My main focus on this site is discussion of ACC sports, mostly basketball in football – in that order. While I love those sports, and many others, there is no doubt in my mind what the greatest sporting event in the world is – soccer’s World Cup. The NCAA basketball tournament is great, nearly perfect, but it just doesn’t have the magnitude of soccer’s biggest event. College basketball players are NOT the best players in the world, and you just can’t compare the excitement of a single university’s fans to those of an entire nation.
The World Cup is most like the Olympics in scope, but it’s even better for one key reason – the Olympics consist mainly of sports that few play or are interested in when the Olympics aren’t in progress, while soccer is without question the most popular sport in the world. Literally billions of people play or follow the game. If you consider the sheer size of the sport, combined with the lack of need for abnormal size to play (unlike basketball, for example), you can easily argue that elite soccer has the best athletes in the world.

The only real knock on the World Cup comes from Americans who don’t like the sport. There are a lot of folks who think that soccer is boring, too foreign and too pussified. I’m not going to spend any energy trying to change those people’s opinions, but I’ll just point out that billions of people can’t be wrong. And if you don’t like it, you might want to learn to at least tolerate it, because the sport’s growth in this country is not going to stop anytime soon. If you don’t love it, your kids will. Hell, if the US makes a deep run this year, you might even learn to love it yourself. It’s easy to love a winner.
But I digress. The World Cup would be great even if the United States had failed to qualify. It’s just such a spectacle – the games, the fans, the colors, the nationalism, the playing styles – they all blend together in a whirlpool of passion and pride. If you haven’t followed it before, try to catch some games this time around – all of them are on live TV.
One of my favorite aspects of international soccer, and to be honest, I don’t follow it much outside of the World Cup, is how so many teams’ playing styles fit with the stereotypes of the people of their country. Germany plays with a dispassionate precision – rarely sexy, but always dangerous. Brazil dances and flashes around the field like it’s Carnival. South American and Mediterranean teams seem to always have a bit more flair, along with wild displays of emotion – screaming, diving, pulling. The Italians are all about style over substance – pretty players preening for the crowd and not at all afraid to cheat. African teams are often big, strong and fast, but as disorganized as the governments they come from. The United States is a multi-ethnic group that plays no one particular style. Yes, it sounds overly simplistic, stereotypical and possibly racist – but watch the teams and you’ll see what I mean. There’s nothing negative about the differences. While you do have some instances of unruly fan behavior in and out of the stadiums, the games themselves are like a celebration of our differences, examples of the varied ways to accomplish the same goal.
As for actual previews of the tournament and the teams, I won’t pretend to be better than what you can find on the Internet. CNN/SI has a nice preview of every team, sorted by the groups here. They also have a nice section that discusses the various tactics and formations used by each team here.
The United States was placed in the very difficult Group E, along with Italy, the Czech Republic and Ghana. The US is ranked fifth in the world by FIFA, but you shouldn’t trust that rating. The US is good, but nowhere near that good. The conventional wisdom is that the Nats are the third best team in their group behind the Azzurri (Italy) and the Czechs. But the Czechs (#2 in the world) have had some serious injury problems lately and of course, the Italians are dealing with that game-fixing scandal. Ghana is the lowest rated team but has actually had some good results in recent friendlies that suggest that they are no pushovers. The US wasn’t expected to do well in 2002 either, but wound up making it out of group play (upsetting huge favorite Portugal along the way) and making it all the way to the quarterfinals.
The US’ first game is next Monday at noon against the Czech Republic. After that, they play Italy on Saturday, June 17 and wrap up with Ghana the next Thursday, June 22. With only three games to earn enough points to make it to the knock-out round (a standard 32-team tournament), the US can’t afford any slip-ups. They need to beat Ghana and at worst, tie both Italy and the Czechs. Much better would be to knock off one of the favorites in the first two games, giving themselves a little breathing-room for that last game. You get 3 points for a win and just one for a tie, so splitting those first two games would be better than two ties.
Whatever happens, barring a complete collapse by the Red, White and Blue, it should be a hell of a tournament and I couldn’t be more psyched.