This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

As late as last week, I got on the microphone on The Matchbook and declared that Arsenal might not lose a Premier League game until December or January. Dropping points somewhere along the way seemed inevitable because even the best teams occasionally spend 90 minutes kicking the ball directly at a goalkeeper who has randomly decided to become a demigod, but I genuinely struggled to find an upcoming fixture where an outright defeat seemed particularly likely.

Brighton heard me, apparently.

Beating one of the biggest clubs in England barely qualifies as surprising for Brighton anymore. The Seagulls have spent years cycling through managers and selling excellent players for enormous sums before somehow finding another collection capable of making a Big Six team absolutely miserable. Arsenal simply became the latest victim Saturday, losing 3-0 as Brighton turned a match against the defending champions into a rather lovely way to celebrate the club’s 125th anniversary.

There was something wonderfully satisfying about watching the game develop because every goal seemed to make the afternoon better than it had been a few minutes earlier. The first provided the initial jolt, the second made you wonder whether Arsenal was actually in serious trouble, and by the time the third went in, the Amex had turned into a party. It reminded me of sitting down for a really good meal and gradually discovering that the thing you ordered isn’t even necessarily the best part of it, because some side you barely considered has suddenly become the reason you’re going to remember the place. I don’t know. The metaphor got away from me a little bit there, but Brighton scored three goals and I had a lovely time watching it.

Arsenal will inevitably receive most of the attention because that’s usually how these things work. A title favorite loses and the immediate question becomes what went wrong with the title favorite, rather than spending much time considering whether the team on the other side might simply deserve some credit. Brighton has been doing this to England’s biggest clubs for years, though, and Saturday was another reminder that its ability to make far wealthier teams miserable has survived seemingly endless changes in personnel.

There isn’t much reason for Arsenal to panic. It’s just September, and every major goal remains available. It does put some of the more ambitious conversations on hold, including the one I was happily participating in about whether this team could go unbeaten. Every additional victory had made that possibility feel slightly less ridiculous, and Arsenal had looked difficult enough to disrupt that I had already started looking several months down the schedule for the first obvious place it might lose. Brighton saved me the trouble.

Not so fast, my friends. Not so fast indeed.

“Some might say we will find a brighter day.”
— Oasis, “Some Might Say”

Bournemouth’s European dreams aren’t hard to comprehend. This is a club that didn’t believe it could be anywhere close to these heights not all that long ago, mostly because there was very little reason to believe it could.

Bournemouth was a League Two side as recently as the 2009-10 season, having narrowly avoided dropping out of the Football League altogether the year before. The Cherries were promoted to League One that spring, spent three seasons there and found their way into the Championship by 2013. Two years later, Bournemouth was in the Premier League, completing a rise through English football that happened quickly enough that there probably wasn’t much time for anyone around the club to properly comprehend what was happening.

It has bounced between the top flight and second division since, though even that description makes Bournemouth’s recent history sound considerably more ordinary than it actually is. The club that once had to worry about its continued existence is currently expanding Vitality Stadium from just over 11,000 seats to more than 20,000, a project Bournemouth says will help secure its long-term success and sustainability. There is something fitting about that happening now, because the stadium itself has started to become one of the few remaining parts of Bournemouth that still looks like it belongs to the club it used to be.

Everything else has changed.

Bournemouth now operates like a fairly big deal on the European continent, and there are several reasons for that. The flood of money into the Premier League has lifted the entire country’s footballing infrastructure above much of the rest of Europe, meaning clubs that would traditionally be considered part of England’s middle class suddenly possess financial resources that would make historically significant teams elsewhere on the continent fairly jealous. Bournemouth has benefited enormously from that reality, but it has also done something important with the money: It has generally spent it well.

Last season was the culmination of all of that. Bournemouth finished sixth in the Premier League and qualified for the Europa League, turning something that would have sounded completely absurd 15 years ago into a fairly logical reward for becoming a very good football team.

That distinction feels important, because Bournemouth did not stumble into Europe as some sort of happy accident. The Cherries earned their way here, and on Thursday night they traveled to San Sebastián and provided perhaps the clearest indication yet that simply qualifying for the competition was never going to be enough.

Bournemouth beat Real Sociedad 2-1.

The setting alone made the whole thing feel slightly surreal. Bournemouth had waited its entire existence for a European night and was immediately sent to one of the great football cities in Spain to play a club that has spent plenty of time in continental competition. There was no gentle introduction to any of this, and Bournemouth didn’t appear particularly interested in asking for one.

Justin Kluivert thought he had scored the first European goal in club history after 11 minutes, only for the flag to initially go up for offside before VAR eventually restored what would have been an especially cruel thing to take away. Nine minutes later, Alex Scott found Rayan, whose header made it 2-0 and left Bournemouth in the unusual position of having waited more than a century to play European football before requiring only 20 minutes to become quite good at it.

Real Sociedad eventually made the evening considerably less comfortable. Sergio Gómez pulled one back after halftime, and Bournemouth had to spend much of the second half protecting what it had built, with Djordje Petrovic making a couple of important saves late to preserve the victory. There was nothing particularly easy about the final half-hour, but that probably made the whole thing more appropriate anyway. Bournemouth had spent too long trying to get here for its first European victory to arrive without at least a little suffering.

I am somebody who loves to find the underdog in sports and then root for it to succeed, occasionally well beyond the point of reason. Bournemouth easily fits into that category, and watching it thrive in a competition that nobody 15 years ago would’ve thought it could even compete in is such a wonderful sight for somebody who remains a lifelong wishful thinker, at least when it comes to sports.

There were almost certainly Bournemouth supporters watching League Two football in 2009 who allowed themselves to imagine something like Thursday night. That is part of what being a sports fan requires, convincing yourself of outcomes that all available information suggests are ridiculous because the alternative is admitting there might be a ceiling on how far your club can go. Bournemouth kept raising that ceiling until eventually there wasn’t much of one left.

What’s even crazier to me is that Bournemouth is no longer merely an interesting underdog in this Europa League. According to Opta’s model entering the competition, it was the favorite to win the entire thing, with a 14.3% chance of lifting the trophy. Benfica was narrowly behind at 14%, with Bayer Leverkusen at 10.2% and Union Saint-Gilloise at 8.6%, while Sunderland, Juventus, Crystal Palace and AC Milan rounded out the other prominent contenders.

That list is somewhat baffling to me, particularly because Juventus and Milan don’t even crack the top five. These are two of the biggest clubs in the history of European football, organizations with trophy cabinets Bournemouth could only dream of matching, particularly considering the Cherries had never even played a European game before Thursday. And yet here they all are, playing in the same competition with a statistical model suggesting Bournemouth has a better chance of winning it than either Italian giant.

It’s hard for me to believe that neither Juventus nor Milan will have success in this tournament given the resources and talent available to them, but the fact Bournemouth can even reasonably be mentioned alongside them speaks volumes about how dramatically the balance of European football has shifted. Ten years ago, the idea that Bournemouth and Juventus could enter a European competition as something approaching competitive equals would have been unimaginable. Even now, after everything that has happened, it sounds somewhat ludicrous.

The Premier League’s enormous financial advantage is obviously responsible for plenty of that. Bournemouth is not alone here, because the clubs occupying England’s tier below the traditional giants now have access to players and resources that would once have been reserved for teams regularly playing in the Champions League. You can see the same thing with Sunderland and Crystal Palace, and all three entered this Europa League campaign with a legitimate argument that they could go deep into the competition.

England’s representatives certainly did little in Matchweek 1 to discourage that idea. Sunderland beat AZ Alkmaar 1-0 at the Stadium of Light in what was an incredible scene in its own right, while Crystal Palace cruised past Lech Poznan 4-0 in South London. Bournemouth’s victory was different, though, because it happened away from home against Real Sociedad and because there was so much history packed into the simple act of the Cherries being there in the first place.

There is obviously a long way to go before anybody in Bournemouth needs to start figuring out where exactly a Europa League trophy parade would fit in a town that is still working on doubling the capacity of its stadium. A 14.3% chance of winning something remains, inconveniently, an 85.7% chance of not winning it, and European competitions have a habit of dealing rather harshly with anyone who starts planning for May in September.

But winning the Europa League is almost beside the point right now. Bournemouth has spent the better part of the last two decades arriving at places that once seemed completely unreasonable, only for each new destination to eventually become normal. League One gave way to the Championship, the Championship gave way to the Premier League and simply surviving in the Premier League eventually gave way to competing near the top of it.

Now the Cherries are in Europe, too, and Thursday night provided the latest adjustment to what Bournemouth supporters are allowed to consider normal. The strange part is no longer that Bournemouth has made it this far.

It’s that nobody should be particularly surprised if it goes further.

This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

I talked about Tottenham’s inability to score last week because three Premier League matches without a goal seemed notable enough to warrant discussion. I assumed that by the time we reconvened here, Spurs would’ve managed to accidentally bounce one in off somebody’s shin and I could move on with my life. Apparently I underestimated this team’s commitment to the bit.

Four matches.

Still nothing.

(Yes, Tottenham has scored six goals this season when one includes its two Carabao Cup matches against Charlton Athletic and Liverpool. This challenge is specifically for the Premier League, where Spurs has decided that putting the ball into the back of the net is an optional activity.)

Tottenham’s latest attempt ended in another scoreless draw, extending a drought that has moved beyond being a strange opening stretch and into something legitimately concerning. Roberto De Zerbi can talk about needing to unblock the attack, and there are portions of matches where you can see the ideas he’s trying to implement. The problem arrives when Spurs gets anywhere near the goal and everybody suddenly appears to forget why they’re there.

So I’m attempting to fix the problem myself. I will run one mile for every goal Tottenham scores in the Premier League this season.

This feels like an arrangement where I can’t lose. Either Spurs continues its current trajectory and I get to spend the rest of the season living a wonderfully sedentary lifestyle, or Tottenham suddenly becomes one of the most prolific teams in England and forces me into the best shape of my life. Perhaps this is what De Zerbi has been waiting for. Maybe Savío has spent the last two weeks thinking about my cardiovascular health and simply needed reassurance that he could proceed.

The challenge starts whenever Tottenham decides to participate. In the meantime, let’s track how many miles I’ve had to run so far.

Oh, yeah… it’s zero. We’ll keep a running tally throughout the year. Right now, it appears Spurs is taking its time in running this race alongside me.

This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

Replay review across sports has somehow reached the point where having more technology occasionally seems to make officiating more confusing. Soccer is particularly gifted at this because offside should be a relatively straightforward concept, yet VAR has managed to turn some decisions into the sort of thing that requires diagrams and a minor in constitutional law to fully understand. Sunday’s Manchester Derby provided the latest example, and unlike plenty of officiating controversies that slowly materialize after everyone has watched 17 different slow-motion angles, this one felt questionable from the moment the goal was awarded.

Manchester City had been playing with 10 men since Phil Foden was sent off in the 23rd minute when Erling Haaland appeared to give his side the lead in the 60th. The goal was initially ruled out for offside before VAR took a nice long and hearty look at it and decided that, actually, everything was fine. Haaland’s positioning wasn’t really the issue. Enzo Fernández was standing in an offside position in front of Lisandro Martínez and made an attempt at the ball, which forced Martínez to react before it eventually reached Haaland at the back post. Inexplicably, however, VAR decided Fernández hadn’t interfered with play.

Yeah, Manchester United didn’t like that.

“I think it was offside,” Martínez said afterward. “And what I can’t understand is the rules. He [Fernández] was there, I went to him. He was there, in front of me. So that’s why [Erling] Haaland was free at the back.”

Martínez then went a little further, which I can’t particularly blame him for. He pointed out that referees visit clubs before every season to explain these rules and then somehow arrive at decisions like this anyway. “It’s unacceptable,” he said. “Because it’s the best league in the world, you have the best teams in the world, the best players in the world, and now we have to go home with this injustice.”

Manchester United manager Michael Carrick wasn’t doing much better trying to understand the explanation.

“The explanation I got was he wasn’t interfering with play, so I just don’t get it,” Carrick said. “He’s thrown himself at the ball six yards from goal and pretty much nearly touched it.”

That’s the part I can’t get past either. Fernández is standing directly in front of Martínez and actively attempting to reach a ball traveling across the six-yard box. Martínez has to account for him because ignoring a player attempting to score from six yards away would generally be considered a poor defensive strategy. Yet somehow we’re supposed to believe Fernández’s presence had nothing to do with what happened behind him.

Bull crap.

Respectfully.

Carrick continued: “It’s worrying if that’s really how the game’s seen by those who are officiating it. I think we all understand what that rule means, and it’s pretty obvious, you know? It’s pretty obvious. I think it’s as obvious as it gets.”

And then came the plot twist.

A couple of hours after the match, Pro Ref (short for Professional Game Referees), the official governing body of football officials in England, acknowledged that United was right. The organization said VAR “did not recognise the likely impact” of Fernández’s position and should have recommended an on-field review, adding that it had contacted Manchester United to acknowledge what it deemed “an error of judgement.”

Wonderful.

The weird part about this game is that while United was screwed, it also didn’t deserve to win. City played with 10 men for more than an hour at Old Trafford, and United never really looked capable of taking advantage of it. There was plenty of possession, but very little of it seemed particularly threatening, and the fact that City was even in a position to score the decisive goal with a man down is an indictment of how poorly United responded to the red card.

So, Manchester United got screwed. It was also very, very bad. And in the end, Manchester is blue.

Paris Saint-Germain has yet to win a game in Ligue 1 this season.

Color me surprised. And no, that’s not sarcastic.

Following PSG’s 2-1 victory over Aston Villa in the UEFA Super Cup, I proclaimed on an episode of The Matchbook that the club is probably the best in all of Europe and, by proxy, the world. Can you blame me? PSG has won two consecutive Champions League titles, the latter of which came against an Arsenal squad that bulldozed its way through the Premier League in the same season.

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Things have changed over the last couple of decades. The Premier League has elevated itself above the Italian flight as the richest and most-watched competition in the world, and the days when seemingly every superstar eventually wound up in Milan, Turin or Rome are long gone. Italian clubs can still compete in Europe — Inter played in the Champions League final two years ago — but Serie A no longer occupies the place it once did at the center of the football universe.

The Italian national team has provided an even more painful reminder of that decline. Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup for the third consecutive time this summer, meaning that as the rest of its European peers watched their countries gallivant around North America in an attempt to claim glory, Italians sat at home hoping Jannik Sinner would win Wimbledon.

He did, for what it’s worth.

But Serie A is still massive, and there’s plenty to like about the league that kicks off another season this weekend. Inter is the obvious favorite, Como has somehow gone from bankruptcy to the Champions League in a decade and most of the traditional powers are somewhere between legitimate contenders and trying to figure out what the hell they’re doing.

Welcome to Italy.

Inter is Still the Team to Beat

Serie A hasn’t had a repeat champion this decade.

Juventus won in 2020, Inter in 2021, Milan in 2022, Napoli in 2023, and the trophy has continued bouncing around between Inter and Napoli ever since. That’s quite the change from the 2010s, when Juventus won nine straight and basically treated the Scudetto -- a widespread synonym for winning the Italian league -- like something that belonged in its trophy cabinet by default.

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Not every soccer game is going to be a thriller.

The Premier League’s opening match of the season between reigning champions Arsenal and newly promoted Coventry City was what many would call a bore. Arsenal showed off its prowess and flexed its muscles, while Coventry looked entirely overmatched in its first game back in the top flight in 25 years. It might sound cliché, but there was never a moment where Coventry was even sniffing taking any sort of points from this match. Arsenal was just that dominant.

I presume this shouldn’t be all that surprising. Arsenal proved that it hadn’t missed a beat with its 3-0 beatdown of Manchester City in the Community Shield last weekend. That was technically the curtain-raiser rather than the beginning of the title defense, but it gave us a pretty decent indication that the Gunners were still the Gunners. A week later, now with points actually on the line, they looked even more comfortable.

But there were at least fleeting moments where Coventry looked presentable. The key word there is fleeting. The first 13 or so minutes saw both sides feeling each other out, and while Coventry didn’t have any golden chances — or any chances at all, for that matter — it was able to keep possession for at least some amount of the time and did a formidable job of limiting Arsenal on the other end. For a club playing its first Premier League game since before Olivia Rodrigo was born, it wasn’t a bad start.

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Liverpool and Manchester City both enter the season with legitimate hopes of winning the whole thing, even though both look quite a bit different than they did a year ago. Manchester United finished third last season, which means it’s once again perfectly reasonable to ask the question we’ve been asking for what feels like my entire life: Is Manchester United back? Tottenham spent an ungodly amount of money this summer in an attempt to make sure it never finishes 17th again. Please, please let that work.

And then there’s the rest of the pack.

Newcastle basically blew everything up, but could it still work? Sunderland is somehow playing European football four years after being in League One. Nottingham Forest had approximately 700 managers last season and hopes to not go through that whole song and dance again. I have talked myself into Leeds being good. Hull City got promoted despite allowing so many goals in the Championship. There is a lot going on here!

There are title contenders and Champions League hopefuls mixed right alongside teams that would happily throw a parade for 16th place.

That’s just all a part of the fun.

Let’s talk about the other half of the Premier League.

Hull City

Hull City entered last season as one of the favorites to be relegated from the Championship, only to find its way into the promotion playoffs and then into the Premier League when everything was said and done. It was a fantastic rise — one that came despite allowing 66 goals in league play — and it should be celebrated. The fact still remains that this Hull City squad was one of the worst teams I’ve ever seen promoted to the Premier League, which might sound like a slight but is actually a major compliment. Props to them for overcoming such odds and making it to the big dance!

Now the goal is simple: find a way to stay up in the EPL at all costs. To me, this is a team that’s likely to be relegated strictly on that basis, but it’s important to point out that anything is possible. And I’m not just trying to spew out a cliché there. Performance last year doesn’t necessarily inform performance this year, particularly when going from one league to the next, and while on paper it’s easy to say Hull City’s level won’t translate to the Premier League, we won’t actually know that for sure until much later in the season.

Still, relegated. Probably.

Ipswich Town

Similar to Hull City, it’s impossible to discuss Ipswich Town without stating that this season has one goal, plain and simple: stay up at all costs. It’s important to be clear that this is not something that’s going to be achieved easily, though I’m certain you all have deciphered that at this point.

Manager Kieran McKenna, who was able to uplift Ipswich Town from a meager third-division side into one that was capable of being promoted twice in the last three seasons, is gone. In his stead came a new face in Gary O’Neil as well as a slew of transfer signings that include Emersonn from Toulouse (€28 million), Abdul Fatawu from Leicester City (€23.45 million) and Florentino from Burnley (€18.7 million), among many others. It was a busy summer for Ipswich, though how much that helps it in its goal of staying up in the first tier is a question all unto itself. There’s a whole lot of new here, and sometimes “a whole lot of new” turns into something wonderful. Other times it just turns into a whole lot of new.

I’ll just say this when it comes to Ipswich: If you’re an American that’s searching for a fun story to latch onto, then this might be a team I’d be interested in rooting for this season. Because if Ipswich is able to remain in the Premier League for one, or two, or potentially even three — or who knows, maybe even four! — seasons, then this will quickly evolve into something that’s worth watching. The club is just flat-out charming, making it a fantastic pick for any newbie that’s desperately wanting something fresh and delightful.

But relegation is likely, at least according to yours truly. I’d love to be wrong.

Leeds United

I was unusually high on Leeds in my inaugural Corner Poll, which ranked all the Premier League teams based on vibes and feelings. Because while Leeds is just in its second season since being promoted back to the Premier League — and only managed to finish 14th last year — I still feel a lingering sense of hope that something incredible could be brewing.

Here’s why: Not only have manager Daniel Farke’s crew played well in the preseason, which you can take for what you will, they’ve also been completely on fire since December 2025. According to ESPN, from Dec. 1 to the end of the season, Leeds “ranked seventh in points per game (1.44), seventh in goal differential (plus-5) and ninth in xG differential (plus 2.23).” Those fancy statistics paint a picture that says Leeds played better than its 14th-place finish last season, particularly over the back half of the campaign.

Furthermore, if the season had started in December rather than August, then Leeds would’ve ended up in seventh instead of 14th. Unfortunately, the Premier League remains stubbornly committed to counting all 38 games, which feels a little unnecessary when some of them don’t support my argument.

Now the team has been forced to turn the page to 2026-27, hoping that some of the momentum that propelled the squad to stay up in the top flight remains. Will Farke’s tactical changes continue to pay off? What about injury-prone forward Dominic Calvert-Lewin? Will he be able to stay on the field and create the chances that Leeds needs him to? What about supporting pieces such as American Brenden Aaronson or transfer Harry Wilson? What will their level of contribution look like?

There are a ton of questions I have surrounding Leeds, yet I still remain somewhat high. There’s something about this group I like, even if I’m not completely sure I can explain it without resorting back to the original premise of The Corner Poll: vibes and feelings.

Perhaps that’s foolish.

We’ll see.

Liverpool

It feels like the same tune as so many other teams. A new manager in place, plus the changing of the guard on the roster. Liverpool isn’t alone in going through a major transition this summer, but everything feels a little more dramatic when it’s happening at Anfield.

Anyone skeptical of Liverpool heading into the season has several valid reasons. For one, Mohamed Salah, the backbone of the operation for years and one of the best pure goalscorers on the planet, is no longer there. Additionally, Virgil van Dijk isn’t getting any younger, though he was still exceptional at the World Cup this past summer for the Netherlands.

If you have belief, it’s because you see the vision that Liverpool is going for with its hire of Andoni Iraola to replace Arne Slot. What plagued Slot for much of last season was his inability to corner down what Liverpool’s identity was meant to be. He was also faced with what many would categorize as insurmountable challenges, with the death of Diogo Jota being chief among them. Add in the fact that Salah went on a public rampage that sought to undermine his manager, and everything was just flat-out not fun at Anfield last year.

It’s Iraola’s job to put all the pieces together and form a cohesive unit. Anybody that’s watched his work at Bournemouth over the last several seasons knows that he’s certainly capable of doing just that. Bournemouth is playing European football this year, for crying out loud, and a big reason why is because of Iraola’s genius.

Still, Liverpool is a whole other can of worms that features immense pressure one simply doesn’t have at Bournemouth. Slot wasn’t able to live up to the expectations necessary, and Iraola now gets the pleasure of discovering what happens when finishing fourth or fifth is treated like a personal attack on the institution. Fun!

The good news for him is that he’ll have plenty of talent to help him achieve that goal. Van Dijk is still a formidable defender even at his advanced age. Alisson is terrific in net, with Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak providing what could be a scrumptious attack — though there were some diminishing returns with that last season.

The same applies in the midfield with Alexis Mac Allister, who should — at least on paper — be one of the best midfielders in the Premier League, though he too was not up to par under Slot in 2025-26. Maybe it was the hair plugs? Hopefully Dominik Szoboszlai’s rise helps alleviate those concerns.

At the end of the day, Liverpool’s immense wealth of players should be enough to see it find a way into the top five once again. But top five isn’t good enough at Anfield. Only titles will suffice.

Manchester City

Pep Guardiola built a dynasty at Manchester City. He brought the club 20 — that’s right, 20 — trophies over his time in City blue, meaning that anybody who attempts to replace him will have the mighty task of maintaining those expectations without possessing the same genius that inhabits Guardiola’s mind.

Of all the lucky men in the world, Enzo Maresca has been charged with spearheading this operation into the future, one without Guardiola and also one without stalwart midfielder Rodri, perhaps the best player in the world. So all he needs to do is replace the greatest manager in club history, replace arguably the most important player from the entire dynasty and make sure City keeps winning things. No biggie. Should be simple.

The impact of Rodri’s departure to Barcelona over the summer can’t be overstated. It leaves a massive hole in the midfield that few players could even hope to replace. While Elliott Anderson, who Manchester City bought from Nottingham Forest for €135 million this past summer, will be able to provide a meaningful stopgap, there’s no one in the world that can do what Rodri does at the level he’s able to do it.

Oh, but Rodri’s not even the only other meaningful departure. Bernardo Silva and John Stones are also gone, with Nathan Aké also taking a hike. That’s a lot of change for a squad that’s already seen some diminishing results after winning six Premier League titles in the span of seven years.

There’s also the fact that the club is still under the pressure of the 130 charges brought against it for violations of Premier League rules, something it has yet to be found guilty of after being charged three years ago, meaning that the vibes have the potential to go to the gutter really fast. There are a whole lot of clouds floating over Manchester City right now.

And then you remember Erling Haaland exists.

No matter how poor the aura is, he’ll be standing like Atlas attempting to lift everybody up with his immense talent and charisma. He’s a true supernova up front, and Manchester City can win a whole lot of games simply because Haaland plays for them.

The same applies to several other players on the team, including incredible chance creators in Rayan Cherki, Jérémy Doku and Antoine Semenyo. One can’t forget about Phil Foden, either, who’s long been a mainstay at the Etihad but whose fall-off in play has been a major reason why the club hasn’t been able to perform up to its caliber in recent years. Regardless of the fall-off, however — and the fact that he was left off England’s World Cup roster this summer — Foden is still quite formidable.

There are so many other great stars on Manchester City that it’s hard to even wrap one’s head around just how talented it truly is. So for all the squabbling about how the dynasty is over, just know that Haaland and company are still capable of achieving great things for Manchester’s “second” club.

Manchester United

Is Manchester United back?

Much like Texas in college football, soccer fans have spent years asking that same question. Is this the year that everything clicks for Man U? Will the resurgence finally emerge for good? It’s a hard question to pin down. Over the last five years, Manchester United has finished sixth, third, eighth, 15th and third. Talk about inconsistency.

Ever since the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson, consistency has been hard to come by. Heading into 2026-27, the only question that fills my head is whether consistency can be achieved. It really is like Texas, isn’t it?

One quick way to analyze Manchester United’s squad makeup is that it’s old. Bruno Fernandes, Luke Shaw and Harry Maguire were all centerpieces of last year’s team, and all of them are on the wrong side of 30. That’s not to mention that Casemiro, 34, was also one of the linchpins of the operation, though he’s no longer involved.

That begs the question of whether those players will be able to sustain the level of performance necessary to compete at a high level in the Premier League. If they aren’t, which young guns will step up in their place and make sure that everything is as delightful and wonderful as an Ella Langley song?

Twenty-one-year-old Kobbie Mainoo would be a prime candidate to fit this bill, as would 22-year-old Andrey Santos. There are others as well, such as Leny Yoro (20), Ayden Heaven (19), Patrick Dorgu (21) and Shea Lacey (19). Twenty-three-year-old Benjamin Sesko is a good contender to step up, too.

To me, that’s not the major question heading into the season, though. Instead, it’s what will Manchester United do with Marcus Rashford?

This isn’t a secret to anybody familiar with what’s going on in Manchester. Rashford wants to leave. Man U wants to shed the money attached to him.

He was on loan at Barcelona last year, and Barça didn’t desire to keep him around as it sought out a three-peat in La Liga. So, can Man U find a suitable home for him before the Sept. 1 transfer deadline, or will he be staying in red until at least January? Talk about drama. Plop down on the couch and pull out the popcorn, because this Bravo show is going to be good!

I think there’s a legitimate argument to be made that Manchester United can succeed at an extremely high level in 2026-27. The floor is very high — maybe even top five — but I’m not sure the ceiling is a title. The squad is back in the Champions League, so that will divert its attention somewhat domestically, but it should also invigorate a fanbase that’s been seeking some semblance of joy since Ferguson decided to call it quits.

But don’t pity the Manchester United fan, by the way. These are still the New York Yankees of English soccer.

Newcastle United

Everybody that is anybody seems to be gone, but there is a new crop of young talent that has entered the fold that will be here to (maybe) save the day from disaster.

Sandro Tonali (Tottenham, €108 million), Bruno Guimarães (Arsenal, €87.5 million), Anthony Gordon (Barcelona, €70 million) and so much more — all gone! Manager Eddie Howe, gone! There’s so much change and so much upheaval that it almost feels unfair to discuss this Newcastle team as a continuation of the last one.

It’s officially “Newcastle 2.0.”

And like most sequels, nobody has any clue whether it will be better than the original or if it’ll make everybody wish for the good old days.

If there’s one goal for Newcastle in 2026-27, it’s a top-10 finish. I don’t know how anything else would be realistic. Because while the club technically has the wealthiest owner in the sport in the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, the expectations that came about after that purchase have just never been fully realized.

Now it’s time for Newcastle to find its identity. A young crop of talent is here, but what will the team decide to do with it? The first version of this Newcastle project became about Champions League qualification, massive signings and finally ending a 70-year domestic trophy drought. This one feels a whole lot more mysterious.

Nottingham Forest

Gwen Stefani would’ve loved Nottingham Forest last year because, man, was it bananas.

Two years ago, Forest finished seventh and returned to Europe for the first time in roughly three decades. Last year, everything promptly went bananas. Nuno Espírito Santo left in September. Ange Postecoglou lasted 39 days. Sean Dyche came and went. Vítor Pereira eventually finished the season in charge.

Forest finished 16th, surviving, but only after running through managers like I run through a box of Little Debbie honey buns on a long road trip. At a certain point, I’m surprised they didn’t simply start pulling names out of a hat.

Now Oliver Glasner is here, and if there’s a reason to be excited about Forest, that’s it. Glasner arrives after a ridiculously successful spell at Crystal Palace, where he won the FA Cup and Conference League, and he’s proven that he can take a talented Premier League squad and turn it into something genuinely dangerous.

Forest still has Morgan Gibbs-White, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Chris Wood, among others, meaning this isn’t some barren wasteland that Glasner has been asked to rebuild from scratch. There have been changes, most notably Elliott Anderson’s gigantic move to Manchester City, but there’s still enough here that Forest should be considerably better than the team that spent last season wandering through the wilderness.

My biggest question is whether everybody can simply remain calm for nine months. That might be asking too much considering everything we’ve learned about Nottingham Forest, but Glasner is really good, the squad has talent and City Ground remains one of the coolest places in the Premier League.

If Forest can go an entire season without employing enough managers to fill out a starting basketball lineup, something around midtable sounds delightful.

Sunderland

When your stadium is called the Stadium of Light, people’s ears should be perked up immediately. That’s just objectively a wonderful stadium name. Imagine playing somewhere called the Stadium of Darkness. Awful. Grim. I want no part of that.

Fortunately for Sunderland, the soccer was pretty bright last season, too.

Sunderland pulled off a miracle last year, going from promotion to an immediate top-10 finish, placing seventh. European football is all of a sudden on the calendar. After being in League One just four years ago, it’s an unprecedented rise, one that’s sure to capture the hearts and minds of soccer fans across the world.

Doubt is easy when it comes to Sunderland, and I have my fair share of it. Being stretched too thin is definitely a real thing, and Sunderland has the potential to have too much on its plate with the Premier League, domestic cups and Europe. How well the Black Cats juggle all those games will determine whether they’ll be staying up in the Premier League when everything is said and done.

To be clear, I don’t believe Sunderland is destined for a bad season. Sure, I think they’ll finish somewhere near the bottom of the table, but that doesn’t mean a nice run in the FA Cup or Europa League is completely out of the question. This doesn’t have to be seventh place or bust.

The bad news is that some of the standout performers from last year are gone. Jobe Bellingham, the brother of Jude, is now at Borussia Dortmund. Can Sunderland manage without him?

Speaking of managing, Régis Le Bris is now faced with what some would call impossible expectations. He was able to lift this squad out of the ashes and keep it in the top flight. Can he do it again, all while juggling more than just the domestic slate? It’s an interesting proposition, one that I’ll be keeping an eye on for the entirety of the season.

Tottenham Hotspur

Back-to-back 17th-place finishes just aren’t going to cut it at Tottenham. As optimistic as I want to be about Spurs — I picked them to finish seventh — it’s hard to forget that. Yes, Tottenham unloaded the money roll and went for broke this summer with transfers, but this is the same group that assembled the last two teams that were almost sent down to the Championship.

I’ve seen some tout this Tottenham squad as one that could find a way into the Champions League next season, and while I understand the premise of that argument, I’m not going to entertain anything other than a top 10 before going that far. It’s important to remember just how crap the last two seasons have been.

Sure, there’s a Europa League title mixed in there that somewhat alleviates the pain, but there are also two straight 17th-place finishes, with the second one almost resulting in the club being relegated down to the second division for the first time in ages. Optimism is fine. Lord knows I’m susceptible to it when Tottenham is involved. But let’s be realistic here.

The people shouting about the optimism have good reason, though! Roberto De Zerbi came in toward the end of last year and was able to keep everything afloat. He remains.

Add in the fact that Tottenham has spent roughly €267 million this summer on players such as Sandro Tonali (Newcastle United, €108 million), Mateus Fernandes (West Ham United, €99 million) and Jan Paul van Hecke (Brighton & Hove Albion, €60 million), among others, and one can see how Tottenham fans are getting all high and mighty all of a sudden. Oh, and there are rumors that the club could be after two Manchester City players in Savinho and Omar Marmoush as well.

Talk about greed. I love it.

But the transfer market is historically inefficient, so there’s every possibility in the world that these moves fall flat — at least at the onset. Spending hundreds of millions of euros is very fun in July and August because everybody is new and nothing could possibly bring down the joy.

Eventually, unfortunately, the players have to actually play soccer.

One strength, one weakness: The backline has been completely redone, and I’m extremely pleased. I think this defense will be formidable and much better than previous iterations. The weakness is that, if nothing else is done this transfer window, the front line is not all that inspiring. Where the goals come from is a fantastic question.

At the end of the day, Tottenham is just hoping for two things: improvement and a shot at competing in Europe once again next season. If that is accomplished, then this year will have been a success that can be built upon heading into 2027-28.

And if Spurs actually finish seventh after I predicted them to finish seventh, I reserve the right to become completely insufferable about it.

There’s a reason it has become the biggest domestic soccer league in the world, pulling in players from every corner of the globe, spending ridiculous amounts of money every summer and creating a weekly television product that has somehow convinced millions of Americans that waking up at 6:30 on a Saturday morning is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Some of that is marketing, some of it is money and some of it is simply the fact that the Premier League has more clubs capable of doing interesting things than just about anywhere else in Europe — or maybe even the world.

And heading into 2026-27, there are a lot of interesting things happening.

Arsenal finally got over the hump last season, winning its first Premier League title in more than two decades after three consecutive second-place finishes. Manchester City is entering the post-Pep Guardiola era, Liverpool stole Andoni Iraola away from Bournemouth, Chelsea handed another enormously expensive collection of players to Xabi Alonso and nine of the league’s 20 clubs will enter the season with a different manager than the one they had a year ago. Mikel Arteta, somehow, is now the longest-tenured manager in the Premier League as well as the sole head man to actually win it, which says just as much about the chaos everywhere else as it does about the stability Arsenal has built in North London.

There are fascinating stories further down the table, too. Bournemouth is preparing to play European football for the first time in club history, Brighton will have another crack at Europe after a run of impressive domestic performances, Coventry City is back in the top flight after a 25-year absence and Brentford might have assembled the most talented squad it has ever had. Aston Villa is trying to follow up a Europa League title while replacing several of its most important players, Crystal Palace has to figure out what life looks like without Oliver Glasner and Fulham has made one of the managerial hires that I’m most skeptical about anywhere on the continent.

So, much like I did with La Liga, we’re going to go through every single team and try to figure out what exactly we’re dealing with.

Because there are 20 teams and I have a propensity to write too many words, this is going to be split into two parts. Part 1 of The Football Corner’s Ultimate 2026-27 Premier League Preview covers Arsenal through Fulham, with Part 2 picking up with the other half of the league. We’ll look at who came in, who went out, what each team did last season and, more importantly, the stories and questions that I think will determine where all 20 of these clubs are headed over the next nine months.

Arsenal

Losing the Champions League final to Paris Saint-Germain last May was absolutely devastating — Gabriel’s miss during the penalty shootout has already become one of the most memeable moments of the last several years in sports — but there really isn’t any reason to believe that this operation isn’t once again one of the favorites to lift the trophy when everything is said and done. That’s been the trajectory for Arsenal for several years now, and after finally getting over the hump domestically last season, the question surrounding Mikel Arteta’s team has shifted from whether it can actually win something to just how much it can win.

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José Mourinho is back. Barcelona is chasing a three-peat. Málaga has returned to the top flight. Sevilla might be going down into the depths of despair. And somehow, that’s only scratching the surface of what we’re about to get in La Liga this season.

Oh, this is going to be fun.

At the top, the hierarchy feels pretty straightforward. Real Madrid and Barcelona are the favorites, as they almost always are. Atlético Madrid is right on their heels, hoping this is finally the year it can do more than simply finish behind Spain’s two superpowers.

After that? Good luck.

Villarreal should be in the European conversation. Athletic Club is coming off a disappointing season but has a new manager and a roster that I think is capable of a significant rebound. Rayo Vallecano has enough going on — both good and bad — to make it one of the teams I’m most interested in watching. And then there are three promoted clubs with stories that make them almost impossible not to root for.

This La Liga season is so interesting to me. Yes, the title race is probably going to revolve around the same familiar names, but there’s so much more happening beneath them that deserves attention.

So rather than going club by club and pretending I have equally strong feelings about all 20 teams, I want to do this a little differently. These are the stories, teams, players and potential disasters that I’m most intrigued by as the 2026-27 La Liga campaign gets underway this upcoming weekend.

And there really isn’t anywhere better to start than with the two-time defending champions.

Can Barcelona Make It Three Straight?

There is a natural tendency when talking about Barcelona these days to begin with Lamine Yamal, which is understandable considering he has already become one of the defining players in world football despite only turning 19 this summer. There are moments when the ball arrives at his feet on the right side and the entire match seems to bend toward him, defenders retreating and teammates beginning their runs because everyone in the stadium knows something might be about to happen. He is already that kind of player, and the frightening part for the rest of Europe is that we are still talking about someone who would be a freshman in college if he were attending university in the United States.

But focusing too much on Yamal risks missing what makes this Barcelona team so intimidating to its competition.

Look around him. Raphinha remains on the left, Dani Olmo can drift through the middle and Pedri continues to play with the sort of grace that makes football seem much simpler than it actually is. Frenkie de Jong gives Barça another player capable of controlling the rhythm of a match, while the additions of Anthony Gordon and Karim Adeyemi provide manager Hansi Flick with even more speed and versatility in an attack that was hardly starving for either. There is so much technical ability throughout the midfield and forward line that you can spend a few minutes simply imagining the combinations Flick can put together and still forget somebody.

It is, quite frankly, a ridiculous collection of footballers.

There is one important piece missing, though, and it happens to be the easiest thing in football to recognize and one of the hardest things to replace: goals.

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For the past month and a half, the World Cup has consumed my life. Pretty much every brain cell I possessed was focused on the universe’s greatest sporting event. It was an absolute joy, and I’m genuinely bummed that it’s over.

Before the tournament even started, I wrote that the World Cup is built on dreams. Those dreams are different depending on the nation. Brazil, the five-time champions who entered the tournament in the midst of a 24-year World Cup title drought, hoped to erase the failures of the recent past and reclaim their place atop the footballing world. England believed this might finally be the generation that brought football home after 60 years of waiting. Argentina wanted to give Lionel Messi one more magical ride. Morocco dreamed of proving that 2022 wasn’t a fluke. The United States wanted to show that soccer had truly arrived in America. Every nation arrived with a different story, but every one of them was chasing the exact same ending.

Only one of those dreams came true.

Spain, perhaps not the flashiest team in the tournament, simply suffocated everybody in its path. It wasn’t always filled with spectacular moments. Its journey didn’t always take our breath away. But it was always relentless. The Spanish pressed opponents into mistakes, dominated possession without becoming wasteful and defended with a discipline that bordered on perfection. Outside of a shaky opening match against Cape Verde, nobody ever really looked comfortable against them. Austria couldn’t solve them. Portugal couldn’t solve them. Belgium couldn’t solve them. France, surprisingly, couldn’t solve them. And in the final, neither could Argentina. Messi magic carried the Argentines all the way to the championship match, but even magic has its limits when it’s staring down a team that never lets you breathe.

During the FOX broadcast, Stu Holden said something that perfectly summed up Spain: “The star is the team.”

Sure, Spain has stars. Lamine Yamal is already one of the most electric players on Earth. Rodri remains the best midfielder in football. Nico Williams, Pedri and the rest of that squad could walk into almost any starting XI in the world. But none of them ever felt bigger than the crest on the front of the shirt. They won because they functioned as one complete unit. In a tournament that revolved around individual brilliance, there was something refreshing about watching the best team simply be ... the best team.

Oddly enough, though, Spain probably won’t be what I remember most from this World Cup. Thirty years from now, I don’t think my mind will immediately jump to Spain lifting the trophy in New Jersey. Instead, it’ll jump to the stories.

It’ll jump to Cape Verde nearly shocking Argentina in one of the greatest underdog performances I’ve ever watched. It’ll jump to Mexico nearly throwing England out of the Azteca in the Round of 16. It’ll jump to Norway’s unbelievable tournament, Erling Haaland proudly carrying around that stuffed raccoon, Paraguay stunning Germany, Morocco breaking Dutch hearts on penalties, Jude Bellingham somehow becoming an even bigger superstar than he already was, Argentina roaring back against Egypt, the breathtaking Golden Boot race, Scotland’s Tartan Army taking over cities across America, the United States smashing Paraguay before digging deep to eliminate Bosnia and Herzegovina while playing with 10 men.

Those are the moments that make the World Cup what it is.

Those are the moments that I’ll carry with me forever.

Even the controversies somehow become part of the memories. The Folarin Balogun red card debacle remains, in my opinion, the biggest blemish on this entire tournament. While I still believe that the decision to send Balogun off was incorrect, the process of reinstating his eligibility was suspicious at best. But as time has passed, I’ve found myself thinking less about the whole situation and more about Balogun’s response afterward. He refused to lash out following the red card. He even shook the referee’s hand after the match concluded. His insistence that little kids watching deserved to see somebody handle adversity the right way was awe-inspiring. If there was one player whose reputation skyrocketed throughout this World Cup, it was Balogun’s. He arrived as an excellent striker. He leaves feeling like somebody who should become the face of soccer in the United States for years to come.

There will be plenty of conversations over the coming months about what this tournament means for soccer in America. Will it create new fans? Will kids pick up a ball because they watched Malik Tillman or Balogun this summer? How will MLS benefit from everything? Honestly, I have no clue. Those questions often take years to fully answer.

What I do know is this: For a month and a half, the world’s game descended upon the United States, and people paid attention.

Maybe they watched every match. Maybe they only tuned in for the United States. Maybe they spent the entire tournament arguing about offside and VAR. That’s OK. They still watched. They still cared. For a few wonderful weeks, soccer dominated conversations around the country in a way that it almost never does outside of a World Cup. That counts for something.

As for me, I’m sticking around.

Soccer has become an integral part of my life over the past five years, especially the last three. Saturday mornings begin with the Premier League. Midweek afternoons belong to the Champions League, which I firmly believe is the second-greatest sporting tournament in the world behind only the World Cup itself. Every season introduces new stories, new rivalries and new reasons to fall in love with the sport all over again. This tournament didn’t create that passion for me. It simply reminded me why it exists.

And here’s the fun part: The stories aren’t over.

In just a few weeks, many of the players who became household names across America during this World Cup will return to their clubs. Arsenal will try to defend its Premier League title. Real Madrid will once again chase European glory. Barcelona will look to reclaim its place atop Spain. Bayern Munich, Inter Milan, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain will all have stories worth following. Lamine Yamal will continue dazzling defenders for Barcelona. Jude Bellingham will still be Jude Bellingham. Kylian Mbappé will keep doing ridiculous things. Erling Haaland will keep scoring goals that defy logic. The World Cup might be over, but the players who made it unforgettable aren’t going anywhere.

If this tournament introduced you to those players for the very first time, don’t let that be where your journey ends.

Because if the past month and a half proved anything, it’s that this sport has an endless supply of stories waiting to be told.

As I stood in front of the television wearing the same outfit — a gray shirt with an American flag and Tottenham Hotspur pajama pants — that I’d worn for all four of the United States’ previous World Cup matches, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d been here before. Four years ago, the USMNT fell out of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to the Netherlands in what was a fairly miserable effort. Four years later, the team that had captured the hearts and minds of millions of Americans nationwide had, for seemingly the billionth time, crashed and burned in the Round of 16.

All credit to Belgium. It was evident they took the Folarin Balogun reinstatement as a personal affront. They were quicker to every ball, crisper with every pass and better at finishing their chances. There was never a moment where it appeared they weren’t in control. Even when Malik Tillman, who emerged as one of the best things about this tournament for the United States, tied the game midway through the first half, Belgium had an immediate response. It felt like every time the Americans showed the slightest bit of life, the Red Devils immediately snuffed it out. By the end of the night, there wasn’t much left to analyze other than a team that was simply second-best in every facet of the game.

For three weeks, it appeared the United States had turned a corner when it came to performing at the international level. Mauricio Pochettino had unlocked a swagger, a hunger that this program hadn’t shown in years. Even the Balogun red card against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Round of 32 couldn’t stop the mojo. And when Balogun was subsequently reinstated just 36 hours before the match against Belgium, it looked like the universe wanted the United States’ journey to continue. Maybe destiny had finally decided to throw American soccer a bone.

But sometimes dreams, however amazing they might be, are just dreams. Sometimes reality is harsh. Sometimes the lights are simply too bright.

It’s hard to analyze the United States’ performance at this World Cup because two things can be true at the same time. On one hand, this was a fantastic improvement over what had been a lackluster cycle since 2022. The team looked more dangerous. More confident. More willing to take the game to its opponent rather than simply survive. For the first time in a long time, there was a genuine feeling that this program was building toward something meaningful. But the exit was so disastrous and so embarrassing that it almost wipes away all of that goodwill. The USMNT needed a trip to the quarterfinals to make this run feel undeniably different from the previous ones. This program had reached the Round of 16 before. That wasn’t uncharted territory. It was the next step that would’ve sent everybody to the moon.

Belgium had other ideas. Several of its players admitted after the match that Balogun’s reinstatement served as extra motivation in a game that otherwise lacked much external fuel for the Red Devils. While that certainly wasn’t the sole reason the United States couldn’t keep up with Belgium, I don’t think it can be completely discounted, either. Sports are emotional, and if Belgium genuinely believed FIFA had handed the Americans an unfair advantage, that’s something that can absolutely sharpen a team’s focus. One has to wonder whether Balogun sitting out the match, as originally intended prior to FIFA’s intervention, changes anything. Maybe the United States still loses. Belgium was the better side regardless, after all. But maybe it loses with a little more dignity than whatever the heck that was.

I am still so frazzled by all of this, if you couldn’t tell. It would’ve been perfectly fine if the United States had lost in a competitive match. That happens. Belgium, despite being in what I believe are the twilight years of its golden generation, is still one of the 10 best national teams on the planet. It has world-class players all over the field and enough quality to beat just about anybody when it’s clicking on all cylinders. Losing to Belgium isn’t embarrassing. Going out in the fashion the United States did is. That’s the part that’s going to sting for a long time, especially after FIFA gift-wrapped the team’s star striker back onto the field for some bizarre reason. In other words, the United States was handed a freebie by FIFA and the universe and simply couldn’t take advantage.

Quite frankly, everything and everybody sucked. Sergiño Dest was terrible. Tim Ream was especially abhorrent on the back end. Matt Freese’s error that resulted in Belgium’s third goal was perhaps the most demoralizing moment of my soccer-watching life because any lingering hope that the Americans could somehow find their way back into the game disappeared the second that ball crossed the line. Christian Pulisic, the face of this USMNT and, according to virtually every media outlet on Earth, the team’s best player, was arguably the worst player on the field. It was the type of collective performance that makes an entire nation want to crawl into a hole and avoid talking about soccer for the next four years.

Let’s talk about Pulisic for a moment because he deserves his own conversation. Outside of a tantalizing first 45 minutes against Paraguay in the tournament opener, the AC Milan winger looked average at best and downright poor at worst. He was dealing with an injury for most of the World Cup, sure, but that’s also been the book on Pulisic throughout much of his career. He just struggles to stay on the field. That’s unfortunate, but it’s also reality. When the United States needed its biggest star to put together the performance of his life in the biggest match this generation of American players has ever experienced, it simply didn’t happen. Whether it was because of injury, poor form or some combination of the two really doesn’t matter in the end. The United States needed Christian Pulisic to be the “LeBron James of soccer.” Instead, he looked a lot more like Anthony Bennett.

So, was this a positive World Cup for the United States? I honestly think the answer is still yes, even after everything that happened Monday night. The game is undoubtedly going to grow in popularity because of this tournament being played on American soil. Millions of people who never would’ve watched a soccer match before have now experienced the drama, the passion and the chaos that make the World Cup unlike anything else in sports.

There have been so many incredible stories throughout the past month. Lionel Messi battling Kylian Mbappé atop the Golden Boot race. Erling Haaland finally getting his moment with Norway. Cape Verde stunning the world against the likes of Spain and Argentina. This tournament has had everything, and the United States managed to become one of those stories for a little while, too. The 4-1 win over Paraguay was one of the best sporting moments of my life. So was the 2-0 victory over Australia a week later. Beating Bosnia and Herzegovina the way they did was genuinely uplifting and only made me love this sport even more than I already did.

But losing 4-1 to Belgium, the same nation that ended the United States’ hopes and dreams back in 2014, was such a gut punch that it overshadows almost everything that came before it. Few people are going to remember that Paraguay game now. Even fewer will remember Australia. All people are going to remember from this World Cup run are three things: Balogun’s controversial red card against Bosnia and Herzegovina, FIFA’s bizarre decision to reinstate him for the Round of 16, and then the absolute wet fart of a performance the United States delivered against Belgium. Fair or unfair, that’s the type of stuff history tends to remember.

In the end, everything remains the same. The United States is out in the Round of 16 of the World Cup once again. The program has unquestionably taken steps forward, but it still has a long way to go before it can seriously dream about winning this tournament. Maybe that day is coming in the distant future. Maybe these past three weeks were the first real signs that American soccer is finally starting to mature into something somewhat capable of competing with the world’s elite. I certainly hope so.

For now, though, I’m left trying to process another Round of 16 exit, wondering what could’ve been had things broken just a little differently, and preparing myself for another emotionally exhausting season of watching Tottenham Hotspur.

The universe is cruel sometimes.

More World Cup

Let’s get this out of the way: FIFA is a corrupt organization, and it has been for a long time.

It often does things that are, at best, questionable and, at worst, filled to the brim with scandal. That’s just the way of the footballing world, and we’ve all, to some degree, come to accept it. Furthermore, Gianni Infantino’s tenure as FIFA president has been, to put it lightly, a mess. Ever wonder why Qatar and Saudi Arabia are hosting World Cups? Or why hydration breaks exist? Look no further than Infantino. He has shown time and time again that he’ll do just about anything to further his own interests alongside those he calls friends.

So, when FIFA inexplicably suspended Folarin Balogun’s automatic one-game suspension following his controversial red card in the United States’ 2-0 Round of 32 victory over Bosnia and Herzegovina, the public was right to raise its eyebrows.

This has happened only once before in World Cup history. Brazilian legend Garrincha was sent off in the 1962 World Cup semifinal against Chile but was ultimately allowed to play in the final, which Brazil won. That was more than six decades ago. It seemed like an awfully strange time for FIFA to dust off that precedent.

Let’s get another thing clear: Balogun’s foul against Bosnia and Herzegovina probably shouldn’t have been a red card in the first place.

The Video Assistant Referee (VAR), alongside the referee on the field, appeared to utilize slow-motion replay to determine that Balogun should be sent off. That is a violation of VAR’s own protocol. Slow motion is intended to help officials determine the point of contact on factual decisions, not the intensity of a challenge. For subjective decisions such as serious foul play, officials are instructed to evaluate the incident primarily at normal speed because slow motion can make challenges appear more deliberate and severe than they actually were in real time.

In other words, there is a legitimate argument that the process leading to Balogun’s red card was flawed from the beginning.

And then FIFA entered the arena.

FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee cited Article 27, which essentially gives the organization broad authority to suspend or modify disciplinary sanctions when it deems appropriate (aka whenever the heck it wants). The same article had already been invoked before the tournament to ensure that Cristiano Ronaldo would remain eligible for Portugal’s opening two group-stage matches.

Viewed strictly through that lens, FIFA ruling Balogun eligible again isn’t all that remarkable. Weird? Sure! But an outrage? Not really. There is at least some precedent through Ronaldo’s case, and the committee appears to have acted within the letter of its own regulations.

The problem isn’t necessarily that FIFA reached this conclusion. The problem is that FIFA never explained how it reached this conclusion.

To date, there has been no written or oral explanation as to why the Disciplinary Committee believed this specific suspension warranted intervention while countless others throughout World Cup history have not. If Article 27 exists for extraordinary circumstances, surely this qualifies as a situation that deserves an extraordinary explanation.

Instead, everyone has been left to endlessly speculate.

As a hardcore supporter of the USMNT, I think that’s flat-out fishy.

Add in the fact that the White House made a direct call to Infantino, and the waters become even muddier.

Let’s give everybody the benefit of the doubt here, though.

Let’s assume FIFA acted completely independently and that any outside pressure from political figures played no role whatsoever in determining Balogun’s eligibility. That’s entirely possible. If that’s what happened, then fine. But if that’s the case, why won’t FIFA simply tell us why Balogun’s case deserved this type of result? More importantly, why won’t it tell Belgium?

Belgium has every right to be upset about this decision. Imagine preparing for the biggest match of your tournament under the assumption that your opponent’s starting striker is suspended, only to learn 36 hours before kickoff that FIFA has reversed course. Whether Balogun deserved to miss the match isn’t really the point. Belgium deserved to know why the governing body suddenly decided that one of the most rigid disciplinary rules in the sport no longer applied.

That explanation has yet to come.

Instead, FIFA merely cited Article 27 and moved on, leaving everyone else to fill in the blanks. That’s an incredibly strange way to handle a decision of this magnitude. If there is a legitimate legal or procedural justification — and there very well may be — why not share it? Why not explain exactly what made this case different from the countless controversial red cards that have resulted in automatic suspensions over the decades?

Transparency benefits everyone here. It benefits the United States because it eliminates the whispers that FIFA bent the rules to help the tournament hosts. It benefits Belgium because it allows its players, coaches and supporters to understand why the decision was made, even if they ultimately disagree with it. More importantly, it benefits FIFA because the organization so desperately needs credibility whenever it exercises broad discretionary powers.

Instead, FIFA chose silence.

And it’s that silence that makes this feel so uncomfortable.

As a U.S. supporter, I’m thrilled Balogun gets to play against Belgium. I also happen to believe the original red card was incorrect. Those two things can both be true. But they don’t erase the fact that Belgium has every right to ask questions, and it has every right to expect answers from the organization running the world’s biggest sporting event.

Football has always operated with certain hard-and-fast rules, and an automatic one-match suspension after a red card has long been one of them. There have been controversial dismissals before. There have been players who missed massive matches because referees got it wrong. There have even been World Cups decided by officiating mistakes that were never corrected after the fact. Fair or unfair, that’s just sports sometimes.

That’s why this decision feels so unusual. It’s not that FIFA reached a result that many people agree with. It’s that it reached that result through a process it has almost never used before and then declined to explain why.

If FIFA believes it got this one right, then it should have no problem showing everyone how it reached that conclusion.

Unfortunately, it has allowed speculation to replace transparency.

Maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this. I genuinely hope there is. Until FIFA decides to share it, though, the controversy isn’t going anywhere.

And honestly, that’s entirely its own doing.

Go, go USA.

The United States plays Bosnia and Herzegovina tonight at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, and I could not be more nervous.

The group stage was one thing. Those matches brought a level of anxiety that I hadn’t experienced in a long time. But the knockout rounds are a completely different animal. There are no second chances anymore. Win and you keep dreaming. Lose and it’s all over.

On paper, the United States is the better team. The FIFA rankings — which should always be taken with an extra grain of salt — say the Americans are comfortably ahead of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The talent is there. The depth appears to be there, too. The manager is certainly there. Everything points toward the United States moving on.

But games aren’t played on paper. (Have I said that before?)

They’re played on grass by actual human beings who are capable of producing moments of absolute genius just as easily as they are capable of making mistakes that leave you staring blankly at your television wondering what in the world just happened.

That’s why I think there are really two ways to look at tonight’s match. There’s the emotional side, and then there’s the tactical side. The emotional side says this game is a lot more even than people might like to think. Both nations are playing in the biggest match in their modern soccer history. For Bosnia and Herzegovina, simply reaching this stage is unprecedented. Never before has the country advanced to the knockout rounds of a World Cup, and now it’s one victory away from a place in the Round of 16. History is staring the Bosnians directly in the face, and teams with nothing to lose can be awfully dangerous.

The United States is carrying a different type of pressure. The World Cup is being played on home soil in front of millions of Americans who desperately want to believe this program has finally turned the corner. Mauricio Pochettino has changed the mood surrounding this team in just a matter of weeks, and now his players have an opportunity to validate all of that optimism. Win tonight and suddenly the quarterfinals don’t seem so far away. The dream begins to feel tangible. People start convincing themselves that maybe this really is the generation that can do something no American team has ever done before. That’s the magic of the World Cup. Hope snowballs into belief faster than at any other sporting event.

Fortunately for the Americans, the tactical matchup points in their favor. Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost certainly going to defend deep, sit in a low block and dare the United States to find a way through. It’ll gladly surrender possession if it means creating opportunities on the counterattack. That’s been the blueprint for underdogs throughout this tournament, and we’ve already seen just how effective it can be. Spain couldn’t solve Cape Verde. Portugal struggled to maneuver around DR Congo. England had similar problems against Ghana. Germany spent 120 frustrating minutes trying to break down Paraguay before crashing out on penalties. These defensive setups are designed to frustrate favorites until frustration evolves into panic.

The encouraging news is that the United States has already shown it knows how to navigate those tricky waters. Paraguay tried something similar in the tournament opener. 4-1, United States. Australia wasn’t much different a week later. 2-0, United States. Pochettino’s pressing system is built to overwhelm teams that want to sit back by forcing turnovers high up the field and preventing opponents from ever getting too comfortable. If the Americans play to their standard, chances are going to come. The biggest key is making sure one of those chances finds the back of the net early.

Nothing destroys a defensive game plan faster than conceding in the opening stages of a match. An early American goal would force Bosnia and Herzegovina to abandon the low block and chase the game, creating exactly the type of open spaces that Christian Pulisic, Folarin Balogun and Weston McKennie thrive in. On the flip side, if the scoreboard still reads 0-0 at halftime — or worse, Bosnia has found a goal on the counterattack — the pressure inside Levi’s Stadium will become almost unbearable. Low blocks become more effective and more difficult to break the longer they’re allowed to survive, and every missed opportunity chips away at a team’s confidence. That’s why the opening 20 or 30 minutes feel so important tonight.

Thankfully, quick starts have become something of a trademark for this American team. The United States scored within the first 10 minutes in all three of its group-stage matches, immediately putting opponents on the back foot and allowing Pochettino’s style to dictate the rest of the contest. If the United States can do that one more time, it will put itself in an excellent position to keep this World Cup journey alive.

More than anything, though, I’m just grateful we get to experience a night like this. A World Cup on home soil. A United States team that genuinely believes it can accomplish something special. Tens of thousands of supporters packing Levi’s Stadium while millions more watch from around the country hoping to witness another step forward for American soccer. This is the type of occasion fans wait years to experience, and now it’s finally here.

I just hope the ride doesn’t end tonight.

More World Cup

I entered Monday night’s match between Morocco and the Netherlands with one objective in mind: watch the Dutch go out and take what was theirs.

What do I mean by that? I wanted to see the Netherlands finally announce itself as one of the favorites to win this World Cup. Beat Morocco and the Oranje were staring at a golden opportunity. A trip to the quarterfinals was almost certainly waiting – taking down Canada in the Round of 16 wouldn’t have been a tricky proposition – and from there, who knows? Every World Cup champion needs a moment where it grabs the tournament by the throat and tells everybody else, “We’re here.” I thought this would be that moment for the Dutch.

Now, don’t get it twisted. Beating Morocco is no easy endeavor. The Moroccans are one of the best teams in Africa, if not the world. Fueled by a diaspora community that’s transfored the way the country views its national team, Morocco has followed its remarkable run to the 2022 semifinals by putting together another outstanding World Cup. They’re young, talented and incredibly well organized. Still, even with all of that in mind, I thought the Netherlands were the better team. At least on paper, I believed the Dutch had enough quality to dictate the match rather than spend the evening reacting to it.

But games aren’t played on paper.

Morocco revolves around Achraf Hakimi. He’s one of the best players in the world and the heartbeat of almost everything the Atlas Lions do. Slow him down and you dramatically increase your chances of winning. That part of Ronald Koeman’s game plan made perfect sense.

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Germany 7, Brazil 1.

That’s the score of the first soccer game I remember watching in its entirety. While the match itself happened on July 8, 2014, I actually laid my eyes upon it a year later when it was replayed on some network prior to the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup final. The timing of the viewing doesn’t really matter. All that does is the impression I was given. As somebody who was just beginning to discover this wonderful sport, Germany didn’t simply look like the best team in the world. It looked unbeatable. It looked like a dynasty that would spend the next decade-plus collecting trophies like a child collects coins.

For those unfamiliar, the infamous Mineiraço — as the match is called in Brazil — occurred during the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. The two world powers met in the semifinals in Belo Horizonte with more than 58,000 people in the stands spurring them on. If Brazil could find a way to win, then its hopes and dreams of capturing a sixth star on home soil remained alive. If Germany won, those dreams would be crushed.

What none of us knew at kickoff was just how thoroughly those dreams would be obliterated.

Goal after goal after goal flew into the back of the net for the Germans. In the span of six minutes during the first half, Germany scored four times, with Toni Kroos netting two while Miroslav Klose and Sami Khedira added the others. It wasn’t merely a defeat — it was a national embarrassment for Brazil and a coming-out party for Germany.

Several days later, Mario Götze’s extra-time winner against Argentina delivered Germany its fourth World Cup title. At that exact moment, there was nothing German football could do wrong. The squad was filled to the brim with superstars. Its youth system was the envy of the footballing world. Years and years of future success seemed preordained from the stars above. It appeared as if Germany had permanently planted its flag atop the footballing mountain.

Then the story turned.

The 2016 European Championship ended with a respectable semifinal defeat to host nation France. It was disappointing, but hardly alarming. Germany was still Germany. Then came the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia. Placed in a group with Sweden, Mexico and South Korea, the Germans looked primed for another deep run. Instead, they stumbled to a shocking defeat against Mexico before crashing out of the tournament with an even more stunning 2-0 loss to South Korea. I remember sitting there completely dumbfounded. The last time I’d really watched Germany play, it was dismantling Brazil 7-1. Now it couldn’t even survive the group stage.

Things never really recovered. Germany reached the Round of 16 at Euro 2020 before falling to England. The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar brought another painful group-stage exit after a loss to Japan ultimately proved too much to overcome. And while 2026 is technically an improvement because Germany actually escaped the group, it somehow feels like another step backward. Outside of a 7-1 demolition (throwback) of Curaçao and a narrow 2-1 victory over Côte d’Ivoire, Germany looked pedestrian throughout this tournament. Even in victory, it never felt worlds above its opposition. In the end, the warning signs were there all along.

Look, Paraguay should’ve been a layup. The Paraguayans had shown some teeth during qualifying, but they also got whooped 4-1 by the United States earlier in this tournament. Germany controlled 76% possession, outshot Paraguay six shots on target to three and held a 1.57-0.35 expected-goals advantage. Orlando Gill stood on his head in goal, making six saves, while Paraguay waited patiently for its chance. It finally came in the 42nd minute when Julio Enciso finished off a perfect counterattack. Kai Havertz brought Germany level nine minutes into the second half, but the breakthrough never truly arrived.

Well ... kind of.

Germany thought it had won the match in extra time before the goal was wiped away because of what the referee — with a VAR assist — ruled was a foul on the goalkeeper. (Germans far and wide will argue that it wasn’t a foul until the day they die.) Was it a foul? Probably. Does that sort of incidental contact usually get called? Not from what I watched in the Premier League this past season. If that same referee had officiated Arsenal all year, I’m fairly convinced the Gunners would’ve finished fourth instead of first. (I’m just jesting and am totally not salty.) Anyway, the goal came off the board, and the match drifted toward penalties, shifting all the pressure entirely onto Germany.

The drama that unfolded from there was magnificent. When Kai Havertz missed his first penalty, putting Germany in a hole straight from the jump, I gasped. I did the same when Paraguay somehow squandered two separate opportunities to put the shootout away. Then came perhaps the defining image of Germany’s tournament. Jonathan Tah, who reportedly only stepped forward because nobody else wanted the responsibility despite the fact that he’d never taken a penalty in a competitive match, launched his effort somewhere into the upper deck of Gillette Stadium. Moments later, Alan Cantero calmly buried the winner to hand Paraguay arguably the greatest victory in its footballing history while Germany walked off the field in shame.

“What happened to German football?” is the question everybody will be asking today, and the honest answer is that it’s complicated. This feels like a team stuck between generations, one that’s filled with technically gifted players but lacks an identity. Julian Nagelsmann spent much of the tournament facing criticism from some of Germany’s biggest football voices, and that couldn’t have helped the confidence in the dressing room, either. Rory Smith put it better than I ever could when he observed that Germany’s youth system “produces loads and loads and loads of the same players. They produce nothing but neat, technically good midfielders... They have no cutting edge.” Watching this team over the past three weeks, it’s hard to argue with that assessment.

Germany still has outstanding players. Jamal Musiala is brilliant. Florian Wirtz is brilliant. Kai Havertz has had brilliant moments throughout his career, too. But when the lights shine their brightest, something just seems to shrivel. France has Kylian Mbappé. Spain has Lamine Yamal. England has Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham. Argentina has Lionel Messi. Heck, Paraguay has Julio Enciso. Germany, despite all of its talent and a population of more than 84 million people, doesn’t seem to have that difference-maker anymore.

When I watched Germany dismantle Brazil all those years ago, I thought I was watching the birth of football’s next great dynasty. Looking back now, I was unknowingly watching the end of one.

The knockout rounds of the World Cup are finally here.

No more trifling around in the group stage wondering what the stakes are. No more scenarios involving goal differential, disciplinary points or pulling out a calculator to determine who needs what. The stakes are now crystal clear: win and advance. Lose, and your hopes and dreams of making history are done and dusted.

There’s something wonderful about the group stage that no other sporting event can quite replicate. It’s where the groundwork for the tournament is laid and where fans are introduced to teams they may have never watched before. It’s where a nation like Cape Verde suddenly captures the imagination of the entire world or where Norway transforms from an intriguing outsider into a legitimate contender. Supporters learn the players, adopt second-favorite teams and fall in love with stories they never expected to care about. The World Cup becomes less of a tournament and more of a global festival, with people from every corner of the planet gathering in one place. This summer, that place just so happens to be Canada, Mexico and the United States.

And that festival isn’t over. Not even close. But there’s certainly a different feeling in the air now.

The music is still playing. The supporters are (hopefully) still singing. The streets are still packed to the brim with jerseys from every imaginable nation. Yet the tension has become almost impossible to ignore because everybody knows one simple truth: One mistake can end everything. One poor clearance, one defensive lapse or one missed penalty can spell the doom of hopes and dreams a lifetime in the making. Ninety wonderful minutes — or perhaps 120 — can determine whether a country celebrates in the streets or spends the flight home wondering what might have been.

That, my friends, is knockout football.

For Americans, the closest touchpoint is probably March Madness. College basketball spends months building toward a tournament where one bad afternoon can erase an entire season’s worth of work and one good afternoon can create memories that last forever. The World Cup operates the same way. A nation can dominate qualifying, breeze through the group stage and look every bit like a future champion only to watch everything come crashing down because of one misplaced pass or one perfectly delivered corner kick. That’s what makes this stage of the tournament so exhilarating and, at the very same time, so terrifying.

This year’s edition carries an extra layer of intrigue because of the expanded field. For the first time ever, 32 teams have reached the knockout rounds. I’ll admit that I wasn’t entirely sure how this new format would play out. Would it water down the competition? Would the extra round simply delay the inevitable arrival of the traditional powers?

While the sample size is admittedly small, the answer has been a resounding no. If anything, it’s made the tournament even better!

Canada and South Africa started the Round of 32 with a battle that required a stoppage-time winner from the hosts just to survive. It sent the entire nation of Canada into joyous hysterics, while Bafana Bafana saw a magical run come to a heartbreaking conclusion. It was dramatic, emotional and exactly what the World Cup is supposed to be. Everything mattered because everything was on the line.

The knockout rounds can make people national heroes. Don’t believe me? Just ask Canada head coach Jesse Marsch, who, after the win over South Africa yesterday, called his players “Canadian heroes.”

But that’s not even the best part, because we’re just getting started.

From today through July 19, that’s the rhythm we’ll live by. Every day brings another collection of matches where entire nations place their hopes on 11 players wearing the same crest. There will be heroes. There will be villains. There will almost certainly be a giant that falls when nobody expects it and a smaller nation that refuses to believe its story is supposed to end. That’s the beauty of the World Cup. Reputation means very little once the whistle blows.

The Round of 32 is here for the first time in tournament history. Then comes the Round of 16. Then the quarterfinals. Then the semifinals. And finally, one last match at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19.

This is the greatest sporting tournament on Earth.

Just beat Panama and you’re first.

Simple enough, right?

England’s path out of Group L remains remarkably straightforward despite a frustrating scoreless draw against Ghana on Tuesday evening in Foxborough. Win the group-stage finale against Panama and the Three Lions will almost certainly claim first place. No calculators. No scoreboard watching. No praying for favors from somebody else. Just win the game in front of you and everything will be better than a sausage roll at Greggs. (That is a correct English reference, right? I’m trying my best over here.)

Of course, this is England we’re talking about. Nothing — and I mean absolutely nothing — is ever that simple.

Listen, every team is capable of putting up a dud at the World Cup. The odds of that occurring become exponentially higher when facing an opponent that’s more than content to park the bus and defend its butt off for 90 minutes. Ghana arrived in Massachusetts with a clear game plan and executed it brilliantly. England dominated possession, controlled territory and spent most of the evening camped out in the attacking third. Yet for all that control — and this is the funny thing about football — England never found the breakthrough it so desperately was seeking. As John Strong noted during the FOX broadcast, this wasn’t the first time the English had experienced some difficulties in Massachusetts.

It’s not like England didn’t have plenty of opportunities to win the match. Harry Kane’s late chance is the one that will haunt England fans until the Panama game rolls around. It was the type of opportunity that you’d expect the captain to bury nine times out of 10. Put that exact ball on his boot 100 times and he launches it into the back of the net more often than not. Instead, he sailed it into the stands. Sound familiar?

What I can’t stop thinking about, though, is a moment on the other end of the field. In the 79th minute, Ghana’s Prince Adu appeared to be taken down on a breakaway in what looked like a fairly obvious foul. Unless I’m missing something, England got away with one there. Had the referee pointed to the spot — and had VAR agreed — Ghana would’ve been awarded a penalty with a chance to take the lead in the waning minutes of the game. Maybe they score there, sending the entire nation of Ghana into a celebration the likes of which we’ve never seen. Maybe they don’t, giving England new life. We never got to see the fruits of it, meaning this match will always have a “what if?” attached to it in my mind. Because there’s a version of this contest where England walked away with zero points and a full-blown crisis on its hands.

Instead, the Three Lions escaped with a draw and remain in an excellent position moving forward. That’s important because winning this group matters — a lot.

The World Cup is difficult enough without voluntarily making the road harder on yourself. Finishing first in Group L would likely set England up with a Round of 32 matchup against DR Congo or Senegal before a potential Round of 16 meeting with either Mexico or (maybe) Scotland. Frankly, that’s a pretty favorable draw. Also, give me England versus Scotland at a World Cup any day of the week. The history, the tension and the inevitable overreaction from both sides would make for incredible theater. More importantly, though, it would represent a pathway that avoids some of the tournament’s bigger sharks during the early knockout rounds.

The alternative isn’t nearly as appealing. If England somehow stumbles against Panama and finishes second in the group, a matchup with either Colombia or Portugal likely awaits in Toronto on July 2. That’s a much different proposition. Both teams possess the type of attacking talent — Portugal especially — capable of ending a World Cup dream in 90 minutes. That’s why Tuesday’s draw, while disappointing, doesn’t actually change all that much other than the timeline. England still controls its own destiny.

The reason the path matters so much is because England really needs this World Cup. It’s been 60 long years since football came home for the one and only time. According to the English, the sport has been wandering through the wilderness ever since. This year’s World Cup provides them with an excellent chance to reclaim their beloved prize. And if England can be gifted a runway that allows it to build confidence and momentum throughout the knockout rounds, that’s probably the best-case scenario. All it has to do to secure that is beat Panama.

Easy, right?

Ehh, maybe. Because nothing is ever easy for England.

Part of Tuesday’s disappointment stems from the fact that England may have received a bit too much fanfare after its opening victory over Croatia. Honestly, I’m guilty of that too. I was practically parading the World Cup trophy through the streets of London after the 4-2 win. A little regression was likely — that’s just how tournaments work. But it still would’ve been nice to score a goal or two, for goodness sake! I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request when you finish with 80% possession.

To be fair, I’m not going to be overly harsh about the result. Ghana isn’t a bad team by any stretch of the imagination. There is legitimate talent throughout that roster, and any nation capable of defending that compactly is going to create problems. Still, Ghana isn’t England! That’s what makes the draw feel disappointing. England entered the match as the better team on paper and spent most of the evening looking like the better team on the field. The final score just didn’t reflect it. That’s sports.

Perhaps the most amusing part of Tuesday’s draw, however, is that it continued a trend that feels almost impossible to explain. England has now followed the exact same script in four consecutive major tournaments. At Euro 2020, England won its opener before drawing 0-0 in its second match. The same thing happened at the 2022 World Cup. Then it happened again at Euro 2024. And now, under Thomas Tuchel rather than Gareth Southgate, England has once again opened with a victory before stumbling to a scoreless draw in Game 2. Hilarious. England loves making life difficult for itself.

If there was a positive takeaway beyond the point itself, it was the defense. Ghana didn’t test England very often, but I thought the back line looked more composed than it did against Croatia. That’s admittedly a small sample size, but improvement is improvement. The bigger concern might actually be Declan Rice, who picked up a yellow card and now enters the Panama match walking a disciplinary tightrope. (He also appears to be nursing some sort of injury, which is expected after he played a bajillion games this past season for Arsenal.) England can ill afford to lose one of its most important midfielders heading into the knockout rounds.

But remember, everything is fine so long as the Three Lions take down Panama. The goal of this tournament — a championship — is still squarely in front of them. Beat Panama and the dream of finally bringing football home is still alive.

Simple enough, right?

More World Cup

Before diving into today’s scenarios, it’s …

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Three groups are in action today, and by the time the final whistle blows tonight, Groups A, B and C will be settled. Some teams are playing for first place. Others are fighting simply to stay alive. A few nations are already packing their bags (boo!). This is where the World Cup becomes truly wonderful because every goal suddenly carries even more immense weight. One moment can be the difference between cruising into the knockout rounds and boarding a plane home. And who wants to go home?

Before diving into the specifics, it’s important to understand how FIFA breaks ties. I know this part is tedious. Trust me, I’d much rather spend my time talking about goals and dramatic stoppage-time winners. But with so many teams entering the final day level on points, these rules matter a ton.

If two or more teams in the same group finish with the same number of points, FIFA first turns to the results between those teams. Head-to-head points are the primary tiebreaker, followed by head-to-head goal difference and then goals scored in those head-to-head matches. If teams are somehow still tied after all of that, the process expands to include overall goal difference and total goals scored throughout the group stage. Should things somehow remain deadlocked, disciplinary records (how many yellow and red cards a team has been shown) come into play before, as an absolute last resort, FIFA turns to the world rankings. Nobody wants things to reach that point.

For third-place teams hoping to advance, the process is slightly different. FIFA ranks those teams based on points, goal difference, goals scored, disciplinary record and finally world ranking. In other words, every goal matters at this stage.

Now that we’ve gotten the boring stuff out of the way, let’s get to the fun part.

Group A: Mexico Is Through, Everybody Else Is Sweating

Mexico has already punched its ticket to the knockout rounds. Six points from victories over South Africa and Korea have guaranteed advancement and placed El Tri firmly at the top of the group.

I would be shocked if Korea isn’t the team that ultimately claims second place. A matchup with South Africa awaits, and the Koreans should feel confident entering that contest. South Africa has struggled throughout this tournament and hasn’t shown much evidence that it can consistently threaten quality opposition. If Korea handles business, its place in the knockout rounds should be secure.

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