I was sitting with my coffee yesterday watching the World Cup and wondering if football has finally become predictable.<\/p>\n
The three biggest names in the game all turned up.<\/p>\n
Mbapp\u00e9 scored twice.<\/p>\n
Haaland scored twice.<\/p>\n
Messi scored twice.<\/p>\n
Their countries qualified.<\/p>\n
No shock. No drama. No experts looking embarrassed on television.<\/p>\n
Just the best players in the world doing exactly what everyone expected them to do.<\/p>\n
And you know what?<\/p>\n
There was something strangely comforting about it.<\/p>\n
Because football spends an awful lot of time trying to convince us that everything is complicated now.<\/p>\n
We have analysts.<\/p>\n
We have data.<\/p>\n
We have heat maps.<\/p>\n
We have people explaining why a player stood three metres further left than he did last season.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I think if a goalkeeper makes a good save, someone somewhere has already prepared a presentation explaining why the goalkeeper\u2019s \u201cexpected save position\u201d made it inevitable.<\/p>\n
But then football does something wonderfully simple.<\/p>\n
The best players get the ball.<\/p>\n
They score goals.<\/p>\n
And everybody says, \u201cAh. That\u2019s why they\u2019re the best players.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, the tournament still had room for the thing football has always loved most.<\/p>\n
A surprise.<\/p>\n
Jordan, playing in their first World Cup, looked like the sort of story everyone wanted.<\/p>\n
The newcomers.<\/p>\n
The underdogs.<\/p>\n
The team nobody expected to be there.<\/p>\n
Then Algeria did what football has always done.<\/p>\n
They ignored the script.<\/p>\n
They came from behind, won the match, and kept their own hopes alive.<\/p>\n
No algorithm predicted the feeling of that.<\/p>\n
No spreadsheet captured the panic.<\/p>\n
No expert could tell you what happens when a team fighting for history meets a team refusing to become someone else\u2019s fairy tale.<\/p>\n
That is why I still love football.<\/p>\n
Because every tournament begins with people telling us who will win.<\/p>\n
Then football spends a month proving that nobody actually knows.<\/p>\n
I remember when we used to just watch matches and see what happened.<\/p>\n
Now we try to predict everything before the first whistle.<\/p>\n
Who will qualify.<\/p>\n
Who will fail.<\/p>\n
Who has the easiest route.<\/p>\n
Who is \u201con the wrong side of the draw.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sometimes I think we spend so much time preparing for the future that we forget to enjoy the present.<\/p>\n
Although, I admit, I do this too.<\/p>\n
I was halfway through yesterday\u2019s match already wondering about the knockout stages.<\/p>\n
Then I complained about everybody else doing exactly the same thing.<\/p>\n
Which is probably the most GOM thing I\u2019ve ever done.<\/p>\n
Football doesn\u2019t need to be perfectly predictable.<\/p>\n
It needs heroes, surprises, mistakes and moments where someone does something nobody expected.<\/p>\n
Because without surprises, it\u2019s just a spreadsheet with grass.<\/p>\n
Anyway, what do I know?
I’m just a grumpy old man<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t just read it \u2014 tell me what you think. I need someone else to blame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The World Cup\u2019s biggest stars did exactly what everyone expected, but football still found room for a surprise. The Grumpy Old Man wonders why we try to predict everything when the game we love keeps proving that nobody really knows what will happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1161,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,13,53,82,111],"tags":[142,91,123,119,79,139,141,140,138,116,102,106],"class_list":["post-1159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football","category-grumpy-old-man","category-humour","category-soccer","category-world-cup-2026","tag-algeria","tag-british-humour","tag-football-opinions","tag-football-pundits","tag-grumpy-old-man","tag-haaland","tag-jordan","tag-mbappe","tag-messi","tag-underdogs","tag-world-cup-2026","tag-world-cup-diary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1159"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1163,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions\/1163"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}