GOM World Cup Diary #13: Whatever Happened To The Surprise?

I was sitting with my coffee yesterday watching the World Cup and wondering if football has finally become predictable.

The three biggest names in the game all turned up.

Mbappé scored twice.

Haaland scored twice.

Messi scored twice.

Their countries qualified.

No shock. No drama. No experts looking embarrassed on television.

Just the best players in the world doing exactly what everyone expected them to do.

And you know what?

There was something strangely comforting about it.

Because football spends an awful lot of time trying to convince us that everything is complicated now.

We have analysts.

We have data.

We have heat maps.

We have people explaining why a player stood three metres further left than he did last season.

Sometimes I think if a goalkeeper makes a good save, someone somewhere has already prepared a presentation explaining why the goalkeeper’s “expected save position” made it inevitable.

But then football does something wonderfully simple.

The best players get the ball.

They score goals.

And everybody says, “Ah. That’s why they’re the best players.”

Of course, the tournament still had room for the thing football has always loved most.

A surprise.

Jordan, playing in their first World Cup, looked like the sort of story everyone wanted.

The newcomers.

The underdogs.

The team nobody expected to be there.

Then Algeria did what football has always done.

They ignored the script.

They came from behind, won the match, and kept their own hopes alive.

No algorithm predicted the feeling of that.

No spreadsheet captured the panic.

No expert could tell you what happens when a team fighting for history meets a team refusing to become someone else’s fairy tale.

That is why I still love football.

Because every tournament begins with people telling us who will win.

Then football spends a month proving that nobody actually knows.

I remember when we used to just watch matches and see what happened.

Now we try to predict everything before the first whistle.

Who will qualify.

Who will fail.

Who has the easiest route.

Who is “on the wrong side of the draw.”

Sometimes I think we spend so much time preparing for the future that we forget to enjoy the present.

Although, I admit, I do this too.

I was halfway through yesterday’s match already wondering about the knockout stages.

Then I complained about everybody else doing exactly the same thing.

Which is probably the most GOM thing I’ve ever done.

Football doesn’t need to be perfectly predictable.

It needs heroes, surprises, mistakes and moments where someone does something nobody expected.

Because without surprises, it’s just a spreadsheet with grass.

Anyway, what do I know?
I’m just a grumpy old man

Don’t just read it — tell me what you think. I need someone else to blame.