Follow live coverage of Portugal vs. Uruguay and the latest World Cup standings and scores.
The World Cup is here. Yet there are still plenty of questions about how things will unfold as soccer moves to center stage over the month in Qatar. Here’s a primer — including on that group stage math.
The World Cup, a quadrennial tournament pitting the best national soccer teams against each other for the title of world champion, is the most important sports event in the world. (Discuss.)
This year’s host is Qatar, which in 2010 beat the United States and Japan to win the right to hold the tournament. Whether that was an honest competition remains in dispute.
The World Cup has never been held on the Arabian Peninsula before, for good reason.
The tournament opened on Nov. 20, when Ecuador beat Qatar. That was a slow day; over the two weeks that follow, four games are played on most days. The tournament ends with the final on Dec. 18, when the winner gets a very heavy (and surprisingly small) gold trophy.
No. The World Cup usually takes place in July — or it did, until Qatar won the right to host it. Initially, Qatar said that it would go ahead and hold the tournament in its normal summer window, despite the fact that its temperatures can reach 120 degrees; it brushed aside any suggestion it could not do so with the help of cooling technology that did not, at the time, exist. In 2015, FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, eventually concluded that the summer temperatures might have unpleasant consequences for fans and players — sluggishness, heat stroke, death, etc. — and agreed to move the tournament to the relatively bearable months of November and December.
No. Temperatures in Qatar this time of year are generally in the 80s, and so not unlike those at a traditional World Cup. (Have you been to Manaus, Brazil, in July?) But organizers have tried to get around this unpleasant state of affairs by installing systems meant to cool the air in seven of Qatar’s eight outdoor stadiums to a manageable 68 degrees.
Oh, the leagues grumbled. A lot. But they lost.
The switch will disrupt not only league competitions globally, but also the lucrative Champions League, soccer’s richest club competition, and it has already led to earlier starts to seasons, compressed schedules and much hand-wringing. It also means that Fox Sports, which paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the broadcast rights in the United States, will have to wedge in a month of soccer games around another fall sport that tends to demand attention that time of year. Ever heard of the N.F.L.?
What is the World Cup? The quadrennial event pits the best national soccer teams against each other for the title of world champion. Here’s a primer to the 2022 men’s tournament:
It is true that Qatar is tiny; at 4,416 square miles, it is 0.12 percent of the size of the United States and by far the smallest nation ever to host the World Cup. All the games will take place in a tight circle of eight stadiums in and around the capital, Doha, making it the most compact World Cup in history.
Thirty-two. Qatar qualified automatically as the host, and after years of matches — including a few bonus months, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic — the other 31 teams earned the right to come and play. (That number will increase to 48 teams in 2026, at the next World Cup, which will be held across the considerably larger real estate of Mexico, Canada and the United States.)
The women have their own World Cup. The next one is in 2023 and will take place in Australia and New Zealand. They’ve already held the draw for that one.
It is an American burden, or an example of American exceptionalism, to call the sport by a different word from almost every other country in the English-speaking world. Americans have their own game of football, of course, but for the purposes of the World Cup, you are allowed to say “football” instead of “soccer.” What you should not do is tell other people what they can call it. That just makes you a jerk.
Go for it. But if you’re an American, don’t be surprised if people start moving away from you in the bar.
The 32 teams are divided into eight groups of four, designated by the letters A through H. In the tournament-opening group stage, each team plays all the other teams in its group once. The top two finishers in each group advance to the round of 16, so losing one game at this stage does not eliminate a team. But after that, the World Cup is a straight knockout tournament.
Three points are awarded for a win, one for a draw and none for a loss. That can lead to teams within the same group finishing with the same number of points. (Here are the current standings.)
If there is a tie within the group, you will be introduced to the glorious tiebreaking concept of goal difference. That’s the difference between the number of goals a team scores and the number it has allowed, so a blowout win (or defeat) can be great insurance or a crippling disaster. If points or goal difference doesn’t break a tie in a group, there are even more complications. Don’t worry about those for now. (Goal differential is listed as “GD” in our standings tables.)
The tournament is being broadcast on Fox and FS1 in English, and on Telemundo in Spanish. You can livestream it on Peacock (in Spanish; the first 12 games are free), or on streaming services that carry Fox and FS1, like Sling TV, Fubo and Vidgo. Or you can follow along on social media services like Twitter, if it’s still in business.
Here’s the full broadcast schedule.
Qatar is three hours ahead of London, eight hours ahead of New York and 11 hours ahead of Los Angeles. That’s the same time zone as Moscow. So whatever strategy you used to wake up early (or stay up late) for the games when Russia hosted the World Cup in 2018 will most likely work this time, too. But it will mean predawn kickoffs on the East Coast of the United States for some games, and midafternoon starts for 10 p.m. games in Qatar.
And don’t worry about long pregame shows where you tune in at the announced game time and the studio crew talks for 25 minutes: At the World Cup, the games will kick off when FIFA’s schedule says they will kick off.
Each half is 45 minutes, although the referee generally adds a few minutes on at the end of each to account for time lost to injuries and such. In between the halves there is 15 minutes for halftime. The whole thing is over in less than two hours, a lot shorter than a typical baseball or (American) football game.
Once the knockout stages of the World Cup begin, the games could get longer. If a match is tied after 90 minutes, 30 minutes more is played. If the score is still tied, the teams have a shootout with five penalty kicks each to determine the winner.
It’s confusing, but here is an explanation, with helpful pictures.
Brazil, France, England and Spain are the oddsmakers’ top choices, followed by Argentina (before it lost to Saudi Arabia at least), Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. The usual suspects qualified so readily, in fact, that our soccer columnist, Rory Smith, wrote in November that “the likelihood is that the winner is already there.” Only eight countries have ever won the World Cup, after all, and seven are in the field again. (Sorry, Italy. See you next time. Maybe.)
No, Italy failed to qualify for the second consecutive cycle, even though the Italians are the reigning European champions after winning in 2021. Whoops.
Yes, it is.
Sweden, Nigeria, Chile and Colombia all failed to qualify. And Russia, which reached the quarterfinals as the host in 2018, was barred from all competitions by FIFA after it invaded Ukraine this year.
After the humiliation of failing to qualify for the 2018 tournament, the Americans are back with a new generation of players. They have been placed in Group B, an intriguing one with England, Iran and Wales.
The United States opened with a 1-1 draw against Wales. It plays England on Nov. 25 and Iran on Nov. 29.
Yes, in a dramatic upset in 1950 that is still being talked about. The two teams faced each other a second time in South Africa in 2010; that match ended in a draw thanks to a goalkeeping error that was either comical or devastating, depending on your rooting interests.
The U.S.’s best ever performance came in the first World Cup in 1930, when it made the semifinals.
Once, in 1958.
Probably not.
The headline game on Friday is U.S. vs. England. Lionel Messi and Argentina will play Mexico a day later, and the day after that (Nov. 27) features a heavyweight collision of Spain vs. Germany.
At each World Cup, one of the groups is informally designated the Group of Death, meaning that it has the strongest teams and thus they will theoretically be engaged in a kind of gladiatorial struggle. No consensus has emerged this time around. And anyway, no one dies in the end, so maybe we should stop using that term.
Erling Haaland, for one. (Norway didn’t qualify.) Mohamed Salah. (Egypt lost to Senegal on penalty kicks for the second time in a month.) A host of players who have been injured. Oh, and thousands upon thousands of fans who were either priced out or turned off by Qatar’s human rights record and by FIFA’s brazen play for as much money as it can squeeze out of them.
Fame, glory and the adoration of your country are one sort of reward. But there is also a huge pile of cash. This year, the winning team will take home $42 million, part of a $440 million prize pool. How much of that will actually go to the individual players is another story.
What Is the Third World? "Third World" is an outdated and derogatory phrase that was used in the 20th century to characterize nations that were economica
ANKARA, February 27, 2023—The two very large earthquakes of February 6 caused an estimated $34.2 billion in direct physical damages in Türkiye, the
A financial center or hub is a city that is strategically located and has a concentration of top-tier financial institutions, reputable stock exchanges, publi
Santo Domingo.- The Dominican Republic has witnessed a remarkable surge in nautical tourism, with over 3,000 vessels arriving in 2023. This sector, which has si