World Cup 2026: The First Big Shocks of the Tournament

I was going to continue with another post on the underlying stats by region for this World Cup, but events got out from under me a little on Sunday, when I tried to fill out my spreadsheet, and then things... started happening yesterday.

So I'm going to start with Germany's exit against Paraguay, which should feel seismic - or would if Germany hadn't done worse in the last two tournaments. The BBC and Guardian seem to have made a big deal of Germany losing on penalties for the first time, which admittedly is interesting, but I'm more intrigued by what's going on around the team and the football association back home, the DFB.

The sense I got as the tournament started was that no one expected much out of this team. The qualifiers were disjointed, with repeated changes in tactics and lineups leading to some bad performances. More to the point, as the Guardian's pre-tournament guide said, the team lacked the individual quality of previous Germany teams - there were no outstanding defenders or keepers as of old (pun kind of intended, more on this anon), no midfield playmaker, just a good attack... albeit one that isn't coming off a good season.

As for that keeper... a lot of ink has been spilled about Cristiano Ronaldo insisting on still being in the Portugal starting XI, but Manuel Neuer has also seemed to be past his sell-by date, if not quite as bad as CR7. One of the controversies before the World Cup started was that head coach Julian Nagelsmann had recalled Neuer, at the age of 40, over the more recently established Oliver Baumann. I subsequently learned that Baumann didn't have a good season either, but the fact remains that recalling Neuer has to have been disruptive for the rest of the team.

All this makes me think of is Raphael Honigstein's 2015 book, Das Reboot, which talked about how the DFB retooled its approach to academy training and recruitment to kick on from the doldrums of the 90s and win the 2014 World Cup. Unfortunately, whatever they did hasn't stuck, because Germany's performances in the World Cup have been dismal ever since, and in the European Championships they haven't been notably better, either - it boggles the mind that the work of several decades, in a rich country with a strong football culture, should fall apart so quickly. If I'm being brutally honest, that's the book I'd like to see - how Germany got from 2014 to now despite all its manifest advantages.

By comparison, the Netherlands losing on penalties to Morocco feels a lot less seismic. A friend relayed that the Athletic or some other outlet had tipped the Dutch to win, and I greeted this with skepticism: in the past you could never rule out the Germans, but you can always, always rule out the Dutch. More than that, apparently the Dutch are abysmal at penalties, so when last night's match ended 1-1 after 120 minutes, I knew what was coming.

Though I should toot my own horn a bit and point out that I had Morocco beating the Netherlands in my Bracketology on the Guardian website. Given how well Morocco did in 2022, and in this year's group stage, I figured they had a chance... more of one than Paraguay, but then, that's why they play the games.

Stat Block

Turning to the stats for a moment, the overall trend from the group stage has continued, with CONMEBOL teams earning 1.85 points per game at the top of the ranking, and Asian teams winning just 0.64 points per game at the bottom. UEFA remains in second place, with 1.72 after yesterday's matches, though if Western Europe were its own confederation, it would have 1.94.

Meanwhile, the Big 5 European teams present (England, France, Germany and Spain) have won 2.42 points per game. To put that in perspective, Arsenal won the Premier League in the season just gone with 2.23 points per game, and we have to go back to the 2021-22 season, when Manchester City won with 93 points, to get a higher points-per-game tally (2.45).

All this is to say, I still think the winner of the tournament will be a team that's won it before, which leaves England, France and Spain on the European side, and Argentina and Brazil on the South American side. Of the European teams, France looks the strongest, while Argentina looks stronger than Brazil to me - so my Bracketology selection has a repeat of the 2022 final in which Argentina beat France.

Though with Argentina facing tournament underdog darlings Cabo Verde on Friday, who knows what'll happen?

World Cup 2026: Western Europe Dominates the Stats

Now that all the teams have played once, it's time for a little stats roundup, Francis-style. Last time around, I built on an idea floated in Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, that showed that national teams from Western Europe dominated the Men's World Cup (I added that qualifier because I'm sure they do well in the Women's World Cup too, but I haven't crunched those numbers yet).

In short, Soccernomics noted that Western Europe was so strong that no Western European team lost against a team from the rest of the world (including Eastern Europe) in the 2006 World Cup. I then counted up the results from the subsequent tournaments (and from 2002, for completeness), and found that the signal is still there, if less pronounced. In short, teams from Western Europe won, on average, 66.7% of their matches against teams from the rest of the world, with draws counting as half a win (which follows Soccernomics' methodology).

2006 was the highest, with an 89.7% record against ROW (rest of world), or 2.59 points per game. 2002, held in South Korea and Japan, was the lowest with 59.1% against ROW and 1.64 points per game. 2022 was the next lowest, with 59.4% wins against ROW and 1.66 points per game.

So how does 2026 stack up so far, with each team having played once?

As of now, Western Europe's record against ROW is 79.2%, or 2.17 points per game, making it the second-highest average since 2006. Although there have been a couple of surprises, like Spain's draw with Cape Verde and the Netherlands' draw with Japan, no team from Western Europe has yet lost a match. This is likely to change as the tournament goes on, especially since Austria has yet to face Argentina and Scotland has yet to face Brazil - and based on Argentina's performance against Algeria the other night, we can expect them to encounter more Western European teams as the tournament goes on.

There are two other ways to slice this data. I decided to do a league-style table for each confederation participating in this tournament, which for once is all six, and this is how the points per match shake out:

1. UEFA: 1.69
2. CONMEBOL: 1.33
3. Asia: 1.22
4. CONCACAF: 1.17
5. Africa: 1.11
6. OFC: 1.00

UEFA's number includes four teams from Eastern Europe, but if you separate the two regions in UEFA, the picture is stark:

1. Western Europe: 2.17
2. Eastern Europe: 0.25

This mismatch is due to Czechia, Turkey and Croatia all losing their opening games, while Bosnia-Herzegovina drew against Canada, whereas no Western European team has lost a match yet.

The other way to look at this data is to split out the so-called EU5: England, France, Germany, Spain and, er, Italy, who aren't here. But even with just four teams in the tournament, the EU5's points-per-game record is even better:

1. EU5: 2.50

As Kuper and Szymanski argue in Soccernomics, Western Europe's chief advantage is in being at the center of the world's football networks. The world's best players and best coaches converge there, particularly in those nation's club tournaments, exchanging knowledge every time someone moves from one team or league to another. One example is Pep Guardiola, who's just left his position as Manchester City manager: he brought the style of football he learned at Barcelona first to Bayern Munich and then to City, and by the end of his tenure in England, pundits noted that even teams down in the lower divisions were setting up with goalkeepers controlling distribution from the back of the pitch.

The system is self-sustaining, because the most money and the most visibility is in Western Europe, and particularly the EU5 leagues. Unfortunately, it doesn't export well, because - apart from leagues that distort the economics, like MLS, the Saudi Pro-League and, previously, the Chinese league - the best paychecks are still in Western Europe.

That said, there are now more cases of players returning to South America after a stint in Europe, such as Neymar - though he doesn't feel as culturally omnipresent as he was in his time in Europe, when he'd cameo in movies like XXX: The Return of Xander Cage. Action-movie cameos aside, Neymar likely went home to Brazil to get game time in a different environment than Paris or Barcelona, and it's paid off in that he was selected for the national team this tournament.

Though it feels more important for the longer-term development of the game outside Europe that Brazil selected an Italian, Carlo Ancelotti, as its coach for the tournament. Ancelotti isn't necessarily a theoretician the way Guardiola or Austria's coach Ralf Rangnick are, but his decades of experience winning the Champions League should provide a different perspective in how to set up to win a tournament. The question will be how well Brazil does under him, and whether the experience he brings will take root longer term.

There's more to be said about coaches with European experience filtering out into the rest of the world, but Round 2 of the group stage, featuring Czechia vs South Africa, has just started, so I'll leave those thoughts for another post. But I'll be interested to see how these numbers, particularly Eastern Europe's, change over the next two rounds, and over the tournament as a whole.

World Cup 2026: Every Time I Think I'm Out

I may have talked about it on this blog, but my enthusiasm for this year's World Cup felt a shade more muted than it has in previous years. Some of it was the political backdrop, in which the tournament seems like it'll be used for propaganda purposes by the Trump administration; some of it was the corruption of FIFA; and some was the lack of cheap tickets, coupled with my reduced buying power and the lack of fun matches near me at Levi's Stadium. It also didn't help that Italy has once again failed to qualify.

I didn't think I'd skip it, God forbid, but I sort of figured I'd be a lot more relaxed about it than previous years: maybe I'd focus on the most important games, or the most intriguing. I'd be there for the final, for sure, but there might be some groups I'd completely forego in the interest of sanity and maintaining a reasonable schedule.

Fast forward to Sunday, June 14th, my fourth straight day of watching as many matches as possible. As I type this, I'm sitting in front of the TV and splitting my attention between this blog and Sweden v Tunisia. In case you don't understand what this says about my sickness, it's a match-up between possibly the most boring European team (other than Switzerland) and the most boring African team. 

Yesterday I had a game in the background or in the foreground from noon (when I was at a friend's house for a barbecue) until past 11pm, when the day's fourth game ended. My day today started, not with the gym as it normally does, but at the local German pub to watch Germany's 7-1 demolition of the unfortunate Curaçao. I had a dark moment this morning when I realized that there would be 3-4 matches every day until early July, which means I'm going to be in front of the TV for a giant amount of that time.

Goodbye, productivity. Hello, spreadsheets about Western Europe's record against the rest of the world at the World Cup (expect a full blog post on that topic at the end of the tournament). My podcast-listening will consist exclusively of World Cup daily rundowns for the foreseeable future... and I still haven't finished yesterday's episodes of Totally Football and Football Weekly.

Now, before you think I'm totally World Cup-addled, I should note that I missed two matches in their entirety today: Netherlands v Japan, which apparently was a cracker, and Côte d'Ivoire v Ecuador, which didn't promise to be a cracker. Though I should say, the only reason I didn't watch them is that I was spending time first with my stepdad and then with my writing group. Which is to say, if I have better things to do, preferably with other humans, I will do those things instead of parking myself in front of the TV.

But also, yeah, if I don't have plans, I'm totally gonna watch Uzbekistan v Colombia on Wednesday night... when else am I going to get to see how the tactical nous of Italy legend Fabio Cannavaro deals with the free-flowing football of James Rodriguez and Yerry Mina?

On a more serious note, this World Cup is just as absorbing a spectacle as it usually is. On the pitch, some of the matches have been as entertaining as you might hope, with the USA's game against Paraguay being a good example. And if Germany hammering Curaçao 7-1 felt a little cruel, that brief moment when the minnows had equalized against the four-time world champions was a validation of the promise of the World Cup: maybe not that any team can beat any other team, but that any team can spring a surprise.

Off the pitch, the US is quietly getting excited about the World Cup, with a bunch of promotions from the likes of DoorDash and McDonald's livening things up. There's a good number of soccer-related ads at half-time (and on Fox, during the hydration breaks that bisect each half), and while many feature David Beckham, a pretty good amount also feature USMNT star Christian Pulisic. And of course, social media is awash with stories of Europeans coming to the US and encountering the outsize plates of American casual dining restaurants, as well as the outsized capacity of Americans, at their best, to welcome strangers to their country. 

That last part is the most important. We're in a particularly ugly period in American politics, as evidenced by the fact that the US launched an unprovoked attack on Iran, another participant in this tournament, and has denied entry to several of the Iranian team's staff. There was widespread worry that the matches would form the opportunity for ICE to deport a bunch of people, and we've been treated to the unedifying spectacle for about 18 months of US officials saying that of course everyone is welcome to attend... as long as they go home immediately afterwards.

FIFA likes to trumpet how football unites the world, to the point that it's become a meaningless cliche. And I'm not naive enough to suggest that taking a German dude to eat brisket tacos will save NATO or bring about world peace. But given how negative a view the rest of the world has developed of us, it's good for Europeans to come here and see that individual people are still welcoming and up for a laugh, even in places that overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2024.

As I finish up this blog, another miracle has occurred, which is that Sweden has just spanked Tunisia 5-1. As noted, I have no horse in this race, but it's pleasing to see that a team I considered stodgy and unimaginative found it in themselves to break down a team that revels in negative football. This might be another outlier into which I shouldn't read too much significance, but coming on the heels of Germany 7-1 Curaçao and Netherlands 2-2 Japan, it's good to see free-scoring football, at least for the moment.

Every World Cup summer is a good one, and if the games are anything to go by, this year won't be an exception. The fact that the party is here on our doorstep and it's inviting in not just the world, but also the rest of America, hopefully will make it even better.