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Journalism of Courage
The World Cup is nearly here. The schedule is complete. The leagues have stopped. The players have arrived. Yet, even as the teams know where they are meant to be and who they are meant to play, there are still plenty of questions about how things will unfold as soccer moves center stage over the month in Qatar. Here’s a primer.
The World Cup, a quadrennial tournament pitting the best national soccer teams against one another for the title of world champion, is the most important sports event in the world. (Discuss.)
This year’s host is Qatar, which in 2010 beat the United States and Japan to win the right to hold the tournament. Whether that was an honest competition remains in dispute.
That is unusual.
The World Cup has never been held on the Arabian Peninsula before, for good reason.
The tournament will open Sunday, when Qatar plays Ecuador. That counts as a slow day; over the two weeks that follow, four games will be played on most days. The tournament ends with the final on Dec. 18, when the winner gets a very heavy (and surprisingly small) gold trophy.
No. The World Cup usually takes place in July — or it did, until Qatar won the right to host it. Initially, Qatar said that it would go ahead and hold the tournament in its normal summer window, despite the fact that its temperatures can reach 120 degrees; it brushed aside any suggestion it could not do so with the help of cooling technology that did not, at the time, exist. In 2015, FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, eventually concluded that the summer temperatures might have unpleasant consequences for fans and players — sluggishness, heat stroke, death, etc. — and agreed to move the tournament to the relatively bearable months of November and December.
No. Temperatures in Qatar this time of year are generally in the 80s, and so not unlike those at a traditional World Cup. (Have you been to Manaus, Brazil, in July?) But organizers have tried to get around this unpleasant state of affairs by installing systems meant to cool the air in seven of Qatar’s eight outdoor stadiums to a manageable 68 degrees.
I’m still confused about the dates. Doesn’t this mess up the normal soccer calendar?
Oh, the leagues grumbled. A lot. But they lost.
The switch will disrupt not only league competitions globally but the lucrative Champions League, soccer’s richest club competition, and it has already led to earlier starts to seasons, compressed schedules and much hand-wringing. It also means that Fox Sports, which paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the broadcast rights in the United States, will have to wedge in a month of soccer games around another fall sport that tends to demand attention that time of year. Ever heard of the NFL?
It is true that Qatar is tiny; at 4,416 square miles, it is 0.12% of the size of the United States and by far the smallest nation ever to host the World Cup. All the games will take place in a tight circle of eight stadiums in and around the capital, Doha, making it the most compact World Cup in history.
Thirty-two. Qatar qualified automatically as the host, and after years of matches — including a few bonus months, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic — the other 31 teams earned the right to come and play. (That number will increase to 48 teams in 2026, at the next World Cup, which will be held across the considerably larger real estate of Mexico, Canada and the United States.)
The women have their own World Cup. The next one is in 2023 and will take place in Australia and New Zealand. They’ve already held the draw for that one.
I feel stupid saying “soccer” when most of the world calls it “football.”
It is an American burden, or an example of American exceptionalism, to call the sport by a different word than almost every other country in the English-speaking world. Americans have their own game of football, of course, but for the purposes of the World Cup, you are allowed to say “football” instead of “soccer.” What you should not do is tell other people what they can call it. That just makes you a jerk.
What about saying “nil” for “zero” and “pitch” for “field”?
Go for it. But if you’re an American, don’t be surprised if people start moving away from you in the bar.
The 32 teams are divided into eight groups of four, designated by the letters A-H. In the tournament-opening group stage, each team plays all the other teams in its group once. The top two finishers in each group advance to the round of 16. After that, the World Cup is a straight knockout tournament.
Three points are awarded for a win, one for a draw and none for a loss. That can lead to teams within the same group finishing with the same number of points.
If there is a tie within the group, you will be introduced to the glorious tiebreaking concept of goal difference. That’s the difference between the number of goals a team scores and the number it has allowed, so a blowout win (or defeat) can be great insurance or a crippling disaster. If points or goal difference doesn’t break a tie in a group, there are even more complications. Don’t worry about those for now.
The tournament will be broadcast on Fox and FS1 in English and on Telemundo in Spanish. You can livestream it on Peacock (in Spanish; the first 12 games are free) or on streaming services that carry Fox and FS1, such as SlingTV, Fubo and Vidgo. Or you can follow along on social media services such as Twitter, if they’re still in business in December.
Qatar is five hours ahead of London, eight hours ahead of New York and 11 hours ahead of Los Angeles. That’s the same time zone as Moscow. So, whatever strategy you used to wake up early (or stay up late) for the games when Russia hosted the World Cup in 2018 will most likely work this time, too. But it will mean predawn kickoffs on the East Coast of the United States for some games, and midafternoon starts for 10 p.m. games in Qatar.
And don’t worry about long pregame shows where you tune in at the announced game time and the studio crew talks for 25 minutes: At the World Cup, the games will kick off when FIFA’s schedule says they will kick off.
Brazil, France, England and Spain are the oddsmakers’ top choices, followed by Argentina, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. The usual suspects qualified so readily, in fact, that our soccer columnist, Rory Smith, wrote last November that “the likelihood is that the winner is already there.” Only eight countries have ever won the World Cup, after all, and seven are in the field again. (Sorry, Italy. See you next time. Maybe.)
No, Italy failed to qualify for the second consecutive cycle, even though the Italians are the reigning European champions after winning in 2021. Whoops.
That is sad.
Yes, it is.
Sweden, Nigeria, Chile and Colombia all failed to qualify. And Russia, which reached the quarterfinals as the host in 2018, was barred from all competitions by FIFA after it invaded Ukraine this year.
After the humiliation of failing to qualify for the 2018 tournament, the Americans are back with a new generation of players. They have been placed in Group B, an intriguing one with England, Iran and Wales. The United States will face Wales on Monday, England next Friday and Iran on Nov. 29.
Yes, in a dramatic upset in 1950 that is still being talked about. The two teams faced each other a second time in South Africa in 2010; that match ended in a draw thanks to a goalkeeping error that was either comical or devastating, depending on your rooting interests.
Once, in 1958.
They’re not going to win then, are they?
Probably not.
Qatar plays Ecuador in the opening game, the host’s first World Cup game, and a potential harbinger of its experience. The tournament’s second day features England vs. Iran and the United States vs. Wales, but that’s just an appetizer for the group’s headline game: U.S. vs. England on Black Friday. Lionel Messi and Argentina will play Mexico a day later, and the day after that (Nov. 27) features a heavyweight collision of Spain vs. Germany.
At each World Cup, one of the groups is informally designated the Group of Death, meaning that it has the strongest teams and thus they will theoretically be engaged in a kind of gladiatorial struggle. No consensus has emerged this time around. And anyway, no one dies in the end, so maybe we should stop using that term.
Yes and yes!
Who won’t be there?
Erling Haaland, for one. (Norway didn’t qualify.) Mohamed Salah. (Egypt lost to Senegal on penalty kicks for the second time in a month.) A host of players who have been injured. Oh, and thousands upon thousands of fans who were either priced out or turned off by Qatar’s human rights record and FIFA’s brazen play for as much money as it can squeeze out of them.
Fame, glory and the adoration of your country are one sort of reward. But there is also a huge pile of cash. This year, the winning team will take home $42 million, part of a $440 million prize pool. Although how much of that will actually go to the individual players is another story.
Written by Sarah Lyall and Andrew Das. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
