European and South American teams are dominating the World Cup. It wasn’t supposed to happen.
I started watching the World Cup in 1990, the year the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon made their remarkable run. Even then the expectation was that teams from Africa and Asia would rise to their rightful place in football rankings. For a while, the expectations seemed to come through. At the 2002 World Cup, Turkey finished third, while hosts South Korea, with an enormous assist from referees, finished fourth. It only seemed a matter of time before an African or Asian team won it all.
But a funny thing happened in the road to equality—the European and South American teams got better.
Teams from South Europe started winning tournaments, and small nations from the continent kept getting better. In this tournament, Iceland, a nation of three hundred thousand people, made a credible showing. Croatia and Serbia both fielded good teams, with Croatia fielding some of the best players in the World. Europe’s minnows keep getting better too. To find a joke team in Europe, you’d have to go to the city-states. As long as a European nation has two million people or so, their team can play.
A similar thing happened in South America. The traditional big nations, Brazil and Argentina, are still good. Uruguay, a nation of three and a million people, has one of the better teams in the tournament. And the traditional minnows in the continent have raised their game enormously. Even Bolivia and Venezuela are serious rivals now.
Meanwhile, in African and Asia… nothing. Continuous mediocrity for all the World to see.
The lesson here friends, is this: you can expect equality, but life has a way to surprise you. As we are seeing these days in Russia at the World Cup.
