It’s a small World (Cup)

Tomorrow’s Día del Periodista would normally be the obvious topic for a newspaper columnist but since the World Cup is starting this coming Thursday before next weekend’s column is published, what could be more important? 

So here goes. This column aims to demonstrate statistically that “World Cup” is something of a misnomer for this tournament but beforehand the million-dollar question for most people is who will end up winning it. So this columnist will open the envelope now and out pops the name … Spain! This forecast does not stem from its status as the reigning European Champions nor being bedazzled by Lamine Yamal but from a superstitious sense of predestination – next Thursday’s kick-off will be between Mexico and South Africa, identical teams to the inauguration of the 2010 World Cup, which was decided by Andrés Iniesta’s goal (along with ‘Waka Waka’ Shakira singing for both that tournament and this one). The only competing jinx which might give Argentina a chance is if they somehow managed to lose their first match against Algeria for a second consecutive opening defeat against an Arab side (crowned with glory in Qatar).

So if Argentina is not to lift a fourth trophy (as so widely yearned here), what is the next best thing? In this columnist’s opinion, not being on the other end of the final but winning the match for third place in order to complete its medal collection with a bronze. Brazil, Germany, Italy and France all have a full row of medals in all the colours but not Argentina, due to having won all six of its World Cup semi-finals – time to join the others.

But let us now leave the forecasts to the online betting sites and concentrate on this column’s main thesis – the World Cup’s failure to live up to its name. FIFA has 211 member football associations, of whom only 80 have ever participated in a World Cup tournament in almost a century while for the highest level of winners, you would have to knock the zero off that figure – just eight countries, all of whom are past or present members of the European Union or Mercosur (they would be simply members if it were not for Brexit). Those two trade blocs are already a single-digit percentage of the world’s population, falling to around seven percent when totalling the inhabitants of those eight countries (some 578 million people).

While a minority of the 211 FIFA members, those 80 participants between 1930 and 2022 do manage to house a majority of world population but you only have to raise the bar ever so slightly to exclude those without a win or draw to their name and the total falls drastically  from well over half of the world’s 8.3 billion people to around a third (or some 2.78 billion people). Less than a dozen countries have failed to score a point (with three of the 11 also goalless) but they leave almost two billion people by the wayside since they include such demographic giants as China and Indonesia.

A slight digression about the latter – they are the cause of the opening group phase of the tournament after qualifying for the 1938 World Cup as the Dutch East Indies, making the six-week voyage to France and losing 6-0 to Hungary in 90 minutes, followed by another six weeks sailing home to Java, leading the FIFA authorities to invent the group stage guaranteeing at least three matches in order to spare anybody else from any such ordeal in future.

Just to banish any notion of a correlation between population and football prowess, it might be pointed out that Curaçao (185,440 inhabitants) and Cape Verde (529,630) will be playing in this World Cup while India (1.48 billion people) and China (1.41 billion) will not.

Omitting the complete losers like China, we are left with a pyramid whose base is formed by the 69 countries notching at least one point and goal while at the peak are the eight champions, minorities ranging between a third and seven percent of global population but always excluding at least two-thirds of humanity. Which other layers can be defined between the peak and the base?

The requirement of repeat World Cup appearances reduces the 69 to 59 since 10 countries have only qualified once in the past (of whom just Bosnia has staged a return to this World Cup, notoriously at multi-champion Italy’s expense). At the other end of that pyramid only 17 countries (including all the eight trophy winners) qualified for at least half of the previous 22 World Cups with a total population of 1.33 billion or less than one person in every six.

Of the 69 participants with points, fully 60 have won at least one match (Egypt with some 120 million people is the only one of the nine winless with a significant population) while 58 countries have played in World Cups with sufficient frequency to have experienced all possible results between victories, draws and defeats – 35 of those nations will be competing in this upcoming tournament.

In terms of goals, two-thirds of these 69 participants (46) have scored enough World Cup goals to have at least one player with at least three goals to his name – 30 of these countries are among the 48 now preparing to compete in North America. At the peak of this pyramid only 17 nations have a positive goal difference (including fully 13 of this tournament’s participants), totalling just over a billion inhabitants.

Two-thirds or 46 of our 69 participants have also reached the penultimate quarter-final stage with all but six of the 176 quarter-finalists between 1930 and 2022 Euro-American while the eight champions have placed 79 times in the last eight.

Concluding with the final stages of the tournament, that octet has struck gold but what about the lesser medals? A total of 20 countries (15 European and five from the Americas) share the 66 medals, of which two-thirds or 44 accrue to the eight gold medallists – 16 of these countries are playing in this World Cup. If the nations lifting the trophy only house seven percent of world population, those finishing in the podium trio double that percentage (around 1.15 billion people).

So much for the global level, next week’s column will continue the number-crunching continent by continent, further underlining that the so-called World Cup is more like a Euro-American monopoly.