BfB

When the 48 team World Cup was conjured up it was done so as a tournament of sixteen groups of three teams resolving to a thirty two team knock out competition. Anyone who is still playing a Football Manager 2020 save can tell you how the system would work.

Groups of three teams are an interesting dynamic, creating a kind of knockout competition where you get a second chance should you lose a game. A top team probably gets a win early, and the other two teams create jeopardy as they battle for second place.

So A plays B, then the loser plays C, and then the other one plays C. Three games, all on at different times, and all containing some jeopardy even if sometimes it is only the worry over who will finish top of a group.

Enjoyed

What we have instead, reportedly because FIFA people enjoyed the last stages of the 2018 Groups, is a compromise. The forty eight teams but with groups of four and a pool of eight third placed teams going though.

So many games, so little purpose, and not because the teams in the expanded World Cup are especially bad but because the competition wants them to be unadventurous. The format rewards the two teams who might be considered in between the top seed and the lowest one for getting a win and then grinding out draws.

This seems to be a boon for FIFA because while it produces dozens of games which are, in essence, meaningless but some games which are high drama. Brazil vs Morocco was a good game, but ultimately both teams have progressed after two games have been played. Spain drawing with Cape Verde was Absolute Cinema content. Messi scoring a hat-trick, Ronanldo playing vaguely well.

This is the short form content FIFA and the hundreds of broadcast partners are begging for. England vs Ghana It is long form content no one wants.

Claim

England could not break down a Ghana team which, having beat Panama in their first game, deployed a 541 which hardly moved from their own half in order to claim a point. England’s assistant manager Anthony Barry revealed that they had expected the Africans to play in a flow block 433 fifteen yards forward than they were. Carlos Queiroz’s commitment to absolutely ensuring there was nothing happening was admirable.

Queiroz’s Ghana were probably aghast at England’s browbeating following the game. This team, this set up, this game offered England the chance to just slide through to the second round. Everyone goes home happy, except they don’t.

For the record Nico O’Rielly hit the bar late on and Harry Kane missed a good chance. Bukayo Saka had a low shot saved. Ghana had a chance when Prince Adu could have had a penalty for a foul by Ezri Konsa but Prince Adu should have been sent off for a stamp on Jordan Pickford when they two faced off in a head to head.

Bad

All of which gives us a problem of bad incentives. A win over Panama wins the group for England – more or less – while Ghana can probably lose to Croatia and still progress. I know this Maths from how Scotland should have looked at Morocco and Brazil and it is a bad situation where a tournament is designed so that if you get one win, the best thing you can do in your next game is not lose.

The problem of course being the progression of the third placed teams, and the idea that three points and a good goal difference will see a team progress. What reason would there be for a team like Ghana, or Scotland, to do anything other than defend? That 3rd Place table starts to shape up in the next week when the final group games are played and as it is it seems like a lot of teams will end on Four Points leaving progress in a World Cup down to how switched off in the last minute against a team and went from 2-0 to 3-0.

None of which is good, but all of which is FIFA. More games equals more content and more content axiomatically means more great content and more terrible games. This tournament is designed to create terrible games of football where not losing, rather than winning, is the aim.

Legacy

None of which is especially animating to England on the morning after the type of 0-0 which is called a “Legacy Performance” by Jacob Steinberg in the Guardian. Alan Shearer gnashed and whaled and found a Pace to his Hale in Wayne Rooney. The ball should be played quicker while England are patient. The players should drop deep while pressing against the Ghana backline. Perhaps it might be an idea to put Phil Foden in the side alongside Jude Bellingham?

It is unimpressive and, in the same way, the result of bad incentives. The people who looked you in the eye and said that only Gareth Southgate would take the handbrake off, and the told you that another manager would take the handbrake off, and then told you that Southgate should be replaced and promised you that if you just piped down and got rid of the guy who took England from the nadirs of 2014 and 2016 to multiple Finals you’d never see an England team frustrated by an opponent who defends deep again.

They lied to you, and probably they have done very well out of it, but you probably should not have believed them. Perhaps I might ask that the next time someone makes a similar promise you remember this moment be it firing a League One manager or voting for Farage.

Comparison

Lest that seem like a hollow comparisons understand this. Everyone who has spent any time with football knows that it is never possible to guarantee a win. England 2026 were always going to come up against the low blocks that frustrated England 2024. The people saying that removing Southgate would see England cut through low blocks at will knew it would not, but they said it anyway.

Perhaps, if you want to be kind, you might say they did it for popularist reasons and speak to an audience, but what they were saying was not true, and generally we do not really like being lied to to help someone make money. Southgate is a good man, a man who puts an importance on things like Social Justice, and being fair. His support for taking a knee, for Black Lives Matter, for the Rainbow Laces campaigns made him a target. Only the extremes like Joey Barton could criticise him for those things, but others who agreed with the likes of Barton kept quiet.

Idiots threw plastic glasses at him, pundits lied to you about what another manager could do, but the results for both were the same. A group of people decided they did not like Southgate because of his politics, lied to you to get you to agree, and now you believe that managers can always break down a low blocks because a pundit who didn’t like the taking a knee, but was too cowardly to say that out loud, told you they could.

Elite

Whatever it is that an Elite Manager is, Tuchel must be it, and his team still struggle with teams which only want to defend. That kind of attritional football might impress Alan Shearer who waxed lyrical about Marvin Senaya, but the success Ghana has was collective, and phrases like superb only substitute for well organised when one is trying to avoid recognising that the replacement you sold the nation for Southgate is in a similar bind and that in some way you made yourself responsible for that.

It is not that this task is difficult to challenge even the bestest, most elite managers, it is that Southgate was an idiot and Auxerre right back’s happens to be the greatest footballer who ever lived. We live in the age of cognitive dissonance.

Thomas Tuchel suffers the same problems that Gareth Southgate had, and for that matter Spain’s Luis de la Fuente had against Capo Verde in this that sometimes teams do not want to get beaten in a way which is pleasing to a big TV audience, and defending in football is a thing.

Which Tuchel already knew, as did the people who campaigned so hard to make a vacancy for him to fill, as I suspect do you, if you think about it.