EDITORIAL
The World Cup mattered not because it was perfect, but because it was unpredictable
They said it would ruin everything. Forty-eight teams would water down the World Cup. Second-tier nations would get embarrassed on football’s biggest stage. The group stage would drag. The knockouts would be predictable. FIFA was chasing money and destroying tradition. The criticism started months before a ball was kicked in the United States. Last Sunday at MetLife Stadium, Spain lifted the trophy, and suddenly all those arguments sounded hollow.
What happened over the month was not what the sceptics predicted. It was the opposite. Spain arrived as quiet achievers, not heavy favourites. France had Mbappé. Argentina had Lionel Messi and were the defending champions. England had young talent bursting with potential. Brazil was supposed to finally end their drought. Nobody was talking about Spain. They had a decent midfield, some organisation, decent defending. That was it. When they started playing, when they kept possessing the ball with an almost boring precision, when they restricted Argentina to zero shots in normal time, when they beat everyone without needing anyone to score twice in a match, the narrative flipped completely.
Spain proved that football’s future was not about individual genius anymore. It was about collective suffocation. About a team so organised that opposing players couldn’t breathe. Rodri completed 790 passes. Their goalkeeper kept seven clean sheets. A substitute named Ferran Torres scored the winning goal. That’s not luck. That’s not accident. That’s evolution.
But here is what truly vindicated the expansion: the new teams didn’t come to make up numbers. Cape Verde, a nation of half a million people, reached the knockout stages for the first time in any World Cup and took Argentina to extra time. They pushed the defending champions to the brink with a 40-year-old goalkeeper and sheer collective will. Egypt fought with intensity that made people remember they belonged on this stage. Norway qualified for quarterfinals for the first time in history because Erling Haaland was somehow inevitable, but also because an entire country believed it was possible.
These weren’t David versus Goliath moments that faded into nostalgia. They changed how the tournament felt. They made it unpredictable. When Brazil crashed out in the second round with Neymar limping off in tears, when Ronaldo’s final World Cup ended quietly against Spain’s precision machine, when Mbappé won the Golden Boot but couldn’t win the tournament, you realised nothing was guaranteed anymore.
Yes, there were controversies. A red card reversed by presidential phone call. Accusations of favouritism. Whispers of corruption. A governance body that bent like never before. It was messy and frustrating and real. And somehow, instead of destroying the tournament, these controversies made it matter more. People argued. People cared. The World Cup went viral not because everything was perfect, but because it was combustible. Raw. Unpredictable.
Forty-eight teams forced the World Cup to become what it had always claimed to be: truly global. Not just Europe and South America trading the trophy. Not just established powerhouses managing wins. Every nation that showed up believed they could achieve something. Most didn’t. But several did. And that changed everything.
The critics said expansion would destroy tradition. Instead, it proved that tradition was stronger than anyone thought. Spain won the same way the greatest teams always do: through discipline, through understanding their identity, through making everyone else irrelevant. But they had to do it against 47 other nations that showed up believing they belonged. That’s why this World Cup mattered. Not because it was perfect. Because it was real.
