The World Cup starts with Russia and Saudi Arabia on June 14. How does it work, and who will win?
The world’s single greatest sporting event, the 2018 FIFA World Cup, is already proving to be dramatic and unpredictable.
The planet’s best teams and players — including Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Argentina’s Lionel Messi — have descended on Russia to play on soccer’s biggest stage. It’s a tournament where legends are born, hearts are broken, and, when all is said and done, a team is crowned the World Cup champion: the pinnacle of the world’s most popular sport.
At least half the world will tune in to the competition, even if most Americans probably won’t. That’s in part because the US national team didn’t qualify, but that’s not the whole story. Ahead of the last World Cup in 2014, which featured Team USA, 87 percent of Americans said they knew little to nothing about soccer, and around 67 percent had no plans to watch.
Here’s my plea: Continue to watch the World Cup even without the US in it. I bet you’ll start to enjoy soccer and the tournament as the rest of the world does. “Soccer is the working man’s ballet,” Simon Kuper, co-author of Soccernomics, which was updated for this World Cup, told me. “You can see beauty and genius right away. It’s hard to appreciate the genius of Einstein, but one can easily appreciate the beauty of Messi.”
If you’re on the fence about whether to tune in, in part because you don’t know much about the World Cup, don’t worry. What follows is a guide that helps answer all the most embarrassing questions you wouldn’t want to ask out loud. At least, that’s the goal (get it?).
Let’s get this ball rolling.
Simply put, the World Cup is the single most beloved sporting event on the planet.
“The World Cup brings together the most people on the globe,” Grant Wahl, the author of Masters of Modern Soccer, told me. “More countries care about this sport and this tournament than any other event.”
The first World Cup took place in Uruguay in 1930 after soccer became a popular event at the Olympics. FIFA, soccer’s governing body (more on this group below), wanted to stage an international competition where professionals — instead of amateurs at the Olympics — could play and draw big crowds.
It has since turned into a global phenomenon that enthralls soccer fans every four years. It is the world’s most-watched sporting event and generates billions of dollars from sponsorships, ticket and shirt sales, broadcasting licenses, and much more.
Here’s how the World Cup works: All the world’s 207 national teams are split up into six regions. Over a roughly two-year period, they compete in regional qualifying tournaments to earn one of the 32 spots at the World Cup. The host of the tournament — in this case, Russia — receives an automatic spot, even if it doesn’t have a particularly good squad. (Sorry, Putin.)
FIFA gives regions with more and better national teams a greater number of spots. That’s why the tournament will feature fewer teams from Asia or Africa, for example, than Europe.
The qualifying 32 teams are then put into eight groups of four — labeled Groups A through H — by a random, though seeded, draw. After the draw, the group that is deemed the hardest to win, meaning that all four teams are fairly evenly matched, is called the “Group of Death.” This year, however, there is some debate as to which one deserves that title.
Once the group stage begins, the teams compete in a round-robin format, where each country plays the other three in the group just once. A win is worth 3 points; a tie, 1 point; and a loss, 0. The two teams with the highest point totals at the end of those three games move on to the knockout rounds.
That’s when the World Cup gets really fun — and soccer fans’ blood pressure rises to unhealthy levels. In the group stage, a team could tie a game, or even lose, but still play on. But in the knockout rounds, the losing team is eliminated from the entire tournament while the winner goes to the next round.
Recall that soccer has two halves, each 45 minutes long, for a total of a 90-minute game (plus “ stoppage time ” for injuries and substitutions, at the referees’ discretion). If the scores are tied at the end of those 90 minutes, the knockout game goes into a 30-minute overtime; if both sides remain tied after that, they go to penalty kicks.
The win-or-go-home nature of the knockout rounds makes every pass, every slide tackle, every save, and, yes, every goal matter even more.
There’s a round of 16, which then turns into a quarterfinal, which becomes a semifinal, ultimately leading to the biggest game in all of soccerdom: the World Cup final. It’s like Game 7 of the World Series and the Super Bowl all rolled into one, but the entire world cares about it.
You can tell how much winning the final means to players and fans just from Germany ’s celebrations after it won the last World Cup in 2014. The country held a huge party when the players returned home.
(Quick note: The losers of the two semifinal games play each other before the final to determine who comes in third place. It’s technically part of the tournament, but it’s more about making the almost-finalists feel good, I guess.)
FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, chooses where it will hold its quadrennial flagship tournament based on bids (and maybe some bribes) from countries. In December 2010, it made a startling decision: Russia would host the 2018 competition. (It also tapped Qatar for the 2022 tournament, but more on that later.)
That was somewhat surprising; other candidates angling for the tournament included a joint Belgium-Netherlands bid, a solo England bid, and a joint Portugal-Spain bid. At the time, those options seemed more attractive to soccer fans because, well, they have great soccer facilities and cultures — and are also not run by an autocrat like Vladimir Putin.
There were some irregularities with the vote. A member of Russia’s World Cup lobbying group sent a painting to a FIFA executive, for example. And three weeks before the tally, news broke that FIFA had suspended two voting members for accepting bribes in exchange for votes. However, a commissioned FIFA report cleared Russia of any “undue influence.”
Awarding authoritarian countries with top global sporting events is actually a trend. As my colleague Zeeshan Aleem pointed out, fewer countries now want to host the Olympics because of how costly it is. But dictatorships that don’t have to worry about financial accountability to citizens remain interested in hosting big sporting competitions.
The same is true for the World Cup. “The World Cup became very overpriced,” said Kuper, who is also a columnist for the Financial Times. He noted that Germany upped the ante when it hosted in 2006 by having top-of-the-line stadiums and facilities, spending roughly $4 billion to host the competition.
There were other instances of countries going all out to win the bid. In 2002, South Korea and Japan built 16 total stadiums, and refurbished four others, to host the tournament. Brazil spent around $15 billion to host the 2014 competition.
That upped the ante for hosting the 2018 World Cup. So far, it looks like Russia has reportedly spent — wait for it — $12 billion total to host the World Cup, with nearly 60 percent of that money coming from the country’s federal budget.
That massive spending total includes building the Krestovsky Stadium in St. Petersburg. It cost about $1 billion, seats around 70,000 fans, and is now the second-largest stadium in the country. As you might imagine with a project like this — and because it’s Russia — there was a lot of corruption surrounding the stadium’s creation. One prominent example: A Russian deputy governor received around 50 million rubles, or $800,000, in kickbacks from the subcontractor who built the scoreboard.
“It’s a systemic problem. You can’t build something legally, safely and sensibly in Russia without constant cost overruns, corruption, and mismanagement,” Lyubov Sobol, a researcher at the anti-Putin Foundation for Fighting Corruption, told the Financial Times in 2016.
But FIFA likely won’t mind. Russia (and Qatar) effectively told the organization, “Look, whatever you want, we’ll spend the money — we don’t care because we’re not accountable, really, to our population,” Kuper told me. Having lavish facilities, frankly, makes the World Cup aesthetically pleasing, which in turn reflects well on Russia and FIFA.
Here’s one thing that might make both Russia and FIFA look bad, though: Russia’s notorious hooliganism. There is currently a disturbing rise in neo-Nazi soccer fans in Russia. During a European soccer tournament in the summer of 2016, Russians attacked English fans — cutting one person’s Achilles’ heel and lodging glass into another person’s neck.
“It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” a British police officer told Sky News . “The Russians came with serious intent to carry out barbaric violence. They were highly organized, very effective. We saw football hooliganism on a different level.”
Russian soccer fans are also known for their rampant racism. FIFA even fined Russia around $30,000 in early May for failing to stop bigoted chants from supporters during a game against France. (The French team has a lot of black players.)
So the World Cup may look aesthetically pleasing thanks to Putin’s heavy spending, but the Russian fans could make the tournament look really ugly.
We’ve talked a lot already about this soccer governing body known as FIFA. What the heck is it, and why is the World Cup called the FIFA World Cup, anyway?
FIFA stands for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. It’s the soccer organization that runs the World Cup and has a super-French name because, well, it was founded in Paris in May 1904. It runs other big tournaments worldwide too, but the World Cup is its main showpiece.
It’s best to think of FIFA as the global administrative hub of soccer that aims to regulate and promote the sport worldwide. Oddly, it runs like an actual global political body. It has a president who leads the entire organization, a Congress that passes dictates for the game, and even committees that provide strategic guidance and oversight.
FIFA is also made up of six semiautonomous regional bodies that help govern their respective areas. These regional bodies administrate all things soccer for their areas, including the six different qualifying tournaments for the World Cup. Soccer in the United States, for example, is governed by the Confederation of North, Central America, and Caribbean Association Football — known more commonly as CONCACAF.
Like most large international bodies, FIFA has had its share of major scandals.
Here’s the most recent big one: In 2015, the US Department of Justice indicted nine FIFA officials and five corporate executives for racketeering conspiracy, money laundering, and wire fraud as part of “a 24-year scheme to enrich themselves through the corruption of international soccer.” It’s worth noting that FIFA is technically a nonprofit, even though it makes billions of dollars.
Two charged members included Alfredo Hawit, then the president of CONCACAF, and Juan Ángel Napout, formerly the South American region’s chief. The scandal eventually led Sepp Blatter, then the head of FIFA, to resign.
FIFA’s corruption has caused some prominent soccer fans to wrestle with their love of the World Cup. Look no further than John Oliver: In 2014, he worked through his conflicting anti-FIFA and pro-World Cup feelings during the early days of his show Last Week Tonight.
It’s worth your time to watch, if for no other reason than you’re going to need a laugh before the next section.
If you’re not sitting down while you read this, grab a seat. It’s about to get rough.
Here’s really all you need to know: America didn’t qualify for the tournament, even though it should have. (The women’s national team, it should be noted, is the best in the world and won the last Women’s World Cup in 2015 .)
The US, like every other country, went through regional qualifying in order to make the World Cup. The United States, because it’s in North America, competes in CONCACAF.
There are multiple rounds in CONCACAF’s qualifying tournament, but the fifth and final one sees the six best teams compete in what’s called the “Hexagonal,” known colloquially as “the Hex.”
In that round, each team plays the others twice — home and away — for a total of 10 games. The top three teams with the highest point total automatically make it to the World Cup, while the fourth-place team has to go into a playoff with an Asian runner-up to qualify. (Again, a win gets a team 3 points; a tie earns 1 point; a loss means a team receives no points.)
The United States made it to the Hexagonal. That meant America had to place among the top four teams in a group consisting of Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, and Trinidad and Tobago to make it into the World Cup.
As you can tell from the results list below, the United States didn’t perform well in the round. It lost its first two games against Mexico and Costa Rica, and then struggled mightily to work its way back into the fold.
