Official World Cup Thread

[Coach]

If people want to talk World Cup, you can have at it! Today Brazil plays Croatia.

[voncap]

Coach, just curious is there an 'Un'official World Cup? LOL

[Coach]

No, haha. There is no unofficial thread. Just this one

[abpk2903]

I'm getting ready to watch my 3 or so soccer games for my "4 year soccer fix" and I know we have discussed this some before but now that I actually took a look at it, the groupings are insane. As someone who has no knowledge of the sport, please help me here:

The "tournament" is 32 teams and FIFA has a "Coca-Cola World Rankings." I understand these are just rankings and probably similar to college sports "subjective but generally accurate." So I expected most teams in tournament to be teams ranked from 1st to say 25th internationally and a few outliers maybe ranked in the low to mid 40s in the rankings. What I found was the 16th and 24th ranked teams out of the tournament and the 56th and 57th ranked teams in it. That seems odd. How are the participants determined?

Some groups seem to be aligned ideally like group B who has the 1st, 14th, 15th, and 42nd ranked teams in its group or group C which has 8th, 12th, 23rd and 42nd. Then there is group D that guarantees one of the top teams doesn't advance with the 7th, 9th, 10th, and 28th teams all stuffed in this group or Group A that handed Brazil a path to the round of 16 by pairing them with the 18th, 20th, and 56th ranked teams. What about group G that basically eliminated the 13th ranked US squad by pairing them with the 2nd, 4th, and 37th ranked teams? How is this even remotely fair? Maybe this is why soccer has some difficulty catching on in the US?

[konjo78]

well we made it out of group stages! That enough is a huge win for the united states!

[sparky]

Agree, making it out of the group is huge. I think we can win the first elimination game too.

[HockeyGenie]

It is outstanding that the US made it out of their group. They outplayed the #4 ranked team in the world for 90 minutes and let up a fluky goal. They went toe to toe with IMO the best team in the world today and they beat up on a pretty good Ghana team.

If I were Klinsman, right now I would be telling them to settle for nothing, there is absolutely no reason they shouldn't be going for it all. I think it is wonderful that there are so many fans behind them but enough of this "BELIEVE" BS, from here on out we "KNOW". This team can do it.

[Crimson's Ghost]

Beat up Ghana? Scored a goal early, hung on for dear life while getting dominated the majority of the game, and scored on a miracle header seems more like it.

BUT they did win.

They've played better against Germany and Portugal than they did against Ghana.

[abpk2903]

From the uneducated naked eye, US looks like they COULD get past Belgium. If they do, who would they play in the round of 8?

[PLDragons24]

Any team can beat anybody once. That's the beauty of single elemination formats, anything can happen. As for the US winning multiple games that's a long shot forsure.