Football Finds A Way as World Cup 2026 succeeds despite itself and clownish organisers | OneFootball

If we were to sum up this World Cup in four words it would be this: Football Finds A Way.

Very much like Qatar 2022, it’s almost impossible to avoid being drawn in by the quality and the excitement and the fun of the actual football itself, all of which have been far higher than anyone dared hope or reasonably expect.

And all of which really serves only as a reminder of why the very worst people love the very best things so much. Just look at what you can get away with. Just look at how resilient this stupid brilliant sport is.

Look at how much we can f*ck it up and it still f*cking works. FIFA cannot believe their luck, surely. The USA can’t believe its luck, although that’s mainly because here is a country whose primary response to the success of the World Cup appears to be ‘Look at the rest of the world realising how much they actually love America!’ when the reality is in fact America still not quite managing to realise just how much the rest of the world actually loves football.

Still, a distraction from Donald ‘drain the swamp’ Trump shambolically creating an actual literal swamp in the middle of Washington DC in a self-inflicted catastrophe-metaphor-made-real that is, even for him, a bit on the absurdly orange nose.

But it’s the fact the president is still clowning around, and that Gianni Infantino is artlessly claiming FIFA is making not one penny out of the Hydration Breaks (Gianni, that’s worse, you cretin: if you’re going to ruin the structure of football forever then at the very least make sure you get paid) that serve as reminders of the most important thing: this World Cup is an on-field success because of football and despite the best efforts of the world’s smallest and most pathetic men to ruin it.

The Hydration Breaks are a farce, yet football endures. There’s been a two-hour half-time but nobody really minded, because Kylian Mbappe. There’s been needless VAR joy-sapping scrutiny at some points, and an inexplicable absence of necessary VAR involvement at others.

There’s been a clear desire to Let The Game Flow, with referees clearly encouraged and instructed to let stuff go as much as they can. Up to 22 and a half minutes when the flow must end. But guys, don’t be ending that flow at a natural and necessary break in play 90 seconds earlier. That won’t do at all.

The expansion to 48 teams and far too many games has also worked. Sure, there have been some fearful thrashings, but enough of those have been dished out to those who wouldn’t, in US terms, be deemed ‘expansion teams’ – your Swedens, your Tunisias – that it hasn’t ruined things.

And enough of what definitely are expansion teams have delivered emotional highs and nose-bloodying highlight-reel moments to make it all worthwhile anyway.

Another impact of the expansion and thus diluting of the overall standard has been something we thought would go the other way. Instead of the whole tournament being lessened, the disparity of standard has actually made the very best players stand out more. Again, we are adamant everyone involved has fluked all of this, but it’s all kind of worked.

The small teams are even, for the most part, behaving themselves. Sure, they’ve had their fun and their unexpected draws. But have any of them actually been silly enough to actually beat any big teams and threaten the involvement of the bigger beasts when the serious tournament begins in the knockout stages? They have not.

They have fulfilled their designated roles perfectly. Turn up. Add colour and vibrancy and novelty to the tournament. Sure, knock yourselves out and have a couple of Kodak moments. But then, crucially, actually do knock yourselves out because we don’t actually want the knockout stages without Belgium or Uruguay, okay?

And it’s in this vein that we move to our biggest gripe with this tournament now. With a necessary acknowledgement that the World Cup will get away with it as it has got away with everything else, but an acknowledgement nonetheless that they have done something unbelievably f*cking stupid.

And that thing is using head-to-head as the first tiebreaker criterion. There are levels to the stupidity here that are staggering to behold. Because, actually, under the 32-team format of the last seven World Cups, we wouldn’t have minded it.

There’s a genuine case that in a short group stage where each team only plays three games, the head-to-head record between two teams in their actual match against each other is a fairer and better first separator than goal difference, which over such a short run can be skewed so significantly by one paddling either dished out or received.

But they didn’t introduce it for any of those tournaments. They introduced it for this one, where it absolutely does not work.

We assume they’ve done it here because of an understandable but misplaced fear that there would be more mismatches with 48 teams and a desire to minimise the impact of any thrashings.

But what they’ve actually achieved is to largely wipe out one of the few accidental benefits of a messy, overlong group stage that takes far too many matches to knock out too few teams.

The one massive and real benefit of taking too many matches to knock out too few teams is that all of those matches should mean something.

The presence of third-place teams rewards failure in one sense, but it also makes winning the group even more important than in a tournament where only the top two from each group go through.

The presence of third-place teams rewards failure in one sense, but it also gives teams who’ve lost the first couple of games a possible route out of trouble.

We have plenty of sympathy with the idea that teams who’ve lost their first two games shouldn’t actually have a lingering chance of qualification, but there’s a clear upside if they do: there is a clear and obvious sporting benefit to be gained from teams still having something to play for.

That should have been a big tick for this World Cup. A real easy win. You can’t eliminate dead rubbers, but you can minimise them. And one way of doing that was to do nothing at all. Just keep goal difference as the first tiebreaker.

That change – or, indeed, non-change – would have had a massive and positive impact on what’s left of the group stage.

Because head-to-head is the tiebreaker, we already know five of the 16 eliminated teams before the final round of group games get under way. That’s a terribly high number when you’re eliminating so few of the teams in your competition to begin with.

And, just as bad, we also already know a third of the group winners ahead of the final round of games. Again, that’s just too many.

We’re left with one completely dead game – USA v Turkey – where absolutely nothing is now at stake. USA are already sure to win the group, and Turkey to finish last.

If goal difference was still the first tiebreaker, we’d know none of that. We’d know none of the group winners and nobody would have been eliminated.

Sure, you can argue that those teams with two defeats from two deserve to be eliminated, but it’s better for the integrity of the tournament if they aren’t. It’s better if they still have something to play for.

The fact third-placed teams go through already increased the risk of a potential carve-up, and there’s a delicious irony to the fact the game where said potential exists this time is between Austria and Algeria, who will each progress if they draw their final game in Group J.

Given what Austria did to Algeria in 1982, we’re very much looking forward to the upcoming Disgrace of Kansas City.

But when you’ve got a format that creates that risk, it’s absurd to add another layer by going down the head-to-head road with its far greater likelihood of teams, or indeed entire matches, where nothing is at stake.

There’s another consideration here. And that’s that there are two types of league table in play at this World Cup. The group tables, and the ranking of the third-placed teams. And in that very important secondary table you can’t use head-to-head, for obvious reasons. You have to go goal difference first. And that creates a slim but non-zero chance that a team could find themselves shoved down to fourth in a group on head-to-head record when they would have finished third in that table – and also the qualifying top eight of the third-place teams – on goal difference.

With one bizarre and short-sighted decision, the organisers have taken the one unalloyed good of this format and p*ssed it up the wall.

So yes, this World Cup has been a successful one by a great many measures. But that’s because of football and footballers and football supporters. Not the organisers who’ve f*cked it and fluked it.