. Mbappé was in the hunt for it... and apparently insisted on playing the whole game on Saturday - preventing Jean-Philippe Mateta from getting a World Cup start to his name. That looks like a case of 'The Ego Has Landed'..... There will always be a few players for whom these silly baubles exercise an irresistible fascination. And that might perhaps be becoming a more common attitude as the modern world becomes more and more focused on statistics and 'major career achievements' in assessing a player's 'greatness'.  [I was teasing one of the online Cristiano zealots the other day by mentioning that one of the 60 or 70 players I would personally rate more highly than Cristiano was England's Matt Le Tissier. He had absolutely zero ambition, was content just to play for the joy of the game, and chose to spend his whole career at the small-town club who'd given him his first chance; he turned down moves to big clubs, missed his chance to play for England, and never won shit - except the love and admiration of everyone who ever saw him play. 'Greatness' lies in what you can do on a football pitch, and how that makes the people who watch you feel; it is unquantifiable - its measure exists in the hearts of football lovers, not in dry tables of statistics of number of games played, goals-per-game scored, and major trophies won. Matt Le Tissier was one of the world's great players of the 1990s, but the record books barely noticed him.]

But for me - and for many players too, I know; and, I would hope, for most fans - this award should be an utter triviality, an irrelevance.

The other 'prizes'

The other gongs given out at the end of the tournament do seem to have a little bit more weight and purpose about them than the - largely random - who happened not to be outscored by anyone else this time? prize. Although I've always felt that clean sheets are a measure of overall team performance which often have fairly little to do with the quality of the goalkeeping; for me, a 'Golden Glove' award ought to be based on the number of saves - and perhaps only the number of 'big saves', or at least with a substantial weighting towards those saves that were particularly impressive technically and particularly important to a match outcome. Again, the best teams who dominte the possession stats and control games well, they may limit their opponent mostly to hopeful shots from distance, which the keeper can gather to his chest without raising a sweat: racking up a lot of 'saves' of this type should not qualify anyone for an award.

The 'Young Player of the Tournament' is usually the most interesting one - and often flags up a player who's going to become a major force in the game for the following decade. However, I feel the age cut-off is a bit niggardly: 21-and-a-half! I don't see the harm in adding another year or two to that. Basically, players only have a shot at winning it if... they break into their senior national team in their teens, and establish themselves as a regular starter within a year or two; if there's a World Cup scheduled in the narrow window - for most players, a lot less than 4 years - before they exceed the age eligibility threshold; and if their nation qualifies for that World Cup, and they are fit to participate in it. That's an awful lot of 'ifs'; so, it's no surprise that many great players were never in the running for this one. Raising the age threshold by just a year or two would make it much more accessible to more promising young players.

This year, Spain's outstanding 19-year-old defender Pau Cubarsi was a worthy and uncontroversial winner. Though it was a little bit of a pity that the field was thinner than expected: Jamal Musiala had a somewhat limited impact, and Germany unexpectedly crashed out of the tournament early; Johan Manzambi got injured and missed Switzerland's last couple of games; we didn't see much of Cubarsi's teammates Nico Williams, Pedri, or Gavi; and Lamine Yamal, while he played very well, wasn't able to convert his his terrifying wing-play into many concrete attacking contributions. In another year, any of them - or indeed, Mexico's impressive youngster Gilberto Mora (he's only 17, but will be a few months too old to be eligible for the award in 2030) - might have earned this award. But it's nice to see it going to a defender. (And it's nice to see it going to a player who'd unmistakeably earned it; the 2022 award to Enzo Fernandez was a bit of a headscratcher for many of us!)

There are some misgivings about how these awards are decided, though. The voting process is rather opaque; and the preliminary shortlisting by FIFA's 'Technical Study Group' even more so. There defiinitely seems to be a heavy bias towards players facing each other in the Final; and while there might be an argument that they must have made a major impact in the tournament if they've made it all the way to the last round, one suspects that it's more to do with the convenience of knowing that they're going to be on hand for the presentations after the game.

And this year's selection of Rodri was, I found, not merely surprising, but pretty damned baffling. Undoubtedly he was a very influential player in Spain's success. And he did grow into the tournament, improving gradually game by game until he was somewhere near his old self again in the last two or three games of the tournament. But still, I would say, not quite at his level of two or three years ago. And in the opening couple of games he was frankly poor; not just a bit below-par, poor - so poor that there was a strong case for dropping him in favour of Zubimendi. While I like to acknowledge the importance of defensive midfielders, I feel it's difficult to prioritize them in a tournament when there have been so many great performances from more attacking players. And it's even more difficult to see how it's earned by a player whose performances across the whole tournament have been, on average, not that great. I felt Manu Koné and Elliot Anderson were far more impressive in that role this time.

But, really, how could it not be Messi or Bellingham? They both scored a boatload of goals, and, even more strikingly, both demonstrated an unflinching determination to drag the fairly mediocre teams around them through a succession of difficult ties by sheer force of will. These were two of the best individual performances, the most impactful performances for their teams, that we have ever seen in a World Cup; and I would have been happy to see them share the award. I wonder if Jude missed out purely because England didn't reach the Final (and perhaps because of a perception that they weren't really that good, and hadn't deserved to get even as far as the semi-final)? And I suspect Messi may have suffered from a certain ennui towards him (he's been around forever, he's won absolutely everything already - why does he need another prize?), and from the rising unpopularity of his rather niggly and petty team, and from the mounting online backlash against the supposedly excessive amount of 'help' that they'd been getting from referees in the tournament. Many voters probably saw Rodri as a less contentious choice: nobody hates Spain, nobody hates Rodri! And maybe there was an element of sympathy in the selection too: aw, look, he's making a comeback after two years in the wilderness with all those injuries.  But, just on the football.... a weird choice!

The inevitable anti-climax

We should not have been surprised that the Final turned out to be so excruciatingly dull. They are rarely anything else. 1986 was good; 1998 and 2006 were quite good; all the others since 1970 have been frustrating anti-climaxes with far less action that we'd hoped for - and often none at all.  People got all excited about the 2022 Final because it finally kicked off near the end of regular time, and produced a thrilling period of extra-time and then a tense penalty shootout; but the first 80 minutes of it had been like watching paint dry. The Quarter-Final and Semi-Final rounds almost invariably produce the best and most entertaining games of any tournament.

This year's, though, suffered especially from the counterpoint with the most improbably thrilling Third-Place game the competition has ever seen the day before. And also.... yes, it was just particularly dull. I fretted before the game that Spain hadn't quite fully clicked (Yamal having to do too much, without Williams on the left to balance him; Oyarzabal struggling to find any consistency in front of goal; Rodri mostly being still quite a long way below his imperious best of a few years ago...), and were struggling to turn their domination of matches into goals. And so it turned out again. Although all of the stats suggested they should have won much more comfortably than they did (and I was gutted to see a couple of good goals get chalked off - probably 'correctly', but very, very harshly - which undid my 3-0 prediction!), things were getting a little bit nervy when they were taken into extra-time without having found any breakthrough. 

There was also a problem that Argentina were visibly knackered after a succession of such close and tense games in their path through the knockout rounds, and two gruelling periods of extra-time; their players started dropping out with injuries left and right, and nobody had very much running in them. They also probably showed Spain 'too much respect', sitting off them and trying to contain them, rather than seeking to create any attacking threat themselves; they just weren't able to get Messi on the ball very much in this one - again, much as I'd anticipated.

A sad irony - and the Argentina hate

Because Argentina's strength and stamina were so shot, and because they were being so comprehensively frozen out of the game on Sunday, they did resort to far more niggliness and, as the game went on, downright unpleasantness, than we'd seen from them in the tournament so far - belatedly deserving the previously rather unjustified or at least wildly exaggerated criticisms of their behaviour and their foul-count which have been endlessly echo-chambering online for the past month. And, alas, things really boiled over in some ugly scenes at the final whistle when a number of Argentina players got involved in an unseemly scuffle with some of the Spanish substitutes - throwing at least one of them to the ground, and seeming to throw some wild slaps or punches in their direction too. Some TV commentators reported at the time that Paredes - who seemed to be the ringleader in the fracas, and was lucky not to have been sent off during the match for multiple unfair challenges - appeared to have been shown a red card; though their basis for saying this was never explained, and it was not backed up by anything we saw in the TV pictures. A day later FIFA was saying that he hadn't been; but in clumsy language that made it a little unclear whether he had never been shown a card, or if he had been and they'd decided to surreptitiously rescind it. 

Paredes, and one or two of his teammates, deserve stiff sanctions for those unruly scenes; but now that the tournament is over, I doubt if anything will be done. I suspect that FIFA will think that their PR goals are better served by brushing the whole thing under the carpet and hoping people quickly forget about it than by prolonging the media spotlight on this incident - and on the various other dubious bits of tournament management FIFA might be reasonably criticised for - by holding a full investigation, and handing down penalties days or weeks after the event. I think that would be an incredibly dumb decision for them to take. But that's FIFA for you; they are not the conniving 'evil geniuses' the online conspiracy hordes try to make them out to be, they are just dumb, clumsy bastards who keep shooting themselves in the foot.

It is a pity that Argentina let themselves down so badly with their dullest and dirtiest game of the tournament - in what will surely be Messi's farewell to World Cup football. And it is an even greater pity that this escalating niggliness and thuggery was allowed to proliferate and get out of hand by the worst refereeing display we've seen in the whole tournament, from the Slovenian Slavko Vinčić. I really don't know how he was ever selected; with only a handful of Euros and World Cup games under his belt so far (about 50 Champions League games over the last several years, but the majority of them in the group stage), he just doesn't look to me as if he's sufficiently experienced to take on a game of this magnitude. I would say there have only been three or four previous games in the tournament where the refereeing was conspicuously poor - and none of them involved Argentina. 

The greatest pity of all is that Vinčić, with his inept performance here, letting so many fouls go unpunished that the match overheated and the Argentinians were completely out of control by the end of it, has belatedly given some genuine ammunition to the conspiracy nutjobs. Yes, in this game - in this one game - it did look like FIFA might be trying to tip the scales in Argentina's favour. But of course they weren't; it was just a referee being overwhelmed by the occasion and having a very, very bad day. Even the most 'biased' - the only 'biased' - referee we've had taking charge of an Argentina match in the tournament was completely unable to swing the match their way. And so all the conspiracy nutjobs have left now is to whinge endlessly about the injustice of Paredes not being sent off after the game had finished. - which might indeed be unjust, but clearly could not have affected the outcome of the game, and thus cannot fit within any conspiracy theory of how FIFA was supposedly trying to secure another win for Argentina.

And I've said this before, but I'll say it again: where is the motivation for any such shenanigans supposed to come from? Messi is a has-been: he effectively retired from proper competitive football when he joined America's MLS three years ago, and this was surely his swansong on the international stage. He has ZERO ongoing value to FIFA in boosting their global brand image and revenues. And Argentina have always been a deeply unpopular footballing nation with almost every country on the planet, so.... what possible advantage is there to FIFA in trying to promote a disliked team and an ageing star player who's about to retire?? Absolutely NONE; it's utter nonsense. 

My high school history teacher was fond of saying: "There are two main theories of the historical causation of major events: conspiracy and cock-up. 999 times out of every 1,000, it's the latter."  

Argentina might have caught a few more breaks from the refs than most other teams over the tournament; they certainly were cut a lot of slack by the hapless Mr Vinčić in the Final. But it's just an accumulation of minor errors working slightly in their favour, not a decisive factor in their success in this tournament - and certainly not part of an abstruse masterplan.

A Fantasy calamity

The polar extremes of the last two games constituting the World Cup Fantasy game's MatchDay 8, a humongous points bonanza in the often dull-as-ditchwater Third-Place game and a sterile goalless (at least, in regular time...) Final, meant that people who'd included plenty of French and English players in their teams prospered hugely. People who guessed correctly that Mbappé would force Didier Deschamps to let him play the full game did particularly well. Those who'd taken a punt on Saka finally being allowed to play a full game did even better... Those who bet once again on Jude Bellingham have never been disappointed in this tournament - even though he only got on for a short outing at the end.

Those who were able to hang fire on their MD8 selection until shortly before the Third-Place kick-off enjoyed a huge advantage in knowing for sure who was going to start in that game. (This is one of the reasons I don't like live in-game substitutions; it creates a massive disadvantage for people in unfavourable timezones, who may not be able to stay up half the night to swap things around immediately before or between games. People often lobby for Fantasy Premier League to introduce a similar facility; but I feel that would be unfair on the many people in East Asia and Oceania who like to play the game.)  And, as I observed in my post-Semi-Finals review, you probably couldn't afford to set up especially for the Third-Place game unless you had your Wildcard still available to use. (And if you did, as I did, that would cut you off from being able to use one of your other chips in MD8. The 'Maximum Captain' chip, in particular, could have been very valuable in this round, as it was so uncertain who would actually produce the weekend's big points.)

And so, really, for most people, the entire Fantasy competition was decided on the final weekend. If you'd backed the right players in the Third-Place Play-Off, you might have racked up a pretty huge total. If you'd backed the wrong players in that game and/or had concentrated largely or solely on players in the Final (because you didn't have a Wildcard left to make multiple changes), you were utterly screwed and might have ended up with just 30 or 40 points. (Yes, that's what happened to me: I crashed from being top in all my mini-leagues to bottom!!!)

It is a cruel and capricious game, indeed.

But now that it's over for another four years, I'm missing it already....

Thoughts on the World Cup Semi-Finals

A strange case of absence

I had - narrowly - fancied France to prevail over Spain in their semi-final on Tuesday. I had even thought that playing the big game on their National Day might give them a bit of an additional emotional lift. But, if anything, it seemed to have the opposite effect - leaving them strangely flat. It was actually one of the worst French performances in years. Now, Spain, of course, deserve a lot of credit for controlling the game so cleverly and knocking France out of their usual comfortable rhythm. But I can't help feeling that Didier Deschamps has stayed on far too long in his role, and that things have started to go stale under him. In fact, he's long been criticised for often excessively conservative tactics; and, given the extraordinarily talented group of players he's had at his disposal, the fact that they haven't won anything in the last 8 years should have been becoming a cause for concern. I get the sense sometimes that Deschamps might not be all that popular with his players, or at least that he doesn't handle the motivational side of his job particularly well; there doesn't seem to be that obvious warmth of rapport between him and his team that we've seen on so many of the benches in this World Cup.

And there have been some odd selection decisions from him all through this World Cup: playing Dembélé out wide on the right, rather than in the more central areas where he thrives for PSG (he has been largely ineffectual, only occasionally popping up for a goal when he's drifted inside into more familiar territory), while Olise has been taken in from that wing, where he's usually so dangerous for Bayern, and asked to act as a No. 10 (to be fair, he has shown a lot of promise in this role - but it's not one he's intimately familiar with, as yet); Bradley Barcola repeatedly being preferred for the start to Désiré Doué, although the latter has always looked far better when he as come on as a sub; only token minutes being given to Rayan Cherki; and Lucas Digne being suddenly preferred to the more established Theo Hernandez at left-back (again, Digne's a great player and had been doing a very good job so far - but he was taken apart by Yamal in this one). But the oddest call of all was dropping midfield linchpin Manu Koné, who has been outstanding all tournament, for the only-just-back-from-injury and still-not-100% Aurélien Tchouaméni in this game. Collectively, France just didn't show up for this one; every single player was strangely below-par; but the sudden disappearance of the one player who might have been able to go toe-to-toe with Rodri and give them a measure of control through the middle of the pitch was probably the most decisive factor in this lacklustre performance. I really think this might have gone down as one of The Greatest Foot-Shootings in World Cup History - if Thomas Tuchel had not so spectacularly gazumped that claim to notoriety barely 26 hours later.

The Comeback Kings and the Masters of Disaster

England produced their best performance of their tournament, matching Argentina's physicality and niggliness, refusing to be overawed by the aura of Lionel Messi, and indeed almost completely neutralising his threat in the first-half, mainly thanks to a tenacious man-marking display from the outstanding Elliot Anderson. And then we score a superb goal on the break 10 minutes into the second-half. And Argentina, for once, look like they have no response. We're in control of the game, and closing in on our first Final in 60 years. But at the mid-half drinks interval, Tuchel unfathomably decides to withdraw into siege mentality again, swapping attacking players for defenders, committing to a 5-4-1 low-block for the remaining half an hour - and leaving us no ready out-ball, no means of counter-attack, so that we will be relentlessly penned in, allowing our opponent almost 100% of possession for the remainder of the game. We had more excuse for that tactic against Mexico, since we had a bigger lead, and had been reduced to 10 men by the Quansah sending-off; but even there, we had to hang on by our fingernails and were extremely lucky to get away with it. Against a much better attacking side who've made a habit of late comebacks in the knockout rounds of this tournament, it was obvious suicide. Even worse than the ultra-defensive substitutions was the insane rigidity of the defensive structure we adopted: Tuchel was insisting that we kept our block so narrow and deep that Messi - who'd been well contained for almost the entire game - was now allowed to roam free around the edge of the area; again and again he was allowed to work short-corner routines, completely unopposed, which set him up to be able to chip in dangerous crosses from just outside the box, 15 or 20 yards from the byline. We were just allowing him as many chances as he wanted to set up possible scoring chances, and it was no surprise at all that two of them were ultimately successful. We might, in fact, have conceded 4 or 5 goals in that torrid closing phase of the game. The capitulation had been so thorough and so abject that not even the most patriotically biased of British pundits - and Alan Shearer is probably right at the top of that list - could dare to say that Argentina hadn't deserved the win.

Should Tuchel go??

After that horrendous meltdown for England in their closing 20 minutes or so against Argentina, there has been a fair old maelstrom of discontent erupting around poor Thomas Tuchel's head - calls for him to be sacked immediately, even before the Third Place Play-off game. I find that a bit of a tough call to make. We don't like to see managers canned over one bad result, especially after what was overall a 'good' tournament for us. And he was presumably brought in with a medium- to long-term plan to rebuild our squad for the post-Kane era. He is probably the most tactically astute coach we've had for a long while, he's got a record of winning big trophies, and I like a lot of what he's done; he certainly deserves a lot of credit for getting us this far with what was, ultimately, a fairly mediocre team. 

Unfortunately, I think the backlash from this last game will be so intense that his position will be untenable. We have the lead, we're 10 or 15 minutes away from our first Final in 60 years,.... and he completely throws it away with some daft tactical decisions that pretty much the entire planet can see are going to be suicidal. I'm afraid there is no coming back from that. 

And I fear he'd probably ramped up the pressure on himself too high already, making so many curious and often unpopular decisions before and during the tournament, yet always brashly insisting that he knew best how to get us to the Final. Other managers - like dear old Gareth - who hadn't made so many confrontational choices might perhaps have been able to get away with such a catastrophic disappointment at the penultimate hurdle; but not Tuchel. Leaving behind popular and dangerous players like Palmer, Gibbs-White, Wharton, Foden, Alexander-Arnold and Bowen; bringing in their stead rather questionable choices like Madueke, Gordon, and Spence (at least the latter two did eventually come good, and I could see the case for Madueke - although he ended up making a poor show in the tournament); bringing along so many injury-prone players like James, Stones, and Livramento, and players who were already struggling with injury like Saka and Rice; overplaying an obviously under-par Rice, but making little or no use of Saka, Mainoo, Watkins, Chalobah; while bringing along complete dead wood like Henderson, Toney, and Quansah; and constantly chopping and changing personnel, to no obvious advantage - trying out 5 different players in the wing positions, 5 more at right-back alone, and another 2 at left-back??? All of that had already run his credit very low - to the point where I think there's really no surviving him going, "You know what, let's NOT beat Argentina...."

How sharper than a serpent's tooth...

One of the things that has depressed me most about this tournament is the really insane level of hate that poor Lionel Messi and his Argentina team have engendered. As I mentioned in the last of these round reviews, there is now a prevalent 'conspiracy theory' that FIFA is coordinating a massive match-rigging campaign to ensure their success - an idea that completely defies practicality (how on earth do you 'rig' even one game of football, that has so many moving parts in it, literally hundreds upon hundreds of potentially decisive 'game actions', let alone an entire tournament??) and motivation (why on earth would they even want to? players like Yamal and Bellingham are the new faces of the game who will dominate the global narrative, and the global drive for increased sponsorship and TV rights deals - not has-been, about-to-retire Messi), and indeed even the obvious facts (none of the supposedly 'contentious' refereeing decisions in their favour have actually been wrong - and there isn't even much scope for sensible argument about any of that, they have been very clearly correct).

There might have been a little bit more of a case for such accusations last time in Qatar. There, FIFA really did seem to be exerting themselves to smooth Messi's path to a World Cup win through some unduly favourable refereeing - although even there, I would suspect that rather than wilful conspiracy, this was just an accidental artefact of referees' natural leniency towards the world's best player; the chief complaint was how Messi himself had become unduly card-proof, despite committing several potentially yellow-card-worthy fouls, including two in the same game at one point, which arguably deserved a sending-off. But most great players, and even many quite average players who have no reputation for excessive physicality, are cut a lot of slack over yellow cards. It got to a point where it was perhaps crossing a line of 'fairness' - but that needn't have been the result of any conscious policy. That still rankles with a lot of people, though; and they are convincing themselves that it's happening again, and even worse - when it just isn't.

A lot of this rancour no doubt comes from the fact that Argentina have rarely been a popular nation in world football: they've often suffered under a - not unfair - reputation for being arrogant, dirty, and inclined to cheat (a reputation which reached its nadir with Diego Maradona, who was somehow both the world's most skilled footballer and also its least likeable). But that doesn't seem an appropriate resentment to bear against them in this tournament: they've actually been playing well, and playing fairly, without excessive physicality or play-acting. 

Alas, a lot of it also comes from the insane rivalry between devotees of Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. The fact that Messi is still playing some of the best football of his career as he closes in on his 40th birthday next year has incensed the Cristiano idolaters, who were hoping they might see something of the same from their man. But no, Cristiano's game has always relied heavily on his exceptional pace, strength, and stamina; now that those have faded, he's become a passenger on the pitch, a player whose presence was visibly holding his team back in this tournament - really, something of a laughing-stock. While Messi actually seems to be thriving in his new style of play, where he just stands serenely still most of the time, and waits for space to evolve around him. His play may have been relatively unspectacular for the most part, but for people who truly appreciate the game it has been a thing of beauty to behold. I can imagine his performances in this World Cup being used in training videos for decades to come. Whereas,.... in the starkest possible contrast, Cristiano's World Cup was a complete non-event. And that has whipped up such a frenzy amongst his deranged cultist followers that... well, it is spilling ever outwards into parts of the Internet constituency that are usually more temperate and unbiased in their views.

And so.... it pains me to see so many people responding to this once-in-a-generation footballing treat with snide remarks about Messi being 'overrated', 'undeserving' of his success, and, most bizarrely of all, a 'cheat' (even if he were getting an undue amount of 'rub of the green' in the refereeing decisions, how would that be his fault??). It is worryingly delusional and absurdly ungrateful. We haven't seen performances this magical in a World Cup since Maradona in 1986, Cruyff in 1974, and Pelé in 1970. That means... most of these jackals deriding Messi's performances have never seen anything like it before in their lives. That doesn't excuse them. If they can't appreciate football, they shouldn't be watching it, let alone daring to comment on it.

We have been privileged to see football elevated to a new level - by a man who should be too old to play professionally any more. The only appropriate responses are awe, wonder, and profound gratitude. If I hear anyone calling him a 'cheat' in person, I am going to punch them.

Fantasy dilemmas for MatchDay 8?

The major curveball for the last MatchDay of the Fantasy World Cup competition is the unnecessary inclusion of the - otiose, risible - Third Place Play-off game on Saturday evening. Historically, this has tended to be quite a low-scoring game. There have been a few notable exceptions to this, but none of them that recently; if you exclude a couple of very high-scoring games in the 1980s, when the face-offs between France and Poland and France and Belgium were arguably better than the Finals, only 4 of the last 16 (14) games have produced more than 3 goals, and the median scoreline across those tournaments is actually slightly lower than that in the Finals. (A lot of people who don't understand statistics have just noted a high number of overall goals, and hence 'average goals', for this fixture and concluded that it is always a very high-scoring game; it is not.) Yet the game doesn't usually see many clean sheets either: only 3 in the last 12 ties - so, it's not a great prospect for points from keepers/defenders. Moreover, it's just incredibly hard to predict the outcome, since neither side tends to be very motivated for it, and coaches usually put out mostly their second-string players. 

You could in theory wait until the team sheets are published an hour or so before the kick-off (this tournament treats the kick-off of the first game in the MatchDay as the deadline for Fantasy selections, rather than having the 'early cut-off' of 90 minutes before first kick-off that we've grown used to in Fantasy Premier League), so that you know what the line-ups for the Third Place match are going to be. But that's not very practical for many of us (it's a 4am or 5am kick-off in East Asia!); and I am always wary of trying to make selections in the last hour before a deadline, because peaks in site traffic easily crash the game website or leave it glitchy and apt to 'unsave' changes you've tried to make.

Moreover, you know very little about many of these back-up players who might now suddenly be starting; you certainly don't have any idea of their form or confidence (because most of them have played only short minutes thus far, if any at all) or how well they're going to play together (because, really, they never have before!). And there are additional dangers, such as that the two previously unused goalkeepers might be rotated at half-time. Or that the coaches will eventually decide they'd rather not lose this game (Deschamps, because it will be his emotional farewell to the national team after an astonishing 14 years in post; Tuchel, because it might be his one chance of saving his job, after the disastrous defeat to Argentina) and sub off many of these second-string players for their more illustrious counterparts quite early in the second-half. So, even if you can hang on to find out who's going to be starting in this match, you have no idea if they're also going to be finishing it, or how well any of them are going to do. 

If you still have your Wildcard to play, you might consider taking a few players from the Third Place game (Doué, Cherki, and Mateta appeal to me; and maybe a keeper...?). But if you don't, you're far better off concentrating your scant allotment of 6 Free Transfers on optimising your squad for the Final. That will be a super-competitive game, and it might well go to extra-time; several of the top players in it might produce some worthwhile Fantasy points. I really wouldn't touch the Third Place game with a bargepole - unless you have the luxury of the Wildcard to allow you to make unlimited changes. [But, since the quarter-finals and semi-finals have gone much as anticipated this year, many managers probably do still have their Wildcards in hand. This year - something of a rarity - might see a fair amount of differentiation achieved in the final Fantasy round through making a few good picks from the Saturday game.] 

One further appeal of the Third Place game is that many of the players starting in it will be relatively less expensive, and might thus be useful 'budget enablers' to help you afford an extra premium player amongst your roster from the Final. But again, you're probably better off sticking with the 'budget enablers' you already have, even if they're not playing (it's quite a smart move to retain one or two of your cheapest players after they get eliminated in the quarter-finals, just to stretch your budget for the core of your squad a bit), than taking a punt on unknown quantities in a meaningless Third Place match; at least, if you only have your regular Free Transfers to work with.

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!!!

A little bit of Zen (103)

"Every ending marks a new beginning. All things pass away, but new things arise in their place. The world is constantly replenished."

GW

The 2026 World Cup is nearly done. Let us hope we have a magnificent Final on Sunday to cap what has been a magnificent tournament - probably the best ever in the competition's history. 

Messi is bowing out in style; perhaps Kane also (I doubt if he'll still be around in 2030). [Let us not dwell upon Cristiano - he should have retired from international football 4 or 5 years ago, to avoid tarnishing his legacy...]  But new stars are rising in their place; I look forward to seeing more from the likes of Ismael Saibari, Pau Cubarsi, Antonio Nusa, Johan Manzambi, Haissem Hassan, Gilberto Mora, and Nico Paz. There will be so many new wonders to enjoy at the next tournament. I can hardly wait...

The language we use

I came upon this interesting video essay a couple of days ago, from the recently founded (just coming up on 9 years old...) educational institution, the London Interdisciplinary School.

It makes some rather alarming observations on the way that stereotypical assessments of black football players tend to focus on physical attributes like pace, strength, stamina, and aggression, or so-called 'natural talent', while lighter-skinned counterparts are far more often characterised in terms of more intellectual attributes such as 'craft', 'guile', 'vision', 'imagination' and so on - and by 'hard work', and skills developed through repetition rather than being just a product of innate ability or instinct.

I'm sure I must have been guilty of this myself from time to time. I must try to be more watchful against it.

I think, for example, of Sadio Mané's wonderful career at Liverpool: how often did we hear him praised for his 'natural athleticism' and 'goalscoring instincts',... while so many of his contemporaries or successors - Lallana, Shaqiri, Szoboszlai, Wirtz, even the 'non-white' but much paler-skinned Salah and Firminho - were more likely to be singled out for qualities like 'inventiveness', 'subtlety', or 'game intelligence'. And yet Mané was just as great a player as any of them, with many of the exact same attributes - but you often wouldn't get that impression from the way that pundits discussed his game performances.

It seems that this vice of unconscious prejudice in the choice of descriptors does not only infect our commentators and journalists, but is disturbingly rife among scouts and youth coaches in the game - with potentially very harmful impacts on the development opportunities for young black players.

As the video warns at its conclusion: "The words we use to praise someone can also be the words that limit them."  Well worth 10 minutes of your time.

France's secret weapon

 

A classic piece of silliness from Noughties UK skit show Harry and Paul....

The national anthems are usually a bit of a chore to sit through at a big sporting event like this - often, I fear, even for citizens of their own country. And our own, the dirge-like 'God Save The King', is, I'm sorry to say, one of the worst. There's hardly an Englishman alive who wouldn't far rather have 'Land of Hope and Glory' or 'Rule, Britannia!' as our anthem - both, alas, tainted with the bombast of colonial ambition, but at least rather more rousing tunes. 

Being confined to a military band rendition is half the problem, I think. A small string section would add so much more emotional texture to the sound. Or, gosh, what about a bit of swoony saxophone or clarinet? Alas, no; we're always stuck with tinny brass and snare-drums. The mode of performance seems to have influenced the choice of songs as well, since we almost always seem to get pieces with the plodding tempo of a slow march. Some of the more exotic ones at least offer the diversion of eccentric structure, with something like a 'symphonic' form with distinct 'movements', wildly different in style and tempo, rather than just a metronomic verse-chorus repetition. I always thought the Italian one was rather fun, even though - or perhaps because - it sounds as though it was composed for the hurdy-gurdy; but of course we're not getting to hear that one this time.

The USA has a surprisingly potent one: a bit slow and po-faced, certainly, but undoubtedly very emotive.

But France wins hands-down. It is, I think, the only national anthem in the world that other countries like to listen to - and might even, occastionally, get tempted to sing along with.

It is because it's such a bloody good tune? Or.... is it all just down to Casablanca??

And France are getting to play their semi-final on their National Day. That's not nothing - it might give them just that little extra emotional lift (as if they needed it!!).

Adam Clery, my favourite of the Youtube tactical analysts, a couple of weeks ago identified another significant advantage the French team may be enjoying - something that has gone largely unnoticed by other pundits. Because Luis Enrique likes to rotate his big players at PSG to keep them fresh for the Champions League, and because a number of them have had spells out with injury this season, a lot of France's top creative talents have played less than 3,000 minutes over the past season, some not much more than 2,000 minutes. (Half of England's starting eleven have clocked well over 4,000 minutes. It's small wonder that Declan Rice looks so constantly knackered, after being asked to play almost every single minute of Arsenal's long and gruelling season.) France's key players still have relatively fresh legs - compared to just about all the other major European teams.

English bookies are apparently still pricing France at around 11/5. That might be partly because patriotic optimists are now backing England heavily. France really ought to be odds-on. Backing them at that price looks very much like free money to me!  [Once again, I find myself with cause to be relieved that my online betting account is inaccessible to me at the moment! France didn't get the expected additional lift from playing on their National Day; in fact, they produced one of their flattest performances in years. Spain certainly knocked them out of their usual comfortable rhythm. And Deschamp made some questionable selection decisions again. But really, France just didn't show up for this one; every single player had an off day...] 

A Happy 'Bastille Day' to any French readers who may happen past.... (Though I don't think it's commonly called that in your country, is it?)  And best of luck for tonight's game!!

Fantasy World Cup - how much of it is 'LUCK'?

 

Before this World Cup tournament, and this summer Fantasy game, got under way, someone asked on one of the Facebook Fantasy forums if people thought there would be more or less 'skill' involved in the World Cup Fantasy game than there is in our usual Fantasy Premier League. I was inclined to be optimistic that there might be just a little bit more scope for 'skill' in this. But I have come to think that that was foolish of me.

I had thought the large number of available players, and the relative lack of knowledge about them for most Fantasy managers, might offer some scope for rewarding those who took the trouble to do a bit more research to try to identify the most promising options among the ranks of smaller countries and lesser-known players. But....NO, the scoring has been utterly dominated by the handful of top players (Messi, Mbappé, Vini, Bellingham, Haaland, Dembélé, Kane...); being quick to identify the best 'unknowns' has really been of very little advantage.

I had thought that the extra points available as a 'Scouting Bonus' for low-owned players who produced a decent match contribution might also offer an opportunity for managers who were better informed about some of the less well-known teams to pick up a small earned advantage here or there. That worked quite well for me in last summer's Club World Cup; but there were fewer promising players to sift through in that (some teams were so weak that they could be completely discounted from consideration; and few teams were rotating much outside of a 'best eleven'...); also, it seemed to be much easier to find information on how they'd performed over the previous season; and that information was highly relevant, as they were there playing for their domestic clubs rather than their countries, and so could demonstrate established form over a long run of consecutive games - not a luxury we ever have with international teams. So,... NO, the ridiculous FIFA website UI made it virtually impossible to find out which players were even eligible on their ownership level; and just about none of the ones who were actually made enough of a contribution to earn the extra points - so, that was a complete bust as well.

I had thought that the large number of 'premium' players in the competition might put a lot of pressure on the budget, and require tougher, shrewder choices from us in filling out our squads. But in fact, since the budget cap in this game is fairly generous, and is increased for the knockout rounds, and since player prices remain fixed throughout, and no player is priced above 10 million pounds (dollars/euros? I suppose no actual denomination is ever specified...), it's actually not been very difficult at all to afford pretty much everyone we most covet. There might have been some difficult choices to make in attack, with Kane looking in good form in a tournament for once, and Havertz and Olarzabal both looking promising possibilities at the start of the competition. But with Messi being classified as a forward, and he, Mbappé, and Haaland all being in scintillating goalscoring form, it was soon evident that even Kane didn't quite make the cut, and that those three were the essential picks up-front for everyone.

The large number of 'booster' chips on offer in this game might also seem to have offered the possibility of some exercise of 'skill' in deciding how best to use them. But the 'Qualification Bonus' was essentially a money-for-nothing chip that almost anyone could get nearly maximum value from by playing it sensibly in the 'Round of 32'. The 'Wildcard' is simply to be held in reserve as a get-out-of-jail-free card to deal with a possible multiple-eliminations disaster, but might not be needed at all. And the 'Clean Sheet Bonus' - kept back as a 'surprise', and not even explained until the end of the group phase - turned out to be the most stupidly random chip imaginable: extra points for players who concede exactly 1 goal (which is simply impossible to anticipate: you play it whenever you haven't got a more pressing reason to use another chip, and you might make 20 points off it or - more likely - 0 points!!). The other two, more conventional bonus chips, 'Maximum Captain' and '12th Man' might provide some reward for shrewd deployment; but the actual return on them is highly variable - and, just as with the dratted 'Triple Captain' chip in FPL, there is a very strong chance of you making next-to-nothing from them. (In fact, the 'Maximum Captain' is highly likely to return you nothing in this tournament, since, if your highest returner turns out to be Mbappé or Messi, you would have had the armband on them anyway, and are getting no advantage from the chip at all.)

The ability to make full use of our bench via 'manual substitutions' during the course of the MatchDay should also represent some scope for the application of 'skill' - but, in practice, very little. The fairly elementary procedure of stacking all the players who play their games latest in the MatchDay on your bench, and then bringing them in to replace players who've already played and failed to return decent points - well, that's easily mastered by absolutely everyone, and provides no useful differentiation between the vast majority of participating managers.

Yes, there are more decisions to be made in a short period of time in this Fantasy game. But, in my more despairing moments, I am inclined to think that every decision you make is just a further chance for you to be unlucky. 

And there is less time - none at all, really!! - to recover from a bad round in this competition. A few terrible Gameweeks don't completely ruin your chances in a competition that stretches over 38 instalments. But in one that only has 8 rounds (and the last 2 of these barely count, since the last few games of a tournament tend to be quite low-scoring; and with so few options left in the available player pool, there's very little scope for differentiation in squads any more), one or two poor MatchDays can put you right out of contention for a high finish. (Just about all of the front-runners this year have been coasting along on the advantage they gained from extraordinarily lucky performances right at the start of the tournament, when they somehow managed to pull in 130, 140, 150 points from MD1 and/or MD2.)

It hasn't helped, either, that just about all the best players have been in such superb form that they have eclipsed the value that might have been offered by anyone else. This has been a rare case where there really is an unarguable 'template' for a large part of your team: it has been inescapable to have Mbappé, Messi, and Haaland, and Vini and Bellingham, and only when you get down into the middle part of the squad have you started encountering more challenging conundrums as to whether to go for Yamal or Olmo or Dembélé or Olise or Saibari or Manzambi or Macallister or Pulisic, etc.

The one small area where 'skill' might yet prove to have made a bit of a difference is in spreading risk to avoid massive damage from unexpected eliminations. Many managers seem to have been rashly loading up on 5 or 6 players from their favourite teams - which could have left them perhaps needing to spend a few 'hits' to restore a full-strength squad if that team were knocked out. But, as it happens, all four of the 'favourites' came through their quarter-finals OK, so probably almost no-one has been hit by this problem; and it really shouldn't be a concern in the semi-finals (as you don't need a bench for the Final, and can thus afford to lose up to 9 or 10 players).

I was observing to someone the other day that... people will always disagree on exactly how much 'skill' there is at play in our Fantasy Football games. To some people it might feel like a lot; but to others only a very little. But the unfortunate truth is that however much scope for the operation of 'skill' in the game there may be, it ultimately makes almost no difference. There is not much of a spread in skill-level across the reasonably competent and engaged Fantasy managers; the only thing that makes a difference in their outcomes is.... LUCK.

A few thoughts after the World Cup Quarter-Finals

Hey, Jude.... 

A slightly dull round...

After such a thrilling tournament, with so many 'surprises' in it, it does feel like something of an anti-climax to have a round where everything pans out pretty much exactly as expected. The only real exception was Belgium, who were much better than I'd expected, and managed to give Spain a little bit of a scare by scoring the first goal they have conceded in this tournament - but were eventually overpowered. And Switzerland gave Argentina a damn good fight, forcing them into extra-time. But the other two challengers, Morocco and Norway, both showed a disappointing lack of ambition, and produced their weakest performances of the competition. 

Prospects for the semi-finals

But these results have set up a fascinating pair of semi-final ties: the 'old enemies' of Argentina and England pitched against each for the fifth time in a World Cup, and the two favourites, France and Spain, facing off in a premature final. It's not often that we actually get the best four teams all advancing to the semis, but this year, somehow, it's happened. (Well, OK, I wouldn't necessarily rate England as the fourth best team in this tournament, even with Bellingham's supernatural contributions: I really think Morocco and Colombia and Norway have, mostly, looked much better, and arguably Cabo Verde too; and Mexico and the USA were much better in the group stage. However, these are the top four teams in the FIFA rankings, so the 'seeding' for the tournament has worked out perfectly.)

France will be facing a real challenge for the first time, as Spain probably won't allow them to have much of the ball. But Spain's finishing has often been quite poor so far, with Oyarzabal blowing somewhat hot-and-cold. And Yamal hasn't yet shown that kind of 'I don't care if the rest of my team isn't very good, I'm going to win this game on my own' mentality that we've seen from Messi and Bellingham (and Mbappé; although his motivation to produce at that level is less acute, since France are actually a really good side) - so, I'm expecting that France will win it, but perhaps only narrowly, and it might well go into extra-time.

I am similarly expecting Argentina to prevail, narrowly, over England. But that one will almost certainly depend on the pair of star players who have been carrying the two teams in this tournament. I think Argentina-without-Messi are better than England-without-Bellingham, but if those two are playing at the top of their game, the result will probably turn on which of them can produce the bigger performance on the night. It should be a great watch.

Bellingham v Messi

One of the things that is marking this out as probably the greatest tournament ever is the truly astonishing form that these two players have been showing. They've both regularly been achieving a god-level of performance, single-handedly dragging their fairly mediocre teams to the brink of the Final. It is all the more remarkable to be seeing this from Messi, who is well past his prime and really ought not to be capable of dominating a tournament like this any more. Whatever happens in these last few games, seeing two such phenomenal players achieving such heights at the same time has been a remarkable privilege - something all football fans should cherish forever.

Mind you - much as I strive not to succumb to foolish, painful optimism about England's prospects, I have always fancied that 2026 ought to be 'our year',.... if only because it fits so well with the scansion of the song: "Sixty years of hurt... never stopped me dreaming...." [I only just found out Ed Sheeran's done a new variation on the beloved classic for this tournament. Feels a little bit sacrilegious - the original Lightning Seeds anthem with Baddiel & Skinner is so iconic; although the update they did for '98 World Cup in France was arguably even better.]

More 'controversies'?

The online hordes on the Fantasy Football forums display two ridiculous vices: they only 'notice' decisions which go against the team they like, and these decisions are always deemed to be obviously 'wrong' and 'unjust' and even 'corrupt'. I often try to gently point out to them that something is not a 'controversy' simply because they disagree with it. But many of the mainstream media outlets add fuel to these fires with silly clickbaity headlines listing the supposed 'controversies' in the latest round of matches.

Norway appeared to have taken the lead again when Heggem lashed home a corner 10 minutes into the second-half; but Haaland had clearly shoved Anderson to the ground just before the corner came in, so it was quite rightly disallowed: no 'controversy' there. There was also a claim that goalkeeper Nyland's clearance had brushed one of the cables supporting the overhead 'spidercam' immediately before Bellingham equalised on the stroke of half-time. If such a contact did occur, it had no material effect on the flight of the ball - so, I don't feel it can really be considered any sort of injustice; the handful of Norwegian players who insisted they'd seen this contact were in a tiny minority in the stadium, and appeared to be just clutching at straws. None of the officials saw this, there were no still or video pictures clearly showing that it happened, and FIFA insist that the in-ball sensor did not register any such contact - so, in effect, it simply 'didn't happen' (even if it did; only a handful of people think they saw it, and there is no independent evidence to corroborate their appeal). Again, that's hardly a 'controversy'. Norway deserved to lose because they sat back and allowed England to have the ball for long periods; and they wasted the few chances that they did create.

Switzerland had lost momentum again, after the sustained period of pressure that got them back in the game, and were starting to look like they were just hanging on rather than actually going after the game to win it - before the Embolo sending-off. So, although an incident like that obviously had a negative impact for them, it's hard to argue that its effect on the game outcome was really decisive; Argentina were simply the better side. And it was an obviously correct decision: Embolo was guilty of a ridiculously exaggerated dive; and it was his second yellow-card offence, so he had to go. The only element of 'controversy' here concerns the manner in which the decision was reached. The referee had originally interpreted the incident as a foul by Paredes and given him a yellow card. VAR intervened, citing the 'Mistaken Identity' rule - but that is only supposed to cover cases where the referee erroneously shows a card to someone other than the player who committed the perceived foul, not to cases like this where the referee misinterpreted the foul. It's hard to complain about this too much (unless you're the Swiss coach!!) as justice was clearly done - but there does seem to be some doubt as to whether correct protocol was followed by the VAR team.

Of course, most of the world was rooting for these 'underdog' teams, so it rankles when they appear to have suffered some tough breaks. But Embolo clearly did deserve to be sent off; and it didn't really appear to affect the course of the game very much anyway. And the Norwegians really didn't have much of a leg to stand on with their two complaints about goals scored or not scored. So, 'controversies'?? Not really.

The fatuousness of the FIFA 'conspiracy theories'

We see this ridiculous bias in counting up grievances against the offiating - only decisions against the team I like are worth noticing and remembering, all such decisions are obviously and inevitably wrong - in the case of Argentina, who are now widely derided online as being at the centre of a comprehensive FIFA conspiracy to ensure that Messi wins the Cup for a second time. These dingbats now tally up the number of 'injustices' in Argentina's favour to include every penalty they've been awarded (all four of them pretty unarguably correct), the Messi foul on Algerian right-back Aissa Mandi in the opening game (he clumsily stepped on to the back of his calf, but with zero force, zero follow-through - it probably should have been a yellow card, but it was nowhere near a red card offence), and the two disputed goals in the Egypt game (similar, but conclusively different circumstances in the two incidents; again, tough though they were to accept for Egyptian and neutral fans, both decisions looked unarguably correct); all incidents where the detractors insist that the referees were wrong - with no foundation to their argument at all.

But of course, these loonies then take it a step further, and maintain that not only are all these unjustly favourable decisions racking up to Argentina's advantage, but that they are being orchestrated to this end - that FIFA is repeatedly seeking to 'rig' their matches. They omit to consider how many other factors are having a major impact in games - how do FIFA ensure that Messi is playing such god-like football, how do they ensure that Julian Alvarez can score one of the goals of the tournament to avoid having to face a penalty shootout with Switzerland? They can't, they aren't; Argentina are progressing on merit.

Probably some wrong decisions have been made in this World Cup, some perhaps in Argentina's games. But none of the headline 'controversial' decisions the conspiracy theorists cite appear to be anything other than straightforwardly correct. And when mistakes do happen, they are more likely the result of simple human frailty rather than conscious bias, or wilful corruption.

The one area where some kind of a case could be made for Argentina having received 'favourable treatment' is in the small number of yellow cards they have received - with Messi, in particular, appearing to be utterly card-proof (this was even more conspicuously the case in the last World Cup in Qatar, where he committed several clumsy challenges which could have been eligible for a yellow card - including two in the same game on one occasion - yet he wasn't shown even one in the whole tournament). But this is probably the result of a natural human sympathy rather than orchestrated match-fixing. It is entirely likely, unavoidable, that referees may tend to be a little more lenient to the best teams and the best players. Argentina - strangely - have not been a very physical or 'dirty' team in this tournament so far; they haven't needed to be, as they're tending to have the lion's share of possession most of the time, and so they're not having to go chasing after the ball very much - hence, an impressively low number of fouls and yellow cards. (They probably should have picked up one or two more cards than they have, but it's hardly a glaring bias in their favour.) And Messi, of course, is a notoriously mild-mannered and affable player, always well in control of his emotions; he can occasionally be a bit clumsy or over-eager in his challenges, but he's not a very physical player, and he almost never evinces any sign of aggression or petulance. So... he's not the kind of player referees are inclined to give cards to; if you have the reputation of being a bit of a 'hard man' or a thug, you're far more likely to receive a yellow card for a challenge that might be only borderline card-worthy; whereas, if you're a player like Messi, you're quite likely to be let off the occasional quite bad foul, because the referee appreciates that it was untypical, an unfortunate accident, not likely to be repeated. There's nothing very surprising or 'unfair' about that. And it's not as if Argentina and Messi are the only beneficiaries of this sort of leniency: Mbappé hasn't been booked either, and England have received remarkably few yellow cards in the tournament so far.

For me, however, the most ludicrous part of the prevalent 'conspiracy theory' is the total lack of motivation for it. Messi is 'yesterday's man' as far as FIFA are concerned. He'll almost certainly be retiring this week, from international football at least, if not from football altogether. (I'm sure he won't want to limp on into his forties and become a laughing-stock, as has unfortunately happened with Cristiano Ronaldo.)  He's been the leading draw in the game for the past decade-and-a-half, but the baton is being passed on now. FIFA does not have some weird sort of homo-erotic fetish for Messi; their interest is solely in consolidating their brand and maximising their revenues from sponsorships, ticket sales, TV rights, etc. They are interested in narratives that promote those ends. Messi has been their trump card for a long time now; but that stops with this tournament. They are surely now going to be far more interested in building up the 'legend' of Jude Bellingham or Kylian Mbappé; and if there were any 'match-fixing' going on at this stage, it would be more likely directed against Argentina than for them.

Fantasy dilemmas for the Semi-Final round

Since the 'favourites' all got safely through the quarter-finals, most of us are left in a not-too-bad condition with our squads ahead of the penultimate MatchDay. I only lost 4 players from mine (although I had taken the chance of leaving 3 blank spaces on my bench). This means that I can probably get by without using my Wildcard (if France and Spain had both been eliminated, I would have had to), and can keep it up my sleeve for the Final (although I probably won't need it there either, and it will have proved to be superfluous).

Fantasy points don't always correlate very well to actual individual and team performances, but... I think it is rather telling this year, powerful evidence that England are much the weakest of the four semi-finalists, that apart from Bellingham and Kane, none of their players has averaged above 4 points per game. Even though they've come through three knockout rounds and are on the brink of an historic appearance in the Final, it's really a bit of a struggle to think of any players apart from the 'big two' that you'd want in a Fantasy squad. Maybe Saka, if you could rely on him starting; maybe Rice, for the chance of an assist from a corner; maybe Anderson for 'tackles' points, or Pickford for saves....? But I'd only go for one of those options, not more... and only if I felt fairly confident that they would get past Argentina to play again in the Final - and I'm afraid I don't. But things aren't much better with Argentina: who do you want, apart from Messi? Maybe Emi Martinez or one of the defenders, maybe Julian Alvarez or Enzo Fernandez?? So, I'm looking at a 5-3-3-2 split across France, Spain, Argentina, and England - with a couple of non-playing 'enablers' still on my bench (Kobel and Dest!). And I'm going to risk my last booster chip, the 'Maximum Captain', in this round rather than the Final (only one opportunity to rotate the captaincy in this round, and a large number of potential contributors that you thus might miss out on).

It is a pity that France and Spain have to face-off in this penultimate round. I think they are clearly a class above either of the teams in the other semi-final, and whoever wins this tie should go on to lift the trophy relatively comfortably. So, I want to go in fairly heavily for their players, expecting that they'll do well for me in the Final too. (If I'd had another Free Transfer to spare, I would probably have gone for Unai Simon as a back-up keeper, in case France should be the ones to go out and I lose Mike Maignan.)  But you really don't want to go anywhere near the maximum quota of 6 players per country at this point; even going to 5 with France is a bit of a big risk. I could potentially lose 8 players, including my only keeper, if France and Argentina go out; so, I'd probably resort to my Wildcard then. But I'm hoping I might only lose 5 players, and be able to leave it unused. If I didn't have that Wildcard in hand, I probably would have left 1 or 2 more spaces on my bench, and settled for a 4-4-3-3 or a 4-4-2-2 distribution, so that the 6 Free Transfers for the final would have been enough to rebuild my starting lineup, whatever the semi-final results.

The imponderable wrinkle for the last phase of the tournament is that the Third Place Play-Off game is also part of MatchDay 8 alongside the Final. (A lot of Fantasy managers seem to be playing their 'Qualification Bonus' chip in this round, in the deluded belief that everyone is guaranteed to 'qualify' for another game - sorry, folks, it doesn't work like that: getting into the consolation game is not 'qualifying'!)  This should at least mean that you're not really 'losing' any players, regardless of the semi-final results. But in practice, of course, teams tend not to take the play-off game very seriously, and often field a second-string team; so, there's no way to know how competitive this game might be, what the most likely result is, or even who's going to start in it - so, for Fantasy purposes, it is best avoided; you really want a full squad (or at least a full starting eleven; you don't really need a bench for a single match) playing in the Final.

I rather fear that both games could largely turn out to be tactical stalemates - all teams being a bit over-cautious because of the magnitude of the occasion, and largely cancelling out each other's threat with an emphasis on ball retention and defending deep. It would be nice if we could see an early breakthrough goal in both games - that might force the opponent to open up more, and perhaps see the games develop into end-to-end ding-dongs. I'd like to hope that we might see a thrilling pair of 3-3s or 4-4s, but dour 1-1s seem much more likely. Either way, I fear both games might have to be decided by penalty shootouts - I really hope not, but that's what my gut is telling me at the moment. We shall see.

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!!!

A little bit of Zen (102)

"All that matters is today. Yesterday is merely information and tomorrow we think about when it arrives."

Jürgen Klopp

Fantasy World Cup: What are the Booster Chips worth?

 

I've said before that I think one of the main faults with FIFA's Fantasy World Cup game is that it has just too many chips - which it calls 'Boosters'. Subject to the same harsh limitation as in Fantasy Premier League that we can only use one of these at a time, it's really a bit of a struggle to get all 5 of them out of the way in a competition that only has 8 rounds (especially as you probably don't really want to be playing any of them in Round 1 or Round 3; and you may - like me - have occasionally found it impossible to play one when you wanted to because the game website mysteriously unsaved your selection of it!).

Sorry, I appreciate that this little note comes rather too late to be of any help to most people in planning how to use these chips - but perhaps it will still show up in search results in four or eight years' and be of some use in a future Fantasy World Cup game.

In planning how you might use these various chips, I think it's important to form a clear view of how they can be useful and how many points you can hope to make out of them.

Qualification Bonus - this is the most straightforward one: only available after the end of the group phase, it gives you 2 extra points for any points-scoring player in your final eleven who progresses to the next round of the competition. (However, for some bizarre reason, this is calculated as completely separate from all the regular points, and does not enjoy a doubling procedure for your nominated captain.)  Hence, the maximum you can make from this chip is 22 points, 2 points for every point-scoring member of your final eleven.

That actually makes it the most valuable of the chips, and the 'easiest' to realise full value from. However, in order to do this, you almost certainly have to play it in the 'Round of 32'. Thereafter, there are few if any badly mismatched ties, and it becomes harder and harder to correctly anticipate the outcome of all the fixtures in the Round. Correctly identifiying 11 (or 15!) players who will all qualify for the next round is relatively straightforward in the 'Round of 32', but increasingly less so thereafter.

Clean Sheet Shield  -  originally announced only as an additional 'Mystery Booster', we weren't even told what this chip was going to be until during MatchDay 3 (although there had been some accurate leaks online); and, like the Qualification Bonus above, it was only available for use in the knockout stage. This extends your chance to earn clean sheet points by treating a clean sheet as 'conceding no more than 1 goal' rather than 'conceding NO goals'. (It is very difficult to find a description of exactly how this is meant to work, since a description is still omitted from the official 'rules page'! I was pretty sure that the original description I'd seen had suggested that clean sheet protection was being extended to 'conceding no more than 2 goals'; but even if that is what they originally said or implied, that's not actually what's happening.)

Now, in theory this could earn you 5 extra points for a goalkeeper and up to 5 defenders, and 1 extra point for up to 4 midfielders (or 5, if you only field 4 defenders): so, the absolute maximum return is 34 points - very handy. But in practice of course, you're almost certainly going to want to play 2 or 3 forwards (in the 2026 iteration, anyway, it has been absolutely essential to play Messi, Mbappé, and Haaland or Kane in every MatchDay), so that will reduce the number of players who can benefit from the chip; quite probably, you'll only have 3/4 defenders and 3/4 midfielders who are eligible, reducing the reasonable maximum expectation to 24-28 points. (I think, as with the 'Qualification Bonus' above, they do not double this bonus for your captain selection - mean!). 

That's apparently slightly better than the 'Qualification Bonus', but.... you're choosing players, especially your keeper and defenders, because of the likelihood that they will win games comfortably and keep clean sheets; so, most of the time, most of your keeper/defender picks are keeping clean sheets anyway, and you're not getting any benefit from this chip - it's just a kind of 'insurance policy', in case one of your star defensive players unexpectedly concedes a solitary goal. You're only getting extra points for defensive players who concede 1 goal (rather than 0 goals or 2-or-more goals).

In practice, then, you'd be very lucky to make even 15-20 points off this chip. And it carries a very high chance of returning little or nothing (if all of your defensive players either keep a proper clean sheet or concede 2 or more goals...). [I played it in the 'Round of 16' this year and made a lousy 1 point off it - and that only because Bruno Guimaraes was subbed off shortly before Haaland scored his second goal against Brazil!!]

It would have been kinder to offer a bonus chip like this in the group stage, when clean sheets or low goals-against likelihoods are more predictable. Once we get into the knockout rounds, with higher stakes, more closely matched teams, and the possibility of extra time, it becomes more and more possible that matches will become high-scoring, with both sides conceding more than once. In 2026, there was only 1 goalless draw and 3 other clean sheets in the 'Round of 16', with only 4 of the 16 teams conceding only 1 goal (making their players eligible for the benefit of this chip); in the 'Round of 32', there were no goalless draws but 7 real clean sheets, while 12 teams conceded only 1 goal. 

This would suggest that the 'Round of 32' is probably the best round to play this chip in also, but.... it's really a bit of a lottery, just about impossible to predict which teams will concede 1 goal rather than zero.... and you might not want players from those teams (you have to think primarily about factors like how likely they are to score other points for you, and how far into the competition they are likely to progress; you can't just be including players because their fixtures look potentially favourable for this bonus!).

You should have more chance of picking up at least 1 or 2 players who concede only a single goal if you play this chip in a round where you have as many teams as possible represented in your Fantasy side. However, this is a truly random chip, not one you can really plan for; and it probably won't make a lot of difference when you play it. You could even leave it until the Final, when it would be an all-or-nothing play: there is a high chance that neither of the two Finalists will concede only a single goal in the game, but if either of them does, you might have multiple players picking up the useful extra points.

[Both the Qualification Bonus and the Clean Sheet Shield are treated as separate from a player's regular points: they are not doubled for your captain, and they do not count towards the 4-point threshold that a low-owned player needs to reach in order to earn his 'scouting bonus' points. This, to me, seems over-complicated, daft, and petty. And I do not recall seeing it explained anywhere in the rules; I just had to work it out for myself from bitter experience!]

12th Man - this bonus chip allows you to recruit an additional player for one MatchDay only: a 16th squad member who automatically counts as an extra member of your starting team (you can't choose to swap them out for one of your subs if they bomb!). The nice thing about this one is that it is free of any of the usual restrictions on country quotas or budget cap, so if there's a star player you can't quite afford, or an additional member of a top team like France that you covet because they're playing a very weak team and might be fancied to score a lot of goals - this is your opportunity. 

A top MatchDay return from a leading player has typically been in the range of 15-18 points in this tournament, so that's what you can hope to earn from this chip. But of course, even your Mbappés and your Haalands can have a blank here and there, so it might very easily give you little or nothing.

This is a very flexible chip that could be used on any MatchDay when the fixtures seem favourable. But there are two problems with that: i)  most of the other booster chips strongly favour use on a narrower range of MatchDays, so in fact with this one you're limited to the few MatchDays that might be 'left over', unclaimed by higher priority chips; ii)  you're more likely to want to use it while all of the starriest players are still in the tournament, which will bias you towards using it in the group stage or one of the early knockout rounds. I think MD2 in the group stage would probably have been the ideal time to use it this year.

Maximum Captain - this chip simply gives you the double-points score for the captain's armband on whichever of your players actually gives you the biggest return of the MatchDay, without you having to designate him in advance. As just mentioned above, the top scoring player in the MatchDay is typically returning about 15-18 points, so this chip might appear to be worth this much as a maximum. But if you weren't playing the chip, you'd get captaincy double-points from someone; and most of the time, you're picking someone that does actually give you a pretty good return - so the additional lift you could get out of this chip is usually only going to be a few points. At least, that's the case in Rounds 1-6 or 7, because the in-game 'manual changes' facility allows you to change captain between each match, and so you can, if you like, rotate the captaincy through a succession of your strongest players until one of them returns a good haul; especially in the earlier rounds when there are a lot of games, this usually means that you end up with a good score from your captain - possibly your maximum possible, and rarely more than 2-3 points lower.; so, that is the likely true value of this chip. 

However, in the semis you only get to try out two captains, and in the Final, you can't switch your captain at all, you're stuck with your original choice. So, I think this chip potentially has the highest value in the final round, or the penultimate round: you might of course correctly guess who your highest-scoring player in the Semi-Finals or Final is going to be; but there's quite a strong chance you'll pick someone who gives a fairly disappointing return, and in that case, the 'Maximum Captain' chip might have given you an 8 or 10-point, maybe even a 15-point lift.

Wildcard - unlike the other chips, this doesn't directly provide a positive points advantage; it's more of a rebuild chip, allowing you unlimited changes to completely refashion your squad. 

Some are tempted to use it to chase a points advantage early in the competition. Big points in the group stage are usually to be found from the most mismatched fixtures, very strong teams playing the weakest teams; but the teams with the most favourable fixtures might change dramatically between MD1 and MD2, and so you might want to make a lot of changes for MD2. Some are even tempted to use the chip ahead of MD3, because a lot of star players are often rested in the third game, if their teams have already secured first-place qualification in their groups.

However, I generally counsel that it is better to plan your initial squad to try spread optimisation of fixtures across MD1 and MD2, and to accept that MD3 is almost always very low-scoring in Fantasy, and isn't worth expending much effort on (take a few cheap hits if you need to in order to muster an eleven, but don't be wasting the valuable Wildcard on fixing your squad for a MatchDay that rarely produces many points anyway).

The Wildcard is best saved for possible 'emergencies'. As a tournament like this progresses, more and more players pick up injuries, or fall out with the team manager, or get suspended; and then, of course, in each round, half of the players and teams are eliminated - often quite unexpectedly in 'upset' results! This hazard is proving to be particularly extreme in the 2026 tournament because the game's designers have been very nigarrdly in the number of Free Transfers allocated for each round, and also because it's been an unusually competitive tournament, with almost every team playing near the best of their ability, and even some of the lesser teams proving to be quite a handful. After the 'Round of 32', almost none of the ties have been at all easy to predict the outcomes of. 

So, there is a very high chance that in the Quarter-Finals or the Semi-Finals, you may find yourself missing half or more of your squad - and that is when you need to use your Wildcard. (This shouldn't be an issue in the Final because you don't need a bench for that, and you are given 6 Free Transfers after the semi-finals. You should be able to distribute your semi-final picks so that, whatever the match outcomes, you don't lose more than 9 or 10 players - 6 free replacements plus an empty bench!)

IN SUMMARY:

Qualification Bonus:  Near-essential to use it in the 'Round of 32'. Expected yield: 14-22 points. (Maximum yield quite easily attainable!).

Clean Sheet Shield:  An utterly random and unpredictable chip, and largely worthless: only available in the knockout rounds - use it whenever it isn't getting in the way of a more important chip.  Expected yield: 0-12 points. (Maximum yield could theoretically be 24-34 points, but it's very, very unlikely anyone would ever get anywhere near that - and it would be a massive fluke if you did!)

12th Man:  Probably best used in the group stage, especially MatchDay2 - when you've had some indications of form in the first batch of games, and the stakes are still high for everyone (by MD3, a lot of teams have nothing left to play for, and there may be a lot of rotations). But this is a flexible chip that can still bring an advantage in the knockout phase; although you probably want to use it in the earlier rounds of that, when there are more top players to choose from, and you might not be able to afford all of them in your regular squad.  Expected yield: 10-15 points. (The maximum could be even higher, if you're lucky; but of course there is a non-zero chance that it could return you little or nothing!)

Maximum Captain:  Probably best saved for the Semi-Finals or Final, when you have a chance to gain a bigger 'differential' points lift from it, as you no longer have the opportunity to 'maximise' your captaincy return by rotating through multiple selections.  Expected yield: In earlier rounds, probably only 0-5 points (because your regular captain picks would usually do very nearly as well); but in Rounds 7 and 8, perhaps as much as 8-15 points. (Then again, it might easily be worth nothing - because your 'Maximum Captain' turns out to be the player you would have given the armband to anyway!!)

Wildcard: This might be of use sometimes in MatchDay 2, if a lot of your initial picks are in surprisingly bad form, and/or the most promising fixtures in the second batch of games are for very different teams than they were in the tournament openers. However, it is usually far better to save the Wildcard for possible emergency use (even if ultimately not needed, left unused!), to rebuild a squad after suffering heavily from unexpected eliminations going into the Quarter-Final and Semi-Final rounds.  

Expected yield: Impossible to quantify, since it's usually saving you from spending points on 'hits' (additional transfers above your 'free transfer' quota) and giving you additional points from better performances (or at least starters rather than non-starters!) from the players you bring in and, hopefully, giving you additional benefits from those new players through the subsequent rounds also; but conservatively.... 15-20 points!!

BEST OF LUCK!