World Cup 2026 finally finds its secret sauce as peril and jeopardy at last enter the chat | OneFootball

We’re not quite at the stage of being ready to change our mind about this World Cup format in its entirety.

The group stage was no better than okay. The marvellous efforts of Cape Verde and the pitiful efforts of Uruguay were and are doing a lot of heavy lifting in attempts to portray the group stage as containing notable drama.

The overall quality of the football was, for sure, better than we feared and somewhere close to as good as could reasonably be expected. But our expectations were low.

There were a needless number of significant outcomes settled avoidably early due to the dunderheaded decision to use head-to-head as first tiebreaker despite the obvious deadening consequences of that for the final matchday permutations.

Ultimately, though, for all its enjoyable and memorable moments, the group stage suffered from what we all expected it to suffer from. A near total lack of jeopardy. Uruguay were the only truly surprising departure from a whistlestop tour through 72 games – more than any other entire World Cup – that eliminated only one third of the teams in the competition. Almost every major team was either definitely or all-but through after two games.

Six of those eliminated teams didn’t manage a single point, while Turkey only did so after they’d already been eliminated.

In all the groups featuring three genuinely good teams, all three of those teams went through. Portugal and Canada were the only seeds not to win their groups, and Canada finishing second behind Switzerland is nobody’s idea of a bracket-disrupting shocker.

It was a lot of time and effort to create an almost entirely predictable outcome, is the point. But the prize is already big. The reward for us all already huge.

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Important here to pause and reiterate that FIFA get no credit for any of this. It’s an entirely accidental byproduct of a decision based solely on the dollar signs spinning round Gianni Infantino’s empty head, but the addition of a last-32 round and thus doubling the number of lovely knockout ties in the tournament is already just looking like a massive win for absolutely everybody. Apart from, at this stage, Germany and Netherlands.

From almost no jeopardy we’ve jumped straight to extreme peril, and we love that for the World Cup. The whole thing is still too big and the third-place safety-net too large and the resulting lopsided uneven knockout bracket undeniably less satisfying than the neatness of group winners playing group runners-up.

But you do get more knockout bang for your buck in this format and it’s already generating plenty of bang. Under the 32-team tournament we knew and loved for seven World Cups between 1998 and 2022, a quarter of the total matches were knockout games. Here it’s almost a third. That’s a win.

While group-stage football is necessary in any major summer tournament, knockout football is just more brutal and thus more terrifying and thus more fun. It’s an obvious point but one that almost all sports forget or deliberately ignore at some point because there’s money to be made, but jeopardy is what makes sport great. Consequences for your actions.

And now we’ve got so much more high-consequence action than before. It really might be worth the payoff of having so much low-consequence treacle to wade through first.

Even the gentlest of starts for the knockout stage featuring Canada against South Africa in a game that, with the best will in the world, has no real bearing on the business end of proceedings, produced an injury-time winner. And the tone has been set for the drama right there.

That has become the baseline for the kind of outcome that will either break your heart or make it soar. Brazil edged out Japan with another injury-time winner, before not one but two penalty shoot-outs. Brilliantly stupid penalty shoot-outs too, which are the best kind.

The second of them here even saw Morocco prevail having performed more injury-time heroics just to take their game against Netherlands to extra-time.

We’re not kidding ourselves that all these extra knockout games are going to be this dramatic or this brutal or this tense and close. There are going to be blowouts, and you can all point to the likely locations of such affairs. But it’s a heck of a start to the round of 32’s World Cup existence.

Whoever lost this one was going to have pretty reasonable cause to gripe at the misfortune of their path. Netherlands won a really difficult group; Morocco were the only team to take seven points without winning their group.

Both were punished heavily with a clash against the other. Both could have won the game in regulation, and whoever won here was always going to feel closer to the quarter-final than any other winner in this new and exciting big first knockout round, given Canada await in the last 16.

There’s no avoiding a sense of a shifting in the World Cup sands here, either. It’s still very early days for this big beautiful bastard of a knockout round, but that’s now two of Europe’s traditional powerhouses unseated.

It doesn’t take much to figure that a World Cup in North America might suit teams from across the Americas and Africa given the conditions, but Europe having no team yet through to the last 16 is still an eye-catching early feature of the last 32.

It will change, of course – at the very least because there are three all-UEFA games coming up. But all that we’ve seen so far can only offer encouragement for your Senegals, your DR Congos, your Ivory Coasts and the Algerias of this world that the last-32 is a strange and rather wonderful place where all things already feel possible.