Wilson's World (of football)

Stopping Messi, ageing Koulibaly, format silliness

Jonathan Wilson — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 02:31:29 GMT

Head-to-head nonsense

At this World Cup, for the first time ever, if teams finish level on points their placing is determined by head-to-head results rather than goal-difference. The Euros have been cursed by this since Euro 96, but it’s a terrible idea in Europe as well. It’s illogical and contrary to sporting integrity.

One of the purposes of a group is to even out the vicissitudes of individual games. You have a player injured for one game? You suffer an outrageous own goal? A clear penalty is denied you? At least you have two other opportunities to put it right. All games count equally. Except suddenly if there’s head-to-head, they don’t. The game against the team with whom you finish level matters more. This is not rational.

But worse, in the majority of cases, a team winning its first two games knows it will finish top of the group, and a team losing its first two games knows it will finish bottom, whatever happens in the third game. Beating South Korea meant Mexico were not merely through, but top, and guaranteed to stay at the Azteca to play a best third-place side. Beating Australia guaranteed the USA top spot and a game against a best third-placed side. Germany the same. Turkey, Haiti, Tunisia were all out after two defeats.

The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

Jon Hotten’s brilliant book, Vinciness, is available now in paperback. Order it here. Originally produced as a limited edition hardback, it uses James Vince’s career as a meditation on sport, fragility and frailty. Heartily recommended.

Issue Sixty-One of The Blizzard is available here, featuring Brazil, Argentina, Belgium’s first international coach, a photo-essay from Uzbekistan, memories of Scotland in 1998, a look at Curaçao and Cape Verde and an investigation into what went wrong for Serbia-Montenegro in 2006.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we continue our series on England and the 1966 World Cup. Listen here.

World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 2014 and weekly live World Cup Q&As . Members can binge all four 1966 episodes now. Join up here.

On Libero, we continue our coverage form the World Cup. Listen here.

That’s bad from an entertainment point of view: ideally you want something riding on each game for both sides. But it’s also bad from the point of view of integrity. Mexico, for example, can rest players against the Czech Republic. If they win, the Czech Republic could go through in second place or would almost certainly progress as a best-third place team. Other sides both in their group and in other groups would not have had the advantage of playing against Mexico reserves.

Plus the absurd possibility exists that a team could finish third on head-to-head and miss out on being a best third-place team on goal difference, while the team in fourth has a superior goal-difference and would have gone through as a best third-place side. Which is self-evidently nonsensical and exposes the arbitrariness of the switch.

Messi and the press

Austria, as you’d expect from a Ralf Rangnick side, tried to press Argentina on Monday. And, to an extent, it worked. There were moments when Argentina seemed unsettled by Austria’s intensity. This, it was possible to believe, was a vision of how the world champions will be dethroned. Their football has a self-consciously Argentinian rhythm and there have been times in the past when European physicality has overcome that.

But Argentina have started this World Cup far better than they started the last one. They had the quality to play their way through the press often enough that Austria were exposed. That brought the penalty that Lionel Messi put wide and the good chance he drove into the body of the Austria goalkeeper Alexander Schlager. And it also led to the move that culminated in Messi converting the cutback to become the World Cup’s all-time leading scorer. The game lost some of its shape in the second half as Austria chased an equaliser but the first period felt instructive: Argentina cane be rattled by a press, but it is a high-risk strategy.

And Argentina started without Julián Álvarez whose return from injury should give them a player who would more naturally run beyond the press than either Lautaro Martínez or Thiago Almada. Álvarez was able to play the final quarter of the game on the left side of midfield. His energy and directness, his intelligence and guile, should give this Argentina additional edge and, given he scored four times in Qatar, reduce some of the burden on Messi, who has got all five Argentina goals so far at this year’s tournament.

The fading of the greats

There is always something slightly sad about seeing an ageing great toiling. This is a tournament of old men: there are as many players aged 40 or over in this tournament as have played in the entire history of the World Cup up till now. And while Messi continues to shine, other superannuated players do not. Cristiano Ronaldo is the obvious example, but Fernando Muslera, Manuel Neuer and Luka Modrić have all struggled. So too have Sadio Mané, although he had a good Cup of Nations, and Kalidou Koulibaly.

Koulibaly is not that old by the standards of the tournament but, at 35, he looks well past his best – and at his best he was one of the greatest centre-backs in the world. The football, though, leaves everybody eventually. At the Cup of Nations, Senegal looked a more secure side after Koulibaly was injured and Mamadou Sarr came into the back four. The former Chelsea centre-back did not look at all comfortable in Senegal’s defeat to France in their opening game, and he was badly exposed against Norway.

It wasn’t just the baffling clearance that presented the ball to Marcus Pederson for Norway’s open goal, or even the way he was outpaced by Erling Haaland for the second, his positional sense seems to have deserted him and he lacks the physical presence of old. Senegal still have a chance of progressing but they will need a significant win over Iraq to achieve it. To do that, Koulibaly will surely have to be withdrawn. That he went off with 19 minutes remaining suggested Pape Thiaw might be of a similar mind.

Goals, Swedish rollercoaster, German flexibility

Jonathan Wilson — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 22:43:14 GMT

A World Cup of goals

Perhaps it’s the giddiness of the group stages, with very little pressure on the major sides, but this has been an extravagantly open World Cup so far. It feels baffling now that before Russia the sense had developed that international football was unavoidably reactive as managers, without the time to impose sophisticated attacking structures, focused on what they could do, which was to organise the defence.

Spain’s success in 2010 and at Euro 2012 (2008 less so), although based on technical skill and passing, was essentially a victory for caution and control. Germany won in 2014 after reverting to a more counter-attacking approach before the quarter-final. Portugal bored their way to success in Euro 2016. Although France ended up in high-scoring games against Argentina and Croatia in 2018, their plan was very much to play within themselves which, with Portugal, set the template for a number of sides including Gareth Southgate’s England. Only post Covid has international football opened up again. It’s been a similar pattern at the Africa Cup of Nations and the Copa América.

The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we continue our series on England and the 1966 World Cup. Listen here.

World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 2010 and yesterday we . Members can binge all four 1966 episodes now. Join up here.

On Libero, we give our first impressions of the World Cup. Listen here.

But still, this tournament has surprised in its openness. There is a basic attacking ethos. Or when teams have been defensive, it has been with good reason: Cape Verde drawing with Spain, for instance. Even DR Congo were prepared take the game at times to Portugal. The question, then, is why. Mexico’s 1-0 win over South Korea is the only game so far in which both sides seemed content to sit off. Even the winner in that game was scored almost apologetically after an error by the South Korea keeper Kim Seung-gyu.

Perhaps it will change in the knockouts, when the consequences of defeat are so much greater. Perhaps this is just modern football, a result of enlightened law changes. Perhaps those who play for superclubs, used to rolling over lesser opponents, simply aren’t capable of defending properly anymore. Perhaps everybody’s just exhausted. But whatever the reason, it’s great fun.

Monterrey rain and the limited challenge to Fifa

Jonathan Wilson — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 01:20:07 GMT

I hadn’t really needed to go to Hervé Renard’s press conference on Friday, which was just as well. I’d decided to pop along largely because the circumstances were so odd, taking over Tunisia after they’d lost their opening game of the tournament 5-1 to Sweden to become their seventh coach since qualifying began. My flight from Guadalajara to Monterrey was even on time. But the system for taxis was inexplicably inefficient and the queue took forever, so by the time I’d dropped my case at the hotel, time was tight.

It was ferociously hot, around 37 degrees and humid. I ordered an Uber and somehow a 25-minute journey took over an hour and the press conference had been missed. There is traffic everywhere. Everything in Mexico takes longer than it ought to.

The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we continue our series on England and the 1966 World Cup. Listen here.

World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 2010 and yesterday we . Members can binge all four 1966 episodes now. Join up here.

On Libero, we give our first impressions of the World Cup. Listen here.

By the time I got out of the Uber, the skies had darkened, lightning was flashing over the mountains and there was the odd drop of rain.

By the time I’d crossed the pedestrian bridge over the road towards the stadium, the rain was coming down properly. I struggled on. I’d left my iPad at the stadium at the Sweden v Tunisia game and wanted to collect it. Fifa had been extremely helpful in locating it and looking after it; it’s a general truth that, while the leadership may be shameful, there are some very good people who work for Fifa.

By the time I got through security, the wind was up, so strong that barriers were being blown along the street. It was still strangely hot. Fighting to prevent my umbrella turning inside out, I managed cut my left index finger four times on the spokes.

By the time I’d navigated the maze of fences, I was soaked and panicking about the state of my laptop on my bag. I got into the media centre, found a Fifa official and picked up my iPad. I went to leave, but the rain was sheeting down. With some Japanese journalists I looked up a rain radar and saw that it was predicted to carry for another half hour. We went back into the media centre and watched the start of the Scotland v Morocco game.

Half an hour later, I left. Thankfully I had a Sainsbury’s carrier bag with me and could use it to wrap my laptop inside my rucksack. It was still raining, but nowhere near as heavily. But the courtyard outside the media centre was flooded. I had to pick my way through ankle-deep water. The stairs had become a waterfall. But the worst was yet to come. The six-lane road, the major access to the stadium, was essentially a river. Cars were approaching the worst of the flood and turning back. There was no way of getting to the exit without wading through shin-deep torrents.

Getting back to the hotel involved a long, soggy walk and, eventually, an Uber. The rain finally stopped about two hours after it had started. Everybody seems to think the waters will have receded by Saturday. But this is not a normal build up to a World Cup game.

Renard, for what it’s worth, was bullish, talking about looking forward not back and insisting that if Tunisia didn’t believe they could beat Japan there was no point turning up. I’m sceptical.

The failure of the resistance

What, numerous people have asked, can be done about Fifa? How can a challenge be mounted at least to check the behaviour of a body that these days is essentially run by fiat with almost no oversight. The culture of clientelism means its members are never going to vote against the president who guarantees their hand-puts and their place on lucrative committees with their annual stipends and lucrative expenses.

It took the FBI, and a nation furious at, as it saw it, being cheated out of hosting rights for the World Cup, to bring down Sepp Blatter, but Gianni Infantino’s reign has been so nakedly self-serving as to make the Blatter days seem like a golden era of government. The only challenge can come from within and, realistically, that means Uefa. It has the financial clout to lure away Argentina and Brazil, the marquee names from the rest of the world, and then could perhaps persuade other major players such as the US and Mexico, with their huge TV markets, Uruguay and a handful of leading Africa or Asian nations to join them.

A Uefa Nations League Plus would be a powerful short-term alternative if it were deemed necessary to boycott the World Cup. And a World Cup without the leading Uefa nations plus half a dozen others would not be the cash cow it is now. Fifa’s reliance on the World Cup – it was responsible for 83% of revenues in the last four-year cycle – is its great vulnerability, which is one of the reasons Infantino has been pushing the Club World Cup so hard.

Perhaps that is Alexander Čeferin’s long-term plan, although he rarely seems like a man up for a lengthy and costly fight. He seems to prefer gestures, such as appointing Omar Artan, the Somalian referee turned away from the US after an 11-hour immigration interview in Miami, to take charge of the Uefa Super Cup final. Coming after the freezing of ticket prices at the next Euros, it’s the latest in a number of smart signals that Uefa is running out of patience with Fifa, that it is trying to position itself as the defender of the game.

There is scope here for Uefa to point out to Fifa members from African, Asian and Latin American nations that Infantino is not their friend, that he did nothing to help Artan, or any of the thousands of journalists and fans who have been denied visas. Uefa could have come across as the protector; Infantino as somebody lacking respect for precisely the region he claims to represent. Instead, Čeferin found himself quoted in the Slovenian media criticising the expansion of the World Cup, saying “a huge number of matches that are completely uninteresting.” He has denied the comments but, understandably, they have not been well received by the football associations of Cape Verde, DR Congo, Curaçao, Haiti, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia. Politically, that represents a huge opportunity missed.

Portugal's Great Albatross

Jonathan Wilson — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:05:45 GMT

For Cristiano Ronaldo, the stats really don’t make comforting reading. He had 25 touches against DR Congo, which for a modern centre-forward isn’t unusually low. He had three shots, all from around the penalty spot. None were on target. He won two aerial duels. He did not set up a chance for anybody else. He didn’t attempt a dribble. In truth, he didn’t do much at all. For a player who operates centrally, who draws the attention as a black hole draws light, he was weirdly peripheral.

A look at his heat map is telling. There is a slight splodge out on the left wing but, fundamentally, his zone of movement was restricted to a circle on the edge of the box. He does not move. Perhaps he cannot move. Where Lionel Messi, admittedly two years his junior, still flits sprite-like around the pitch, disappearing for long periods only to reemerge with devastating effect, Ronaldo just sits, absorbing energy.

One of the more extraordinary nights at the last World Cup in Qatar was the game between Portugal and Switzerland. Fernando Santos, knowing he was leaving the job, finally found the courage to leave out Ronaldo and was rewarded with by far Portugal’s best performance of the tournament. Portugal won 6-1 and Ronaldo’s replacement, Gonçalo Ramos, scored three. And yet by midway through the second half, a substantial proportion of the crowd at Lusail were chanting Ronaldo’s name. The biggest cheer of the night came after he’d come on, put the ball in the net despite being miles offside, and delivered his trademark celebration even as the goal was being ruled out. His celebrity somehow outweighed the team performance and the biggest win of the tournament.

The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we start a series on England and the 1966 World Cup. Listen here.

World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 2010, while last Friday we talked to Sam Kunti about Brazil post-2002. Members can binge all four 1966 episodes now. Join up here.

On Libero, we preview the World Cup. Listen here.

Ronaldo was 37 at the time and already clearly a burden on Portugal. It wasn’t just that he didn’t move, it’s that he exercised an unhealthy psychological hold. Everything was about him. That remained true at the Euros, when Ronaldo burst into tears after missing a penalty against Slovenia. And somehow, aged 41, Ronaldo is still there in the Portugal side, getting in the way, gurning at every missed shot, making everything about him.

Seven coaches, one big problem

Jonathan Wilson — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:51:53 GMT

The Rolling Chaos of Tunisia

It’s undeniable that Tunisia were dreadful against Sweden on Sunday. Losing 5-1 to the team you probably have to beat to have a chance of finishing third and progressing through the group is bad. It’s true you can go through the goals and point to two goalkeeping errors, a player losing possession 10 yards outside his own box, two fulminating strikes from outside the box and a curious (although correct) VAR decision that led to a player who had appeared offside being rendered on by a nick off a toe, and construct an argument that Tunisia had been slightly unfortunate. But they’d also conceded five against Belgium in their final pre-tournament friendly.

Sabri Lamouchi had tried to instil a more open, more progressive style of play, which counts as revolutionary in Tunisian football. They have always been the most dour, the most paranoid, of sides, forever wasting time, feigning injury, spoiling and wrestling, as though terrified a game of football might actually break out. At least now we know why. When they lost on penalties to Mali in the last 16 of the Africa Cup of Nations, they had refused to actually take on an inferior side despite their opponents having a man sent off after 26 minutes. But fear runs deep in Tunisian football.

* The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we start a series on England and the 1966 World Cup. Listen here.

On Libero, we preview the World Cup. Listen here.

Now, after they conceded five in two successive games, is perhaps not the best time to make the argument, but Tunisian football is held back by anxiety. For at least 30 years they have had gifted players who have been underutilised, constrained by a mentality that paralyses them with the terror of failure. For managers, defeat means dismissal, as Lamouchi has discovered. This is not the first time Tunisia have done this. Youssef Zouaoui was sacked after Tunisia lost the opening game of the 1994 Cup of Nations to Mali. Henryk Kasperczak was sacked after Tunisia’s defeats to England and Colombia at the 1998 World Cup.

But how healthy is it, really, for a country to have burned through six coaches since the start of qualifying? Jalel Kadri, who had led them at the last World Cup, oversaw two wins in the first two qualifiers but resigned in January 2024 after a group -tage exit at the Cup of Nations. He was replaced on a caretaker basis by Montasser Louhichi, who oversaw a win and a draw in qualifying before being replaced on 1 July 2024 by Faouzi Benzarti. The 74 year old was sacked on 22 October after a home defeat to Comoros in Cup of Nations qualifying.

Kais Yaâkoubi took over on an interim basis before Sami Trabelsi took charge on 10 February 2025. He continued Tunisia’s remarkable record in World Cup qualifying – somehow, for all the disruption, they won nine and drew one of ten games and didn’t concede a single goal – but a group stage exit in the Arab Cup followed by that penalty shoot-out defeat to Mali did for him.

Mondher Kabaier, the coach of Club Africain who left the Tunisia job after being replaced by Kadri when he was stricken by Covid, looked the preferred candidate to replace Lamouchi, although it was never entirely clear how he could get a visa in time. And then came the great coup de théâtre: the appointment of Hervé Renard for his third men’s World Cup in charge of a third different team, having led Morocco in 2018 and Saudi Arabia in 2022. He broke off from managing the Saudis to lead France at the women’s World Cup, then returned to lead them through World Cup qualifying, which he did, only to be sacked two months ago. Tunisia are the sixth African team he has taken charge of, and he remains the only man to lead two different African sides to the Cup of Nations: Zambia in 2012 and Ivory Coast in 2015.

If Tunisia are to make it through, they need, at the very least, either to beat Japan on Saturday or the Netherlands the following Thursday, although starting with a minus-4 goal difference is less than ideal if they’re hoping to be a best third-place side.

Familiar Problems Haunt Spain

There is always something comforting when teams fail in familiar ways. Spain had 74.3% possession against Cape Verde. They had 27 shots. They didn’t score. The centre-forward Mikel Oyarzabal didn’t touch the ball in the opening half hour. We’ve seen this before, Spain passing sideways in the face in a low block, unable to prise an opening.

We’ve seen this before from Cape Verde as well. Their qualification was based on their home form: a 3-0 win over Eswatini, three 1-0 wins and a goalless draw. Since their first emergence at the Cup of Nations in 2013, they have been a side rooted in the solidity of their defence. They didn’t qualify for the 2025 Cup of Nations, largely because they kept only one clean sheet in six games. In World Cup qualifying, Cape Verde lost only once – but it was 4-1 to Cameroon. Score early against them, and there’s not much Cape Verde can do; they just don’t have the capacity to take the game to even a half-decent opponent. But they are supremely skilled at shutting sides out.

What was made this noteworthy, though, was that it had seemed Spain had moved on. Their victory in the Euros was predicated on the direct running of Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams. Both eventually came on – Yamal after 71 minutes and Williams after 87 – but if they are not fit enough, or not sufficiently in form, to play the role they did in 2024, this might be back to the old problems for Spain. Certainly De La Fuente’s decision to opt for a 4-3-1-2 rather than 4-3-3 suggested he is not convinced by his other wide options.

Teams have come back from worse starts to win the tournament, notably Argentina and Spain themselves, it it’s the familiarity of the issue that will concern Spain.

Brazilian worries and Morocco's rise

Jonathan Wilson — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:31:39 GMT

For the World Cup, given time differences and the fact I have very little idea what day it is, Wilson’s World will break from the standard Monday-Thursday routine to a less regular pattern. There will be some full columns, but also others, like today’s, of thoughts I’ve had and have nowhere else to express. Some will be free and some will be paywalled.

Vinícius and the Brazilian midfield crisis

The good news for Brazil is that it got better after about half an hour, but the way they started the game must have brought back memories of their 4-1 defeat to Argentina in March 2025. The problem was exactly the same: a midfield that was overrun.

At el Monumental, Dorival Jnr was still in charge and the midfield was André and Joelinton, who was withdrawn at half-time for João Gomes. Carlo Ancelotti has yet to solve the issue. At MetLife, the midfield was Casemiro and Bruno Guimarães, but the problem was the same. The personnel, in truth, are not the issue. Here it was Casemiro chugging, looking every second of his 34 years, and withdrawn at half-time for Fabinho.

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The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we start a series on England and the 1966 World Cup. Listen here.

World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 2010, while last Friday we talked to Sam Kunti about Brazil piost-2002. Members can binge all four 1966 episodes now. Join up here.

On Libero, we preview the World Cup. Listen here.

But it’s not really about personnel, or not just about personnel. Both at el Monumental and at Metlife, Brazil played a 4-2-3-1 that looks a lot like 4-2-4. Lucas Paqueta did regain the ball eight times in his 62 minutes in the field but, like Casemiro spent the game haring around plugging others’ gaps. Raphinha does not track. Vinícius Jnr tracks intermittently. Between them Raphinha and Vini regained the ball once all game; when Vini did so, after a lengthy sprint, it was such an event that he looked round expectantly, awaiting praise. A forward line that remains as distant as Brazil’s does is always going to place intolerable pressure on the midfield.

Ill-advised back threes and games of four quarters

Jonathan Wilson — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:04:06 GMT

South Africa’s Baffling Approach

Over the past three or four years, South Africa have been one of the most watchable sides in Africa, technically good and with an attacking instinct that has been harnessed by Hugo Broos. They got to the semi-final of the 2023 Cup of Nations (played in 2024) on the back of clean sheets allied to creative sparkle. Their 2-0 win over Morocco in the last 16 in Côte d’Ivoire was arguably the best South African performance since the glory days of the 1990s. There seemed then evidence of a new wave, inspired by the large contingent at Mamelodi Sundowns (eight of them in the World Cup squad) who beat FAR Rabat in this season’s African Champions League final, having been runners-up the previous year.

But at the most recent Cup of Nations, played over New Year in Morocco, South Africa lost 2-1 to Cameroon in the last 16. Cameroon looked quicker, stronger, smarter, allowing South Africa the ball and exposing them on the break. Perhaps that played on Broos’s mind, because the way they played in that opening game against Mexico was completely different to how they have played under him over the past two years.

Only once before under Broos have they set up with a back five, in the semi-final of the 2023 Cup of Nations against Nigeria. Then too, perhaps, fear of the occasion took hold. It was a desperately cagey game, in which South Africa equalised with a last-minute penalty but lost in a shoot-out. Was Broos concerned his side would wilt amid the frenzy of the Azteca? Even Javier Aguirre, the Mexico manager, spoke of his side suffering “stage fright” in the cauldron of green. Was Broos worried Mexico might dominate them physically, as Cameroon had?

Either way, it didn’t work. South Africa seemed inhibited, tentative, their attempts to slow the game down and control possession only leading to them into pressing traps, such as brought the first goal. Whether the fault lay with Ronwen Williams for playing the pass or with Sphephelo Sithole for dealing with it so ineptly can be debated, but where Sithole deserves sympathy is for his red card. There’s no doubt it was a sending off as Sithole tanged with Brian Gutierrez but the situation only developed because Nkosinathi Sibisi, the right-sided centre-back, had got caught playing three or four yards behind the defensive line. Players can make mistakes at any time, of course, but playing in an unfamiliar system probably makes such errors more likely.

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The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we start a series on England and the 1966 World Cup. Listen here.

On Libero, we preview the World Cup. Listen here.

Hydration Breaks Must Go

Before the tournament I had, to be honest, been ambivalent about hydration breaks. If that’s what it takes to protect the well-being of players, I thought, so be it. I’ve been at plenty of games in which there have been breaks – at the Brazil World Cup, in the Premier League and at Cups of Nations. They always just seemed to pass by.

It turns out the breaks at this World Cup are different, more insidious for being mandatory. You know they’re coming. They seem to take forever. The play feels as though it’s shaped by them. The temperature in the Azteca was warm, but in no sense unpalatably hot: officially 23 degrees Celsius, although cooler when it clouded over. That’s not a danger to anybody. But we have the breaks so they can fit in more ads.

It turns out, football is better when it’s two halves of 45 minutes rather than four quarters of 22.5 minutes. In that opening game, South Africa just seemed to be establishing a foothold in the game when the first-half break came. Mexico reset and took control again. Rhythm, in turns out, matters a lot. In fact, given how low-scoring a game football is, it’s probably the most important thing – and Fifa have messed with it without really seeming to think through the consequences. Once again, the sport itself has been sacrificed to commercial instincts.

The Thrilling US Start

This has been a more open World Cup so far than I’d anticipated, although that maya be because the nature of the group stage, with two-thirds of the best third-place teams going through, means that, as yet, there is very little jeopardy. The big danger was always going to be in the last 32 when one slip, or one freakish goal, could eliminate a giant and a cautious cloud may yet descend. But the most impressive side over the first two days, by far, has been the USA.

Folarin Balogun produced a pair of excellent finishes (and one further effort that was ruled offside), suggesting that the US have the sort of firepower that was notably lacking from either South Korea or Canada, both of whom dominated their games without taking full advantage. And Christian Pulisic, confidence boosted by one early shuffle at pace, excelled, albeit he remains, as he was in his Chelsea days, a player much better at running at opponents than at doing anything with the ball once he’s beaten them. There was one hilariously dreadful cross that flew across the box about 50 feet in the air, and even his cross for the second goal was deflected.

But it didn’t really matter because of the sense of momentum the US generated. This is a Paraguay side that had conceded only 10 goals in 18 games in qualifying, and yet they were overwhelmed by the waves of US attacks, rattled into basic errors. In that sense, the USA are a very Pochettino side, and there appears reason for them to be extremely optimistic. Although perhaps the biggest question going forward is whether Pochettino will continue to dress like late-70s Roger Moore. Every shot of the bench looked like a young Russell Crowe had been cast in a remake of Moonraker. You just hope one of the multitude of Hollywood royalty who were there in LA have the foresight to make it.

Infantino grins as the World Cup burns

Jonathan Wilson — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:29:06 GMT

On Thursday evening, Mexico will play South Africa at the Estadio Ciudad de Mexico and the 23^rd World Cup will be underway. Most of the world will call it the Estadio Azteca, although these days its actually known, for sponsorship reasons, as the Estadio Banorte. The Mexican bank is not an official Fifa partner and so the name has to be changed; Fifa, sticking to its naming conventions in such circumstances, has opted not to use the traditional name for the stadium, and so another little bit of history and romance has been killed for drab commercial reasons.

Few recent World Cups have not had a troubled build-up, but this has been more troubled than most – and not just for the obvious geopolitical reason than Iran and the USA are at war.

The Somalian referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan, highly regarded enough to have taken charge of the second leg of this season’s African Champions League final, was interrogated for 11 hours and ultimately denied entry at Miami airport. Artan is 34. He’s spent most of his life working, despite the disadvantages of growing up in an impoverished and often violent country, to be the best he can be at a thankless but necessary pursuit. He is at the top of his game and seemed about to achieve the fulfilment of refereeing at a World Cup. And then, he has been denied that chance precisely because he is from Somalia. And Fifa does nothing.

* The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we start a series on England and the 1966 World Cup. Listen here.

World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 2010, while last Friday we talked to John Football about Italy in 1982. Members can binge all four 1966 episodes now. Join up here.

On Libero, we ask why so many high-level managers are working at this World Cup. Listen here.

World Soccer Magazine’s guide to the 2026 World Cup came out on May 15. And, because you subscribe to Wilson’s World of Football, you can get a 50% discount by pre-ordering here and using the discount code JW50. Or to subscribe, go here and save 61%.

Various members of Iran’s delegation have been denied visas while restrictions have been placed on when the team can travel in and out of Los Angeles and Seattle for games. Trump has reportedly instructed ICE to check the visas of players from certain squads. Teams, especially from Muslim-majority countries, have been subjected to invasive searches. And Gianni Infantino grins away and calls this the most inclusive World Cup in history.

The Dragons of Walpole

Jonathan Wilson — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:31:43 GMT

On Saturday, Scotland will play their first game at a World Cup since 1998, taking on Haiti at the Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. Most people are probably now aware, thanks to the controversy over train prices, that the stadium is not in Boston, but around 27 miles to the south-west. When I went there for an MLS game between New England Revolution and Chicago Fire in 2000, I was not.

I’d seen the 1994 World Cup. I knew about the stadium in Boston. It was where Diego Maradona had played his final World Cup match, helping Argentina to a 2-1 win over Nigeria before being led off the pitch by a smiling nurse called Sue Ellen Carpenter for the fateful drugs test. I’d just finished a journalism course in London and was visiting mates at Harvard before getting on with trying to find an actual job. Hristo Stoichkov played for Chicago Fire. I arranged press accreditation.

Only on the morning of the game did I actually look at where the stadium was. Now, of course, it would be a relatively easy task to determine the best way of getting there, but the internet was in its infancy and it’s fair to say MLS was not particularly alert to the possibility of fans going to games without a car.

* The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we talk to Tim Vickery about the history of Brazil at World Cups. Listen here.

World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 2006, while last Friday we talked to John Football about Italy in 1982. Join up here.

On Libero, we ask why Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are still dominant figures. Listen here.

World Soccer Magazine’s guide to the 2026 World Cup is out on May 15. And, because you subscribe to Wilson’s World of Football, you can get a 50% discount by pre-ordering here and using the discount code JW50. Or to subscribe, go here and save 61%.

I looked at a map, and saw that the closest rail station was Walpole (the controversial train does not actually stop at a proper station; you just have to leap off onto the trackside), so I decided to take a train there, assuming there’d be a shuttle bus or something to get from there to the ground. I was wrong.

It was a foul night, windy and lashing with rain. I got off the train at Walpole and quickly realised there was no shuttle service. There wasn’t anything, really. The town has a population of 26,000, but the station isn’t even in the town. I went out of the exit and… nothing. Just a road in the forest. There was nobody about. In the distance I could see a glow of lights, so I set off down the road towards it. I was soon soaked, but worse was how eerie the whole place was. This was only a year after The Blair Witch Project had come out and I could think of nothing else. I was going to be butchered by some weird supernatural force on the way to see a game I didn’t actually care about on a terrible night – and even worse, Stoichkov was ruled out by injury.

I eventually arrived in Walpole. There was a small green with a flagpole on which the Stars and Stripes and a Vietnam MIA flag hung at half-mast. There was no bus, no people. As I pondered what to do, a man emerged from the gloom. He was wearing a hunting jacket and had a rifle slung over his shoulder. His appearance didn’t make me any less uneasy.

Hesitantly, I approached him. “Scuse me, mate. Is there a bus to the soccer game?”

When he’d finished laughing, he gave me the number of a local taxi company and pointed out a call box. I rang them. More laughter. Half an hour.

The rain was still hammering down. I decided to try to get something to eat. I found a pizza takeaway place with a handful of stools. It was brightly lit by fluorescent tubes and on the tiled walls were two signed photographs, one of Kevin Bacon and one of Marvin Hagler. I vaguely noted that the dedications on both made reference to “Dragons”, but mainly I was wondering if all the tiles were to make it easier to mop up any blood. The man in the hunting jacket was sat at the counter. When I walked in, he told the woman behind the counter to go and get the boss. This didn’t seem an entirely happy development.

The boss came out. He was about six foot six, dressed entirely in black and had slicked back hair just greying at the temple. He was a pizza ship owner played by Christopher Lee and massively intimidating. After some hilarity over my being British and on my way to a soccer game, the man in the hunting jacket kept urging the boss to show me something. So he went into the back and returned a couple of minutes later with a blue plastic box which he placed on the counter.

He reached in and took out a remote-controlled quad bike, then thrust his hand inside his shirt. I was sure he was going to pull out a knife or a gun. I was about to be slaughtered in a pizza takeaway joint in a forest in Massachusetts. He smiled unnervingly. Then he took out what appeared to be an iguana, although I now know it to have been a bearded dragon. He dropped it on the quad bike. It clearly knew what it was doing, grasping the handlebars and squeezing its knees to the chassis, a frown of concentration appearing above its unblinking eyes.

The boss put the bike and the lizard in the floor and began driving it about. I expressed a startled admiration. “I took this on Letterman,” he said. “But on Letterman we had a pig on the controls.”

He showed me some newspaper cuttings and, sure enough, he’d trained a pig to hold a remote-control handset steady with its trotter while guiding the joystick with its snout. And not just one bearded dragon, but a fleet. The boss, it turned out, took his dragons round local schools to explain evolution. I never found out at what point the bike and the pig had got involved.

I ate my pizza. The taxi arrived. I got to the game a minute or so before kick-off and introduced myself to the people either side of me in the press box. To my right was a world-weary Slovak. To my left, a small sprightly man.

“I’m Ferdie,” he said, his tone making it clear I should know who he was. When it became apparent I didn’t he explained: Ferdie Ato Adoboe, a Ghanaian who’d played professional football on five continents and held the world records for speed keepie-ups and running the 100m backwards.

“Mate,” I said, “if you’re trying to impress me you’re going to have to try a lot harder than that.”

The Marksmen and the Wanderers

Jonathan Wilson — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:05:48 GMT

The first season of the American Soccer League, 1921-22, may have been chaotic, but to an extent that was priced in. Very few new professional leagues, in whatever sport, pass off smoothly. Certainly at that point there was no great reason to believe that American football would take off to surpass baseball; soccer had a chance.

The National Football League had begun just a year before the ASL. It featured 14 teams but was run on such an ad hoc basis that there was no fixture list and there was no clear criteria for determining who was champion. The first season, frankly, was a mess. Akron Pros won eight and drew three of eleven fixtures and only five months after their final game, in April 1921, were they declared champions, even though Buffalo/Phoenixville had won twenty, drawn one and lost one of their twenty-two games.

Part of the complication was the question of whether Buffalo/Phoenixville constituted one club or two. Phoenixville were not a league side and would play on a Saturday, but they shared talent with professional clubs: eight with the Buffalo All-Americans, Fritz Pollard with Akron Pros plus another played with Cleveland Tigers. Buffalo, in New York State, is 365 miles from Phoenixville in Pennsylvania, but after games on a Saturday, those eight players would take the train north-west. Phoenixville won 11 out of 11, Buffalo won eight, drew one and lost one. But Akron were the first champions. At least everybody was certain Philadelphia FC had won the first ASL – albeit the club was Bethlehem Steel under another name.

* The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

Issue Sixty of The Blizzard is available here, featuring an investigation into Ghana’s underachievement, an examination of Kylian Mbappé’s childhood, George Weah, George Reynolds, Newcastle United, play-off finals and the Chicago Bricklayers.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we talk to Tim Vickery about the history of Brazil at World Cups. Listen here.

World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 2006, while last Thursday we conducted a live Q&A. Join up here.

On Libero, we consider the end of the season. Listen here.

Nor were NFL crowds much larger than those in the ASL at the beginning of the decade, rarely reaching 10,000. The real interest, though, as Bethlehem Steel had already learned to their cost, was in university sport. College American football in particular was beginning to draw huge crowds. In 1924, Red Grange of the Illinois Fighting Illini, nicknamed the Galloping Ghost, scored six times to beat Michigan in front of a 70,000 crowd at the University of Illinois; college games were becoming a mass-media event. In 1927, the University of Michigan built a 72,000-capacity stadium in Ann Arbor to house its American football team; within a year it had expanded that to 85,000. Soccer never got close to that, paying perhaps for the failure to connect with universities once Harvard had demonstrated a preference for the handing game in the late 19^th century.

The only way they could have played

Jonathan Wilson — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 06:59:56 GMT

“Journalism,” the Spanish coach Juanma Lillo told Sid Lowe in Issue 0 of The Blizzard, “analyses everything via success — and as a result, journalism always wins. The analysis, the reports, are carried out via success so they’re always right. No one is looking at the process except through the prism of a result.”

And not just journalism. In the hours since Gabriel’s missed penalty confirmed Paris Saint-Germain as winners of the Champions League, there has been a remarkable amount of criticism of Arsenal’s approach, running the gamut from the self-entitled who demand to be entertained to those who wonder whether more attacking thrusts might have got a second, game-winning goal. Both, though, seem to ignore the reality.

Play an open game, and Arsenal would have been ripped apart by PSG, just as Bayern were (ignore the 6-5 scoreline; PSG were comfortably the better side and Vincent Kompany’s approach ended up looking extremely naïve). So they had to close the game down, sit deep and go long. That’s why Kai Havertz started ahead of Viktor Gyökeres, and why, along with the Spaniard’s obvious fatigue in recent weeks, the more destructive Myles Lewis-Skelly was deployed in midfield ahead of Martín Zubimendi.

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The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we look at the greatest Champions League finals of all time. Listen here.

World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 2002, while on Friday we considered England’s chances at the World Cup with Jonathan Northcroft. Join up here.

On Libero, we consider the end of the season. Listen here.

But it’s not as simple as saying that PSG are a better side than Arsenal, or even that they are a better attacking side. They are a much fresher side. Only one of their players, Vitinha, had played more than 2000 minutes of league football this season; nine of Arsenal’s had. PSG were able to rest players for league games secure in the knowledge that their squad is by far the best in Ligue Un; their wage bill is almost double that of the side with the second-biggest, Marseille, and 10 times that of, say, Le Havre. Arsenal do not have that luxury; for them every game had the potential to be a scrap, and that is exhausting. Swap the squads round and PSG would probably still be the side playing with verve.

Mikel Arteta seemingly took a decision last summer that what Arsenal needed was strength in depth rather than necessarily greater quality. Rather than pursuing a top-class centre-forward – could they, perhaps, have got Alexander Isak or Hugo Ekitiké with a large bid early in the window? – they went for Gyökeres and Madueke: hard-working toilers rather than star quality. It helped bring the league title and Gyökeres’s 14 league goals were undeniably helpful even if few of them came against top sides, but the limitations of the strategy were seen against PSG.

There had been hints, certainly in the first leg of the Bayern tie, that French champions might run out of steam late in tough games (understandably enough, given how rarely they’re challenged domestically), but Arsenal’s substitutes never looked like hurting PSG. Gyökeres struggled to hold the ball up and that meant that Arsenal rarely had any way of releasing pressure, still less threatening PSG. And when they did get a flurry of late corners, Madueke’s delivery was nowhere near as threatening as Bukayo Saka’s might have been.

And yet despite that, Arsenal might easily have won it. They led 1-0 for an hour. Kai Havertz, having taken his goal superbly, wasn’t far off getting a second before half-time. There was a shout for a penalty (although personally I thought Madueke grabbed Nuno Mendes’s arm, initiating their mutual tumble; certainly the criticism the German referee Daniel Siebert received from certain quarters seemed excessive and partisan). PSG’s threat was sporadic at best, their equaliser the result of a momentary lapse from Cristhian Mosquera (who, having already been booked, was fortunate not to receive a second yellow card). The Spain international would not have been playing but for injuries to both Jurriën Timber and Ben White; in that sense Arsenal were a little unfortunate. PSG did hit the post and might have had a penalty in the first half for a handball by Saka, but very few sides capitalise on all their chances. For Arsenal to take this PSG to penalties was an achievement in itself.

The criticism seems to misunderstand the nature of this Arsenal and, arguably, football itself. Although Arsenal’s spending has increased, their wage bill is still well below that of Manchester City; they are still catching up. There will, presumably, be further investment this summer with a high-class central striker and a wide creators the priorities.

What should Arsenal have done? Attacked to create a better spectacle? Defending is just as much a part of the game as attacking, and Arsenal did it very well. There have been times this season when they have seemed self-defeatingly cautious, or when their determination to slow the game down has come close to overstepping the bounds of decency, but this was not one of them.

Arsenal lost, but this was a fraction from being a tactical triumph for Arteta. The process was good.

Slot, Glasner, Tuchel and why context is vital

Jonathan Wilson — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:15:34 GMT

In football, there are very few absolutes. What works with a particular team in a particular place at a particular time does not necessarily work with a different team in a different place at a different time. This is one of the difficulties of the use of data in football; how can an algorithm possibly take into account the context and all the manifold complexities of circumstance?

It’s not just a football issue. “Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life,” the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung wrote in his essay “The Stages of Life”. “Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”

He was referring to his theory that life falls into two basic periods: the “morning” in which a subject is goal-oriented and outward-looking, seeking to gain an education, begin a career or start a family, securing their place in the world; and the “afternoon” which, with basic status already established, is more inward-looking, about nurturing or maintaining what already exists, finding fulfilment in less obvious goals. There are clear and quite specific parallels there for football: there is a major difference between emerging players or managers and those who already have a reputation (and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, there is a danger for established managers that they drift into self-parody).

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The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we look at the greatest Champions League finals of all time. Listen here.

World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 2002, while on Friday we considered England’s chances at the World Cup with Jonathan Northcroft. Join up here.

On Libero, we consider the end of the season. Listen here.

But there is also the more basic point that there is no recipe for success in football. Tony Bloom and Jamestown Analytics may have come as close as anybody but there is no formula for success. Everything is changing all the time. That’s one of the reasons why only four managers have ever won the English league with more than one club. There are no universal solutions, something that is highlighted by three recent examples: Arne Slot, Oliver Glasner and the England World Cup squad.

Caligula, West Ham and relegation

Jonathan Wilson — Tue, 26 May 2026 07:00:20 GMT

Caligula’s Palace and Bridge is a painting among Tate Britain’s JMW Turner collection. It shows the ruins of a great edifice and, from it, stretching through the water, a vast, crumbling stone construction. In his life of the emperor, Suetonius described how, in defiance of a prediction that he was no more likely to become emperor than to ride a horse across the Gulf of Baiae, Caligula had a floating bridge made of boats lashed together and rode across in a chariot from Baiae to Puteoli. Turner’s version, made of stone, is far more dramatic, and far more fitting for the point being made.

Turner, like many Romantics, loved ruins. Caligula’s Palace and Bridge was first exhibited in 1831. Britain was industrialising rapidly. The Enlightenment values of reason and order were dominant. It would be misleading to suggest that Turner was simply pining for a past age – Rain, Steam and Speed may be ambiguous but there is a sense of excitement and awe at the power of the train depicted – but equally he clearly felt the pull of the old, the broken and the beautiful, elements that were being swept away by the demands of progress. Ruins were, quite apart from anything else, memento mori, reminders that all man’s hubris would eventually collapse into dust.

Yet Caligula’s Palace and Bridge is not a gloomy painting. Rather, there is beauty and grandeur in the collapsing bridge and, beneath its bulk, we see a group of women washing in the water, children playing while a man leads his goats to drink, a couple embracing as they sit on a rock. Life goes on. Which, belatedly, leads us to the Olympic Stadium and West Ham United.

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The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we look at the greatest Champions League finals of all time. Listen here.

World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 1998, while on Friday we considered England’s chances at the World Cup with Jonathan Northcroft. Join up here.

On Libero, we ask if Michael Carrick is the best option for Manchester United. Listen here.

What would a civilisation think, hundreds of years from now, coming across the ruins of the London Stadium? Would any of it survive? It feels so flimsy it may not: a few girders, some decaying concrete as an appendage to the Westfield shopping complex. Would they grasp what went on there? Could they have any conception of the folly and waste that has led West Ham to have the largest stadium in the Championship? Even next season, how will that feel? The London Stadium can be a bleak and soulless place even now; how much worse when numbers aren’t even padded by tourists coming for their hit of Premier League football.

The whole story is one of incompetence and waste. What do you do with an Olympic stadium once the Olympics have packed up and left town? The stadium had cost around £430m but had no purpose. It essentially had to be taken over by a football club; no other sport draws anything like large enough crowds regularly enough to be anything approaching viable. But a stadium built for athletics is not necessarily right for football. Conversion cost £320m but, frankly, the better option night just have been to knock it down and start again. Maybe forget the stadium bit; just knock up some more luxury flats.

The London Stadium is too shallow. The angles are wrong. The sound dissipates. It’s all too open, too flat in both senses of the word. It just isn’t a football stadium, which certainly isn’t the full story but may in part explain why so little football has ever been played in it. In 2013, the Greater London Authority, led by the mayor, Boris Johnson, agreed a 99-year deal to lease the stadium to West Ham. The current rate is £4.4m a year, although that will halve after relegation.

At the time it was widely seen as a great deal for West Ham – a ready-made 60,000-capacity stadium without the hundreds of millions of pounds of construction costs and debt repayments that, say, Arsenal and Tottenham endured with their stadium moves – but the GLA was desperate. What else were they going to do with the site? And there was at the time, a sense that some monument to the uplifting spirit of the Games needed to be maintained. But does anybody now, watching Max Kilman lose his man, or Aaron Wan-Bissaka slice a clearance, or Jean-Clair Todibo look baffled, think of Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis and Greg Rutherford winning gold on Super Saturday? If you want a monument, build a monument; if you want a football stadium, don’t start with one designed for athletics.

“You sold our soul for this shithole,” goes the song, with “the Boleyn” now a shorthand for the good old days. Whether Upton Park could ever have been a truly modern football stadium – and balancing tradition and the demand of fans to maintain treasured old features with functionality and corporate and media facilities is never easy – is debatable, but it’s not like media facilities in the new ground are world-claass. If West Ham had been winning, playing great football, perhaps the new stadium would have been embraced, but the financial advantages it should have conferred have been squandered, as was the £105m West Ham got for Declan Rice. A once in a generation player like him should sustain a club for a generation, but if anything they spent the money even worse than Tottenham spent their Gareth Bale windfall.

West Ham’s is a story of bad appointments and bad signings, of the sort of advantages most clubs can only dream of shamefully squandered by David Sullivan and Karren Brady. There have been plenty of warning signs over the past four years; none have been heeded. Even without the stadium and the Rice money, West Ham have spent 14 years in the Premier League; broadcasting rights alone should have been enough to insulate them. But faced with an emergent class of smartly run smaller cubs and a pair of newly promoted sides in Sunderland and Leeds who recruited well, West Ham collapsed.

Turner would probably paint a ruined London Stadium as an example of the way entropy and decrepitude come for us all. And, as with Caligula, there is certainly hubris and delusion there, both in the way the decision over the future of Olympic Stadium, the way corporate culture gnaws at everything and the incompetence with which West Ham have been led, and the arrogance of the leadership not to notice. There’s still a football club there somewhere, but it may take some finding.

Discount offer: SC Libero

Jonathan Wilson — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:23:35 GMT

Thank you for being paid subscribers to Wilson’s World.

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If you sign up to an annual membership for either the Einsteins or Special Ones tier, you’ll get 50% off if you use the checkout code: WWOF50

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Villa glory, Europa League questions

Jonathan Wilson — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:05:59 GMT

It’s the modern world, so everybody’s always upset about something. Unai Emery, even, was unusually sharp in the press-conference after the Europa League final, demanding that a Turkish journalist who had suggested that Aston Villa had won easily show some respect to Freiburg. Those who follow German football seemed equally desperate to insist nobody wrote off Freiburg’s achievements. Villa fans were desperate for their European glory to be acknowledged. But multiple things can be true at once.

This was a great triumph for Aston Villa, 44 years after their last European trophy, 30 years after their last silverware of any kind, and seven years after they won promotion through the play-offs. There are few enough opportunities for clubs outside the absolute elite to celebrate in modern football, and they should be seized. As For Crystal Palace, Aberdeen and Union Saint-Gilloise last year, there were tears, a clear sense of fans unable quite to believe that this had happened to them. Nobody should begrudge that.

What’s the best way to win a final? With a dramatic late comeback, by holding a slender lead and clinging on for the final whistle, or with a procession? From the moment Youri Tielemans volleyed in Villa’s opener four minutes before half-time, the result was in no doubt. Freiburg were nowhere near good enough to threaten them. Emi Martínez may have been the wounded hero, playing despite breaking a finger in the warm-up, but he could probably have kept a clean sheet relatively easily after breaking every finger.

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But that’s not meant to disparage Freiburg, who’d beaten Genk, Celta Vigo and Braga to get there. Their budget is 2.8 times less than that of Villa. They finished seventh in the Bundesliga. This was just a mismatch and Villa’s superiority, underpinned by the financial superiority of the Premier League, won out. Premier League clubs have won their last 20 knockout ties against foreign opposition in the Europa league and Conference League. The domination of the Premier League at this level is systemic.

What makes football good?

Jonathan Wilson — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:00:36 GMT

There was a climactic game in Britain on Saturday, full of intrigue and drama, that engrossed the nation and will be talked about for years to come. But it was not the FA Cup final. A drab first half yielded to a more interesting second as Manchester City held off a spirited Chelsea to win the Cup for the third time under Pep Guardiola, but the match th…

The VARanoid Mood in 2020s Football

Jonathan Wilson — Thu, 14 May 2026 09:10:22 GMT

This week saw potentially crucial games in title races in two different countries decided by VAR decisions late in injury time. In both cases the decision was greeted with howls of outrage and allegations of conspiracy. That some people believed VAR would remove controversy from the game seems absurdly quaint and misguided now.

To recap, briefly, the two incidents. On Sunday, Callum Wilson looked to have equalised for West Ham against Arsenal, but his goal was ruled out when it was decided that Pablo had fouled David Raya. Which was certainly arguable, although it’s also arguable that he had extended his arm to brace himself after being shoved by Leandro Trossard. Personally, I felt it was probably the right decision: although I wasn’t entirely convinced Pablo had committed a foul, Raya’s shirt had also been tugged by Jean-Clair Todibo, which clearly was a foul. Given Declan Rice, a habitual wrestler, also committed a foul in the box, perhaps a penalty could have been awarded, but then Tomáš Souček was also guilty of an offence. So: an utter mess in which it was possible to focus on any of about half a dozen incidents but, given the centrality of the goalkeeper to the action, I don’t think it’s unreasonable that took precedence.

On Wednesday, Celtic were drawing 2-2 at Motherwell when, deep into injury-time, a throw-in was lobbed into the box. The Motherwell midfielder Sam Nicholson jumped with Celtic’s Auston Trusty. As his right arm caught the defender in the head, the ball seemed to brush his hand in front of his forehead a moment before he headed it clear. At first it seemed the VAR check was for a possible foul on Trusty – that was what I thought watching on television, and it was what the Sky commentators thought – but it then became clear they were checking for the handball.

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And the ball almost certainly did strike the hand, which was raised; in that sense it was technically correct. But was Nicholson trying to handle it? Was his hand really in an unnatural position given he was trying to protect himself from Trusty? Did he gain any sort of advantage from it given he still got a meaty head on it? In that sense it is a pure VAR penalty: a minor infraction that would almost certainly never previously have been noticed – had Trusty not stayed down following the blow to his head would it have been seen? – gleefully picked upon by rectitudinous refereeing.

Professional Pioneers and Cuckoo Champions

Jonathan Wilson — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:35:53 GMT

Baseball had been openly professional since 1869, American football since 1892 and basketball since 1898 so why, it began to be asked in the years immediately after the First World War, not soccer? Football had, after all, been professional in England since 1885 and Scotland since 1893 and there was talk of coming professionalism in central Europe and S…

The golden age of Paris

Jonathan Wilson — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:07:57 GMT

In some ways, the dynamic of the rise of Paris Saint-Germain feels very old-fashioned. They have clearly been a major club for several years and then, all at once, they’ve found the right combination of squad and manager to find a new level. They may or may not beat Arsenal in the Champions League final in Budapest at the end of the month but, either way, it feels like European football is in its PSG era, the first such clearly defined period since the Barcelona era came to an end (which was probably with the semi-final defeat to Chelsea in 2012, although it might just about be extended to the victory over Juventus under Luis Enrique in 2015).

Real Madrid may object that they have won six Champions Leagues since that Barcelona defeat to Chelsea, including a run of four triumphs in five years, but their almost perpetual success makes it very hard to define any period other than the late fifties, when they won the first five European Cups, as definitively madridista. They’re the default, the team that wins when nobody else does, which may not be entirely fair, but that;s the curse of pre-eminence.

PSG under Luis Enrique have an obvious style and elan. They counter-attack with lethal pace and directness and have, in Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Ousmane Dembelé and Desiré Doué, three of the brightest, most watchable forwards in world football. Vitally, unlike their PSG predecessors, all three are not merely hugely individually gifted, but have a team ethic and perform their defensive duties.

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The first leg showed their attacking prowess but what was impressive in the second was how, with Fabián Ruiz back in midfield, they were able to control the game. Bayern created far fewer clear openings than PSG did in the second leg. Although the final aggregate was 6-5 and, in that sense Bayern could argue that the game was decided by the infuriating penalty PSG were awarded shortly before half-time in the first leg, it somehow never felt that close. Only a string of fine saves from Manuel Neuer in Munich, making up for his uncomfortable first leg, prevented PSG running away with it.

The Last Diamond

Jonathan Wilson — Mon, 04 May 2026 08:57:27 GMT

77 years ago today, as the evening drew on, Marta Egri was waiting at home in Turin for an artist. She was approaching her 18th birthday and her father had commissioned a portrait of her to mark the occasion. Her mother, Jolán, was with her. The phone rang. Their assumption was that it was the artist apologising for being late but, when Jolán answered, …