It’s World Cup season, folks, which means a summer spent watching the very best players on the planet.
For those who follow the sport of soccer (yes, we are calling it that despite it being known as football around the world), you know exactly what to expect. Undiluted drama, pure cinema and narratives that even the best scriptwriters in Hollywood would struggle to muster up.
But this isn’t just a World Cup for your initiated soccer fan, this is a chance for everyone to fall in love with the world’s game. To do that, you need to understand the basics. Trust me, I know. I spent my first year at CNN trying to understand what March Madness was… I’m still not totally sure I understand it either, despite my colleague Dana O’Neil’s attempts to explain it.
Anyway, here are the answers to hopefully every question you’re too embarrassed to ask your soccer-loving pals.
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World Cup structure
First, there are no stupid questions in this classroom, so we can start with the basics.
The sport is easy in that respect. It’s 11 players on either team at any one time. Managers can then make a total of five substitutions each during the match – to freshen things up or switch tactics and so on.
The teams play for 90 minutes per game, split into two 45-minute halves. A win gets you three points, a draw gets you one and a loss gets you absolutely nothing at all.
This year will see the biggest World Cup on record, with a total of 48 teams vying for the one trophy. Those teams have been split into 12 groups of four teams, decided by the World Cup draw in December.
The teams in each group play each other once, meaning all nations will play a minimum of three games at the tournament. Each group is a mini-league, with final rankings based on the number of points each team gets from its three matches.
Once all the group matches are over, the top two nations from each group progress to the knockout rounds. Then, eight of the best third-placed finishers across all the groups join them. It essentially means we will have a total of 32 teams in the first knockout stage – if your team wins a group game, they’ve got a great chance of progressing into the next round.
Knockout rounds
This bit is now pretty simple because the knockout stages work just like any other bracket in any other sport. The winner goes through to the next round. So, it would go: Round of 32, round of 16, quarterfinals, semifinals and the final (though there is also a third-place match for the losers of each semifinal).
This is the first time we’ve had a Round of 32 at the World Cup, due to the increased number of teams. Only 16 nations will exit the group stage.
The rules of a knockout game are the same but, naturally, there can’t be any draws. So, if a match is tied after 90 minutes, then there will be 30 minutes of extra time – split into two 15-minute periods with a very short interval in between.
If there is still a tie after that, then we go to the dreaded penalty shootout. Each team will take five penalties each, with the team scoring the most winning the match. If no one misses in those first 10 attempts – or if each team scores the same amount – then we head to a knockout scenario until someone eventually does come out on top.
You’ve got to be a certain type of someone to enjoy the tension and drama of a penalty shootout. Personally, I love them…
Who might win?
It’s very unlikely for there to be an upset at the World Cup. There’s just too many quality teams for an underdog to go all the way – sorry to any USMNT fans out there.
The champion is likely to be one of the top teams – think France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, England or Portugal. But, that being said, there will be plenty of surprises along the way.
You can always expect one of those top teams to be beaten earlier than expected and there is guaranteed to be a smaller team that has a deep run in the knockouts. That’s the beauty of a cup competition.
Why is soccer so big?
Now, we’ve covered what to expect from the World Cup, you might be left wondering why so many people love this game and where it all started. In truth, the answer to both those questions is up for debate.
Ahead of this year’s World Cup, I spoke to soccer historian Matthew Taylor to try to get to the bottom of why kicking a ball around eventually became a sport that took over the world.
“There are forms of ball games that exist in lots of ancient societies,” he said. “I suppose the most well-known one recently is Cuju, the Chinese game.
“But there were forms of ball games everywhere, and people have tried to connect them. But I think it’s difficult to do so. A game involving a ball and potentially the use of feet and hands is quite endemic to the way humans are, so I think it’s difficult to make very clear connections with the codified game.”
And that’s the crucial bit, the codification of the game we see today occurred in the late 19th century.
The simplistic answer is to say the birthplace of modern soccer is the Freemasons’ Tavern, an old pub situated in the West End of London. This was the place chosen by the newly formed English Football Association in 1862 to hash out the rules by which the game should be played.
There’s still a plaque outside the building today – now a hotel and nightclub – which reads “The Football Association was formed on the proposal of Ebenezer Cobb Morley at the Freemasons’ Tavern which stood on this site. The modern game of football was born on this day. 26 October 1863.”
As neat and whimsical as that is, it’s debated. Others claim to have invented the modern game, notably in Scotland. Experts simply can’t really decide… sorry.
“I think the truth is that it emerges from a kind of mixture of people and places,” Taylor said. “So, yeah, it’s a chaotic and complicated picture.”
Now, though, the global game is governed by FIFA. It is they who are organizing the World Cup this summer and who are trying to grow the sport in every which direction.
The money involved is astronomical, with the sport a commercial beast that has more political sway than most nations. But strip it all away, and the Beautiful Game itself hasn’t changed anywhere near as much. After all, it’s still 22 people running around trying to score.
And it’s that simple essence of the game that initially made it spread throughout the world, somewhat off the back of the British Empire and trade routes that helped disseminate the word of soccer.
While the British were important in the spread of the game, Taylor says its far more complex than that.
“One way of understanding the way in which the sport spread is a kind of openness and cosmopolitanism,” Taylor said, explaining that those who helped spread the game did so to be associated with a new frontier.
“These are fairly cosmopolitan, mobile people for whom football represents a sense of Britishness, but a kind of Britishness which is also very modern. To start a football club is kind of to associate yourself with this, this kind of very modern world and football represented that.
“That’s one of the reasons, apart from the fact that it’s an easy game to develop and a very fun game to play, that football spread so widely.”
So there you have it, a crash course in soccer and the World Cup. Now that you have the basics, it’s time to get watching.
The first game between co-host Mexico and South Africa kicks off on June 11 and the final isn’t until July 19. You’ve got 104 chances to watch a game in between those bookmarks and you now have no excuse not to.
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