Good, Bad & Ugly: Enjoy it while it lasts Australia, a spot of schadenfreude and please, FIFA, don't mess with the format

The Group Stage is done, and what a blur. Sure, plenty of that might have been that I’ve barely slept, but still: right until the last moments, with Cameroon securing a famous yet futile win over Brazil and Serbia going out kicking and screaming, quite literally, to Switzerland, this was great.

The football got better as teams discovered what they needed to do to win – more on which later – and the drama ratcheted up. The ending to Group E, with Japan and Spain advancing at the expense of Germany, and Group C, as Argentina defeated Poland and Mexico battled in vain, will live long in the memory.

That results in a bumper Good, Bad, Ugly column this week, so let’s get cracking.

Good

Socceroos

With the greatest of respect, I did not expect to be leading this third edition of Good, Bad & Ugly with the Socceroos again.

Or if I did, it was in the context of having illuminated the nation for a short while and brought football back to the centre of the popular consciousness.

One of my creature comforts is watching 9 News Sydney: having lived in non-English speaking countries for a decade without a connected TV, it gives me great pleasure to watch the nightly news, however banal and parochial.

Even with the Socceroos posting their equal-best result in the biggest sporting event on the planet, 9 has sometimes ranked football behind, say, Reed Mahoney’s golf day with Bulldogs sponsors, in the hierarchy of the sports section, but even so, the positioning of football within our national conversation has been spectacular in the last few days.

There’s a line to be drawn here for sokkah people. Just because we make the front page now does not mean that we will forever: come next week, it’ll be Test cricket, NRL & AFL news and (if you live in a non-Sydney place) whoever your local version of Peter Overton is pretending to give two hoots about golf or something.

My advice is to enjoy it while we have it. It’s not true that football is the only sport that can unite the nation (contrary to what Graham Arnold says) unless I imagined the Olympics and Ashes last year, but it is also true that football is the only sport on which Australia can be taken seriously by most other nations.

Rugby league – and I say this as someone who just got back from the Rugby League World Cup – isn’t. AFL is even less so. Rugby union maybe, but then, does Australia actually care about it anymore? Cricket is also a maybe, but a limited amount of nations, however populous at least three of them are, play it.

It’s fine to have our semi-regular time in the sun, use that to ask for a bit bigger slice of the funding pie so that these events happen again more frequently, and then go back to where we were, battling along. I’ll see you at Sydney Olympic for the mixed grill, FFA Cup combo.

Live sites

The scenes coming out of Melbourne’s Fed Square are the equal of any that have been seen anywhere in the world at this tournament.

Granted, there might be an element of us having the weather for it when, in the Northern Hemisphere at least, it’s winter. Nobody was crowding around the main square in Tokyo to watch the Samurai Blue defeat Spain because it was four degrees when the game kicked off.

The pictures from Melbourne have galvanised Australian leaders to act so that they might be replicated elsewhere in the country. There is a rant in there somewhere about the NSW Government’s two-century-long role as the fun police, but let’s instead leave that to one side and say: well done. We got there in the end.

The point of football, in case you missed it, is the fans. The collective experience matters more to it than to other sports, because largely, not that much happens. We’re left to our own devices for a lot it, which is why such a rich fan culture has developed around it.

What might actually be the best way to get new people into the game is through the live experience, which can actually be replicated here and in the very near future. It’s no good getting your previously-football skeptic mate into the Socceroos on TV, because they don’t have a game worth watching for ages.

If they head down to a live site and like the vibe, then the door is open for the A-League to offer something similar. Go forth and evangelise, people.

Bad

Unpredictability v homogeniety

This was, at least according to SBS, the first World Cup group stage since 1994 in which no team has won every game. I don’t know that it’s closer than ever, because Brazil, Portugal and France were all able to rest players, but still: what a stat.

The second round had been a little stodgy as teams played more pragmatically at times, but the do-or-die nature of the final fixture brought some out of their shells, and made you wonder why they didn’t do that more. Mexico, in particular, might be wondering why they didn’t have more of a crack.

This is also the first tournament where all six inhabited continents are represented in the knockouts, with Australia (Oceania), Japan and South Korea (Asia), Senegal and Morocco (Africa) and the USA (North America) joining the usual host of South Americans and Europeans.

Yes, I know the Socceroos are in the AFC, but still: geographically, it works. Yes, we need to get penguins into football to complete the set.

You’ll notice that this is in the ‘bad’ section. It’s not bad that diversity exists, of course, or that more teams than ever are threatening. Those are unquestionably good things.

What is bad is a wider point about the tactical evolution and (to some extent) homogeneity of football. The general level of play is probably higher than ever, with more teams doing more analytics and being able to produce better team performances.

That has come at the expense of entertainment, as often the most exciting parts of the groups has been when sides turn up from left-field with mad ideas, whereas teams have essentially got better at defensive organisation while not being able to develop the same structures in attack.

I’m not old enough to remember Cameroon 1990, but I do recall Nigeria and Norway in 1998, South Korea and Senegal in 2002, Australia in 2006, Chile in 2010 and Colombia in 2014. They might not have gone the whole way, but there were fun. Japan might be the closest to that in this tournament.

What we might be seeing is a Europeanisation of the international game, as all the best players play in Europe, are coached in Europe, mainly by Europeans, and thus play in a fundamentally European style, even with their national teams.

Jamie Hamilton, who knows far more about football tactics than I do, has written extensively about this and, if you have a free half hour (it’s quite long), I heavily recommend getting the teeth into his piece on how Europe and South America have traditionally had different conceptions of football.

Only Giorgian de Arrascaeta, now departed with Uruguay, has been a genuine, from-nowhere, breakout star. Maybe I play too much Football Manager and thus know all the players, but it used to be that guys and teams came out of the blue. Now…less so. That’s bad.

(Photo by Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

Germany

It’s actually a little bit harsh to call Germany bad, because I’m not that sure that they were. They played 270 minutes at this tournament – give or take a decade or so of injury time – and were the better side for most of their time on the field.

They defeated Costa Rica and were better than them for all but about ten minutes of it. Ditto Japan, where they dominated for 70 and lost. Then against Spain, they competed well and got a 1-1 draw.

Yet, as coach Hansi Flick admitted post-match, this team is not the model of German efficiency. Their biggest deficiencies are in two of the worst areas to be deficient, central defence and central attack, and it doesn’t matter how many nice midfielders you have if you aren’t going to score and are liable to concede.

Germany underwent what journalist Rafa Honigstein called ‘das Reboot’ after a debacle at Euro 2004, overhauling coaching methods and resulting in the generation that won the 2014 World Cup.

That was based around superb midfielders – think Mesut Ozil, Mario Gotze, Toni Kroos and the like – but was still pretty dependant on Miroslav Klose and Thomas Muller for goals and Jerome Boateng and Mats Hummels at the back.

Hummels might yet have been there in 2022 while Muller actually was. With the greatest of respect to Niclas Fullkrug, who scored twice, he wouldn’t have been close to a German national team in pretty much any other generation. Das Reboot 2.0 might be on the cards.

Ugly

FIFA messing with the format

If you’ve really enjoyed the last few days of World Cup action, the good news is that FIFA are doing their best to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

The joy of watching teams fight for qualification as the situation changes around them is not long for this world, with the powers-that-be set to change for the next tournament in line with the expansion of the World Cup.

The current 32-team, eight group format is perfect, the gold standard of tournament structure that gives everyone enough games, makes the group phase worth watching throughout and offers ample opportunity for shocks, jeopardy and all that good stuff.

The 48-team nonsense that is set to come in 2026 will likely ruin this. The current plan is for 16 groups of three with two advancing from both, though the word behind the scenes is that the plan is being revisited.

The three-team groups are wide open for abuse. For one, it is likely to heavily incentivise defensive football through overvaluing draws, and for two, it is also liable to produce match-fixing between sides who know what a mutually-agreeable result would be.

As the last games would only feature two of three teams rather than the simultaneous kick-offs we have now, they could simply work out what gets both through and play towards it, as happened in 1982 between Austria and Germany, prompting the change to the rules we have now.

The best option is simple: stop messing around with it. There’s a very good reason why we’re on the longest run ever of consecutive World Cups with the same format. It works.

Man of the match awards

We’ve discussed the stupidity of man of the match awards a this tournament before, with Kevin de Bruyne staking a claim for the award for Most Disappointed Player To Win Man of the Match.

Well, he has competition. Kai Havertz was given the gong in Germany’s win over Costa Rica, but looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. Whereas KDB looked like he might start crying, Kai looked as if he was seconds away from thumping the cameraman with the promotional Budweiser trophy.

Bud, FIFA, whoever: I know you have contractual obligations, but come on. We don’t need to see this.

Starwatch

Lionel Messi
Still very good, Socceroos be scared

Cristiano Ronaldo
Probably shouldn’t be starting but will start and Portugal will be worse for it.

Robert Lewandowski
Never touched the ball against Argentina. No, really: I’m not sure he actually contacted the football at any time.

Luka Modric
Lives to fight another day as Croatia went through. Watching him against Japan’s high-speed midfield in the Round of 16 could be very fun though.

Diego Maradona
An unexpected appearance for the now-deceased superstar, but with Australia facing Argentina, there’s been a resurgence in memories of the time he doped against the Socceroos in 1993. Well, Australia, don’t feel too cheated: he was doping against everyone else, and sometimes having a great time while at it.

Pele
The great man is in hospital at the moment. The world hopes you get back to flogging pills and Crestfield’s Wax Paper in no time.