Talk of exploitation and corruption dominated the pre-World Cup discourse, and now gloom is hanging over the tournament, jodyrosen writes. “To put it politely, the Qatar World Cup is a moral debacle.”
and a hyena prowling the savanna for a midnight snack. Georgia’s national team has never qualified for a major national tournament, but its fortunes may shift in the Kvaratskhelia era.
Sheikh Mansour writes the checks, but the visionary behind Manchester City is its manager, Pep Guardiola, who has been at the forefront of a series of tactical and conceptual breakthroughs that have transformed soccer over the past decade and a half.
More often, though, the goals scored by cup-winning sides are prosaic. Many goals come from “dead ball” situations—set pieces like corner kicks and free kicks—rather than freewheeling open play. Knockout-round games are often decided by penalty shoot-outs. In general, hatch-battening works better than swashbuckling. When Spain took the title in 2010, it scored just eight goals total, triumphing in four straight knockout-round matches by scores of 1–0.
The more romantic scenarios involve neither usual suspects nor formidable dark horses but true moon shots: teams that, in this most off-kilter of World Cups, might just find a way—maybe, somehow—to launch themselves to the title. It’s pleasant to imagine that we could finally get an Asian champion, like Japan, or an African one, like Morocco.
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