Football Thread 21/22

[LipeJJ]

HomokHarcos said:

Ka-pi96 said:

eh, won't make a difference. They'll still be 16 European teams so even if all the others were to completely suck that would still be 16 teams worth watching. It will still be the showpiece event of international football and every single European team that's in it will still want to do as well as they possibly can (ideally winning the whole thing). The opening group stage where 2/3 teams progress will be pretty much meaningless I'd agree with that, but the later rounds will still be highly anticipated as always.

Besides, is there even anybody that genuinely thinks non-European teams won't ever be serious World Cup contenders again? Because if so they're almost certainly wrong. At a minimum Brazil will still be strong contenders in the future.

I probably put too much weight in what Stefan Szymanski says (heck that's where my prediction about the World Cup becoming less relevant also came from), but he predicts in the future that Brazil (and the other South Americans) will stall behind the top teams of Western Europe. I think it's already happened, loot at Brazil's results against Western European teams at World Cups since 2006.
0-1 vs. France
0-0 vs. Portugal
1-2 vs. the Netherlands
1-7 vs. Germanu
0-3 vs. the Netherlands
1-1 vs. Switzerland
1-2 vs. Belgium

That makes 0 wins, 2 draws and 5 losses.

Before 2010 the only time two consecutive World Cups were won by a European team was 1934 and 1938. 2018 will mark the fourth consecutive time a European team wins the World Cup.

Aren't you being extremely picky tho? Matches against western european teams only on world cups since 2006 (in which they had the best team from any viewpoint and were absolute favorites to win)...

Not to mention 90% of those games could go either way or had Brazil playing better than the other team (like today). The way you talk is like there is some technical gap that will prevent Brazil (or Argentina) from winning something. If anything, it's the opposite (excluding Germany and Netherlands in 2014). We always had the edge, but ended up defeating ourselves or simply having bad luck due to things like an own goal (today), a bizarre goalkeeper failure (Netherlands 2010), an irregular goal (Switzerland 2018), and so on. My point is... Brazil is as competitive as ever, just like teams like Germany and Argentina will continue to be, even tho they had utter fails this cup.