2018 Men's World Cup

[oladub]

The World Cup competition has begun. The World Cup final will be held on July 15. FIFA has a good website to follow the tournament including game highlight clips, schedule, and standings.

2018 World Cup

[oladub]

Japanese and Senagalese fans at the World Cup are cleaning up behind themselves in the stadium.

The United States more surprisingly Italy failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. However, Iceland, population 330,000, did. Iceland is the least populated country to ever make it to the World Cup. Iceland also affords a single payer health care plan although California doesn't. Iceland also put its bankers in prison instead of bailing them out like Bush and Obama did. Without having its own international soccer stars, Iceland is the longest of long shots in the World Cup although it tied Argentina in its first game.

[coracle]

I just can’t get interested in the World Cup this time round: there seems to be so many minor countries involved that don’t interest me any more. But I did watch France-Argentina on Saturday to keep out of the heat. That was a good game.

I’m really glad Germany has been eliminated though. My ancestors come from England and I’m always glad when Germany gets beaten at anything. “We” beat them twice at World War and once at the World Cup. Sweet!

[coracle]

The Penalty taking on Sunday was just absolutely riveting entertainment! Particularly that Germany had already been eliminated!

[oladub]

The French team, the better team, defeated Croatia in the final World Cup game. This tournament became a pretty much all European event with South American and African teams deposed along the way. I wondered about that and at first blamed that on European teams scraping the best talent away from N. Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. There was some of that but the French team, at least, was French born with only about 6 foreign born players. The conclusion I came to was that wealthy European nations have developed fantastic youth soccer programs in which talented youth are placed in soccer academies at a very young age. That, seems to be the more important reason wealthy European nations develop such talent. However, I still wonder if talented African teams like Nigeria would not have done better if some of their talented players had not played for European teams and European teams done not so well.

Feisty Croatia was always too poor to attract immigrants and bucked the trend by not having much of any training program for its own youth.

Side note: FIFA orders World Cup broadcasters to stop zooming in on 'hot women' in the crowd during games
Who was complaining?