I feel bad for Cristiano Ronaldo. His career in World Cups ended without a single trophy for Portugal.

Good luck to Belgium.

Edit: Yep, as it should be. Congrats Belgium!

I feel a little gloating at the American team. It is usually good for the sport when hosts go far in a tournament. But the shady business with the suspension an revoking of the same, coming back down to reality was probably needed.

With no host remaining will the North Americans look elsewhere for a team to root for or will they simply lose interest in the tournament altogether?

It's the same thing, every single time. The US media, ex-players, pundits... everyone screams at the sky, claiming the US has a shot to compete for a World Cup. And every time, as soon as they play a real, big-boy team, they end up looking like a JV squad. Completely outmatched, outclassed, out-everythinged. Like a team of children vs. a team of fully grown adults.

It's clear that these are our forth-best athletes vs. the world's first-best. That all of our greatest talent gets funneled into the NFL, MLB, and NBA and then our soccer teams get the left overs. And as long as that continues, these sorts of embarrassing losses will be the result.

Don't blame the team tho, even the Belgian Team Coach went to Folarin and did not blame him for playing after the decision.

As a Belgian I did not really cared who win until I saw the USA ambassador being like 'Belgium is weak, USA Team is like USA the best in the world' at that point you lose support.