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      England Victory Sets Up Showdown With France

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      AL KHOR, Qatar — England was floundering, looking nervous and giving up territory and opportunities to Senegal midway through the first half in Al Bayt Stadium. But then the youngest member of its squad made his presence count.Playing with a freedom and confidence that seemed to have deserted his more experienced teammates, Jude Bellingham, 19, produced crucial contributions to two first-half goals that sent England on its way to a 3-0 victory over Senegal. The win set up a quarterfinal match with France and a meeting with Kylian Mbappé, who was the breakout teenage star of the last World Cup.Mbappé became a household name when at 19 he exploded onto the global stage at the World Cup in Russia, becoming the first teenager to score in a World Cup final since Pelé in 1958. Bellingham, a midfielder, is also using the sport’s biggest platform to make his mark.“Jude is a fantastic player — he does everything well,” England’s captain, Harry Kane, said of Bellingham’s performance, during a postgame news conference. “I like Jude a lot, a good person, mature for his age and great leadership skills. All I would say is keep working and keep learning.”England had been at risk of falling behind Senegal, the African champion, when Bellingham made the first of what have now become his customary surges up the field. Seeing an opportunity to transition after Senegal lost the ball, Bellingham sprinted into space down the left side, received the ball from Kane and showed calmness to find Jordan Henderson in the center of the area. Henderson, the Liverpool captain and a most unlikely goal scorer here — having scored only twice before in a 12-year career with England’s national team — finished easily before asking the crowd to acclaim the contribution of Bellingham by pointing to the young midfielder as he wheeled away in celebration.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Messi’s Score Sets Tone for Argentina in World Cup Win

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      AL RAYYAN, Qatar — For all of his accomplishments, and there are many, there was one thing Lionel Messi had never done at the World Cup: score a goal in an elimination game.Now that he has done so — his first-half shot helped carry Argentina to a 2-1 victory over Australia on Saturday night — he still has a chance at another first: Messi has never lifted the World Cup trophy.A championship, of course, is still a ways away. But squint your eyes as Messi darted through the Australian defense at Ahmad bin Ali Stadium on Saturday night and it still seems possible. For 90 minutes, Messi, 35, looked like the Messi who made his World Cup debut at 18 and has torn through club opponents across Europe for decades.With the win, Argentina advanced to the quarterfinals, where it will face the Netherlands on Friday. A potential matchup with Brazil looms after that, and maybe one with France or Spain or England if Argentina (along with one of those other teams) can reach the final.Messi’s last act on the World Cup stage is perhaps still a ways away.“I’m very happy for taking another step forward and achieving another objective. It was a very physical and difficult match,” Messi said, then alluding to the fact that Argentina’s final group stage game was three days before. “We had played recently and didn’t have much time to rest up. We were a little concerned about that.”A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      A Bitter World Cup Finish Brings a Chance for Team USA to Look Forward

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      AL RAYYAN, Qatar — The whistle blew on the United States at this World Cup, and through the Khalifa International Stadium loudspeakers came a Dutch version of “Auld Lang Syne.”The song is familiar to Americans as a New Year’s Eve anthem, played just at the moment between two distinct phases of time, a switch in the calendar. And so it was for this U.S. soccer team: a chance to reflect on what was, and to resolve for improvement in the future.The winning team from the Netherlands, the 3-1 victors headed on to the quarterfinals, danced in a huddle. The Americans stood quietly on the outside, mostly with hands on hips.“It’s frustration to begin with,” United States captain Tyler Adams said of the complex emotions. “But after reflecting for that quick moment, you could just really sit here and think it’s probably the first time in a long time where people will say, ‘Wow, this team has something special.’”This year’s U.S. team was seen as young and talented, the second-youngest roster in the tournament, with the youngest starting lineup. But this World Cup is a bit mistimed, perhaps, for a program that believes it is a couple of years from full bloom.The goal in Qatar, at least to most fans and commentators, and perhaps even to some of those close to the team, was to advance through the group stage, to reach the round of 16. That was accomplished. But goals ratchet up with each success, so the loss to the Dutch was greeted with heartbreak, and then perspective.A disappointing game. A pretty good tournament. A bright future.“When you put four performances like that out on the field, it really gives people something to be excited about,” Adams said.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Hometown of Tyler Adams, U.S. Captain, Still Proud Even With Loss

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      Schoolmates, friends and others packed a pub early to watch their hometown hero, Tyler Adams, lead the United States men’s national team, which was eliminated from the World Cup by the Netherlands.WAPPINGERS FALLS, N.Y. — The United States may be out of the World Cup, but the team’s elimination on Saturday did little to dim the pride for the team’s captain, Tyler Adams, in his Hudson Valley hometown.Adams, 23, is one of the youngest players to be captain of the U.S. men’s national team, and his play in Qatar had captured the attention of those around his hometown, Wappinger, between Poughkeepsie and Fishkill, near the banks of the Hudson River.At the County Fare Bar & Grill on Saturday morning, it seemed that nearly half the town showed up to cheer for Adams. That included Matt Ball and Joseph Cavaccini, who had grown up with the soccer star and his brothers, as well as a bus driver known to boast over her loudspeaker that Adams had graduated from nearby Roy C. Ketcham High School.Family friends, former schoolmates and neighbors recalled Adams as a driven young man who regularly missed social and school functions — including his own graduation ceremony — because of sports commitments.Adams worked hard, Cavaccini said using, more colorful terms. “That’s why it’s not a surprise. It’s just pride — we are just so proud,” he said.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      As the World Focuses on Soccer, a Women’s Team in Exile Aches to Play

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      When the Afghanistan women’s national soccer team watches the men’s World Cup, every image on the TV screen feels bittersweet.Each country’s flag flying high and each roaring, roiling cheering section. Each national anthem echoing across a pristine pitch. The Afghan women’s team, still in the developmental stages after years of playing in a war-torn country, hopes to be good enough someday to take part in soccer’s most prestigious tournament.But this year’s men’s tournament, with all its pageantry and thrill, is just a stinging reminder of how distant that ambition remains after the players fled their country last year when the Taliban took over.The Taliban have barred girls and women from playing sports. And the women’s national soccer team is still feeling the effect of it even though its members have settled in Australia, 7,000 miles away and safe from the Taliban. Because the Afghanistan Football Federation doesn’t recognize the team as an official national team, neither does FIFA, the global governing body of soccer.Now the players who risked their lives to play soccer inside of Afghanistan, and then risked them again to flee for a shot at freedom, are no longer eligible for international competitions. They are calling on FIFA to reinstate the Afghan squad so the women can officially represent their country.Afghan players warmed up at an event where they received new team jerseys at their Australian club.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThe jerseys were labeled “AWT” for Afghan Women’s Team and bore Afghanistan’s flag.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times“We had to leave our home and stop our dreams, but it always was our goal to play as a national team again,” said Fati, the team’s goalkeeper who lives in a suburb of Melbourne. (The New York Times is not using the players’ last names at their request because they fear retribution from the Taliban.)“Now it looks like us playing for the national team is not going to work anymore. My heart can’t stand this,” Fati said.She added, “FIFA has the money and the power to help us, but it’s not doing anything.”Khalida Popal, one of the founding players of the Afghan women’s national team and the person who orchestrated the team’s escape from Afghanistan, said, “FIFA will say they don’t want to get involved in politics, but this is a human rights issue and they know it. They’ve just chosen to discard us.”FIFA officials, including President Gianni Infantino and Sarai Bareman, the federation’s chief officer for women’s football, did not respond to repeated requests for comment about how the Afghan women’s team could return to the international game, as the players in Australia have been ready to play and travel for months.Firooz Mashoof, spokesman for the Afghanistan Football Federation, said there was nothing the Afghan federation could do to help because, as he explained, the women’s national team dissolved when the players and women’s soccer committee fled the country. Inside the country, the 50 or so women’s soccer teams — from youth to the club level — also have vanished, he said.The federation has yet to discuss the future of women’s soccer with the Taliban, Mashoof said, because “the situation of women’s human and social rights in Afghanistan is not good.” He said FIFA would have to step in to make something happen.Khalida Popal, founder of the Afghan women’s national team, said FIFA officials “have just chosen to discard us.”Charlotte de la Fuente for The New York TimesIn August, Popal worked with young players at a training session for the Afghan women’s development team in Doncaster, England. Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe Afghan players and some human rights activists, including Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, said that couldn’t happen soon enough. Worden noted that the men’s senior national team, which did not qualify for the World Cup, and other Afghan men’s nationals teams, including ones for boys under 14, continued to play internationally while the women’s side of the sport had been completely shut down. That glaring inequality of opportunity, she said, is a violation of the Olympic Charter and FIFA’s own rules regarding human rights and nondiscrimination.“Right now, the Afghan federation is absolutely in full, flagrant violation of FIFA’s human rights policy and should be thrown out of the football world until women and girls can resume playing football in their country — and for their country,” Worden said. “The Taliban is totally getting away with banning women and girls. Global governing bodies like FIFA have an obligation to thwart what is happening.”Worden said it was time for the International Olympic Committee to suspend the Afghanistan Olympic Committee. The I.O.C. did so in 1999 after the Taliban barred girls and women from sports the first time it came to power, as it is doing now.Friba Rezayee, who competed in the 2004 Athens Games as one of Afghanistan’s first two female Olympians, said in a telephone interview that the I.O.C. and FIFA are actively ignoring the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding in Afghanistan.“Just last week, the Taliban beat people, including women, inside a stadium where athletes should be playing their sport,” said Rezayee, a judo competitor who fled to Canada in 2011. She added that dozens of female athletes in Afghanistan have told her that the Taliban is hunting for women who play sports so they can punish them. She heard from one judoka who recounted being beaten by the Taliban with a rifle when they found her practicing at her dojo. The soldiers let that woman go so she could be an example to other women who dare to play a sport, Rezayee said.Fati, the team’s goalkeeper, shown playing in Australia in April, said “it was always our goal to play as a national team again.”Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThe national team at a match in Australia in April.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times“What more does the I.O.C. and FIFA have to see to stand up for female athletes?” she said. “These organizations have the capacity and the budget to ensure the safety of athletes and also ensure that women are free to play their sport.”I.O.C. action against the Afghanistan Olympic Committee could happen next week. Mark Adams, spokesman for the organization, said the I.O.C. was “very concerned about developments regarding the participation of women and girls in sport in Afghanistan” and that the executive board would review the issue at its meeting on Dec. 6.If the I.O.C. goes forward with that suspension, it will put needed pressure on each sport’s international federation to decide whether its Afghan athletes can participate in non-Olympic international competitions. But FIFA doesn’t have to wait. It already has the power — and the duty, Worden said — to suspend the Afghan Football Federation for its exclusion of girls and women, bypassing the Taliban so girls and women can compete.One international sports federation, the International Cycling Union, has taken the initiative to help the Afghan women without any prodding from the I.O.C. The organization has been going out of its way to support Afghan cyclists and find ways for those women to compete, showing other federations — such as FIFA — that it is possible to do so without making it a political statement.David Lappartient, the president of the cycling union and a French politician, used his political and sports connections to help evacuate 125 people, including cyclists and other athletes, from Afghanistan. The federation has since sponsored a group of cyclists who now live and train in federation housing in Aigle, Switzerland, the cycling union’s home base. Last month, the federation also hosted the Afghanistan women’s cycling national championships, and more than four dozen Afghan women competed.Many of the members of the national team living in Australia share housing, shop and work together.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesGabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times“We must address a message of hope that sports is possible for women when it is quite difficult or impossible now in Afghanistan,” Lappartient said. “I just want to give this idea that the light is still on.”Without similar support from FIFA, the Afghan women’s soccer team is now looking for somewhere to play as an official national team. It’s considering joining the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, or Conifa, said Popal, the longtime Afghan women’s football program director. According to Conifa’s website, the organization “supports representatives of international football teams from nations, de facto nations, regions, minority people and sports isolated territories.”But the level and depth of competition at Conifa is not what the Afghans have been used to at the FIFA level, where 187 women’s teams compete. In comparison, Conifa’s website listed only three women’s programs in its rankings from July: FA Sapmi (from the Indigenous Sami people who inhabit part of Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia), Northern Cyprus and Tibet.For the Afghan women, the goal is to return to play under FIFA’s umbrella. To get there, Popal, who lives in Denmark, has sent multiple emails to FIFA officials asking them for help reinstating the Afghan team. For months and months now, she has yet to receive an answer.Last month, she also filed an official grievance with FIFA, writing, “All the coaches and players need to have their right to play respected and FIFA has the responsibility to guarantee our right to represent Afghanistan, even in exile.” At least a half dozen current and former players have also filed grievances, she said.Again, no response.“Men took away the players’ right to play football in Afghanistan, and now FIFA is taking away the right for the players to play football anywhere else,” Popal said. “I’m so frustrated that women have no voice. Why do the women of Afghanistan always have to pay the price?”Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThe players’ bond goes beyond being teammates as they share meals and have sleepovers at each other’s houses. Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesIn addition, the Afghan players have been hurt by the re-emergence of Keramuddin Keram, the former president of the Afghanistan Football Federation, Popal said. Keram, who was charged with sexually abusing players on the national team after Popal made the case public, had been hiding from authorities after his indictment. Now, with the Taliban in charge, he has returned to public life.“Our players have suffered so much in so many different ways, and it’s disgusting how they’ve been treated,” Popal said.Popal and the national team players said they didn’t want the I.O.C. or FIFA to bar the Afghan men’s team because the women’s team does not exist anymore. There should be a way for both the men’s and women’s teams to play, even while the Taliban is in control of the country, they said.If FIFA isn’t willing to help, Popal said she would like to establish a football association that includes all the players living in the Afghan diaspora and run that association from outside of Afghanistan. Other countries affected by war or countries that curtail the rights of women could follow her lead, she said.Already, Popal has ideas of running a training camp for the senior national team players in Australia, the under-17 players who ended up in England, the under-15 players who are now in Portugal — or any female Afghan soccer player. During that camp, there could be a tryout for the senior team that would theoretically play FIFA tournaments, she said.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThe team won its second game as part of the Melbourne Victory club 10-0.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesFati, for one, would love that idea. Her dream as a young goalkeeper was to play in the World Cup. But right now, with the current restrictions on the national team and the practice the Afghan team needs to reach the sport’s highest level, the closest Fati will get is when the Women’s World Cup is held in Australia and New Zealand next year. Melbourne, Fati’s new home, will be a host city.While waiting to hear about its fate with FIFA, the Afghan team has been playing together at the professional club Melbourne Victory, with that club supporting the team’s travel, training and gear. The team competed in a state league and finished third in its division.But the players want so much more.“I am so mad at FIFA right now,” Fati said. “They are always saying that football is a family and that they take care of their football family. But that’s not the truth. They don’t care about us. They have forgotten us.”Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesNajim Rahim More

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      Twists and Turns: A World Cup Fitness Coach Explains Pregame Warm-Ups

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      In the final hour before a game, teams’ activities can look as random as recess at the local elementary school. But there is order in the chaos.DOHA, Qatar — Watching players perform their pregame warm-ups on the field is one of the more delightful World Cup rituals. They’re skipping, they’re lunging, they’re sashaying. They’re stretching and sprinting. Some are running drills or rocketing balls at goals (or goalkeepers). Others are playing what looks like backyard keep-away, firing one-touch passes around a small circle as two players in the middle dodge and dart to try to win the ball.It can look as random as recess at the local elementary school (albeit if the kids were professional athletes), but there is organization in the chaos.To help us understand what is going on, we turned to Andrew Clark, the high-performance coordinator for Australia’s team, known as the Socceroos. (Currently No. 38 in the FIFA rankings, the team exceeded expectations by placing second in Group D; it will play Argentina on Saturday in the first knockout round.)Clark talked us through the importance of finding the sweet spot between too little and too much pregame preparation, and how to keep the players’ nerves from shredding before the match.This interview has been edited and condensed.What is the goal of the warm-up?The purpose of a warm-up is to prepare the players to perform in the most efficient way, to get them 100 percent ready physically and mentally for the match. There’s a whole lot of detail underneath that of raising body temperature, turning on decision-making and performing the sort of actions that are going to be required in a game. But we have to make sure that we don’t overdo it. We don’t want to overload the players and take away energy that’s needed for the match.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockDan Mullan/Getty ImagesMatthias Hangst/Getty ImagesWhy can’t you just do the exercises out of sight, inside the stadium?You want to give the players a sense of what they’re about to walk into. Little things like the wind, the temperature, how wet the grass is, what it feels like, the speed of the pitch. Where are the shadows on the field? Also, just being there and feeling the atmosphere in the stadium gives them energy and takes away a bit of their anxiety.All the players — the starting lineup as well as the substitutes — are out there, but they’re doing different things.We’ve got 26 players, but only 11 players can play, plus five players off the bench. For the players on the bench, we’re trying to make sure they’re ready in case they’re called at short notice during the match. But they’re warming up 50 minutes before kickoff, and it might be nearly two hours before they enter the field. What we need is basically just to make sure their systems are starting to turn on, their core temperature is up, their spine is activated.And then those players will go off and do something more relaxed, like the little circle groups that you see. If you push them too hard, they can go over the top, and you can actually kill their performance. So it’s very important that we keep them calm and relaxed.In a tournament situation, it’s a constant struggle to try to expose the players who aren’t playing in the matches to enough training. All of them have put in all the work to get to this point. And emotionally it’s difficult. They’re not getting the same gratification as the guy who scores the winner. We work really hard to make sure that we don’t neglect them, that we give them the best opportunity when the time comes.Fabrizio Bensch/ReutersWhat about the starting players?They’re going through a process of turning their body on and slowly working through the dynamic ranges of motion that they’ll be required to perform in the match. Then they’ll do some maximum-velocity type activities.And then we go into a game-based situation where it becomes spatial and decision making. Usually it’s some sort of position game — 5 versus 5, plus one spare player, or 4 versus 4, plus 3. We want to make sure they’re starting to make decisions similar to what they’re doing in the game.What about when they seem to be all doing different things?After that, you start to see things that are specific to certain players. Some players are finishing on goal, some players are crossing. We have our own ideas, but we take guidance from what a player needs in those last few minutes. We know what a central defender needs; we know what a midfielder needs, and we design activities that allow them to do that.The last thing we do is come together and do something as explosive as possible just to finish off. It’s called post-activation potentiation, or PAP, and it involves an excitation of the neuromuscular system. They walk into the changing room fully activated, fully charged and ready to start the game.What do they do back in the locker room, after the warm-up but before the game begins?There’s still 15 minutes to the match, so the challenge for a player is filling that 15-minute gap. It’s a chance to refuel, it’s a chance to go through some final checks, put their pads on, say a few words.Matthias Hangst/Getty ImagesWhat if they’re super-nervous — or not nervous enough?Once we’re spread out on the field, the stadium swallows up communication, so this is the time everyone can talk. You have to understand how they’re feeling, whether they need a rocket or whether, OK, there’s a lot of anxiety in this group, we need to be very calm. They can be either overstimulated or under-stimulated, and we try to balance that out, to get back to the midpoint where people are nice and stable and ready to perform their best.There’s less pressure on you than on teams from places like Argentina and Brazil. Does that make it any easier?Because of the weight of expectation placed on them, other teams can be overly anxious about needing to beat us. We see that as an opportunity. We prey on their anxiety. More

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      The U.S. World Cup Team Is Notably Diverse, but the Pipeline Needs Help

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      In some ways, things haven’t changed much in American soccer.You may well have never heard of him, but Desmond Armstrong is a pioneer. In 1990, he became the first African American to represent the United States in a World Cup game.Never mind that the United States, then returning to the World Cup after a four-decade hiatus, was humbled by Czechoslovakia in a 5-1 loss. By starting as a defender for the Americans that June day in Italy, Armstrong signaled that his home country could produce elite players who weren’t white.Sadly, with a few exceptions, his trailblazing role did not get much attention in the press that day. Nor did it in the run-up to the tournament, or when the American team played Italy to a near draw in group stage play days later. Another talented Black player, Jimmy Banks, also broke ground on the 1990 U.S. team, subbing in for his initial action during the game against the Czechs. Banks’s part as a breaker of norms was similarly overlooked.Color Armstrong unsurprised.“The disregard was commonplace from the media back then,” Armstrong told me this week when we discussed the omissions. He is 58 now, still fit and trim, and running a grass roots youth soccer club in Nashville.“It was sort of like, Jimmy and I are on the team, but aside from the team making history since the U.S. hadn’t been in the Cup in 40 years, we are also making history,” he said. “It’s just that what we were doing was something that didn’t go acknowledged by many people.”“We were recognized as a footnote, if at all.”Armstrong, right, vying for the ball during the FIFA World Cup match between Italy and the United States in 1990.Chris Smith/Popperfoto via Getty ImagesArmstrong and Banks, who died in 2019 after battling pancreatic cancer, deserve our acknowledgment, respect and appreciation.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      The Giant World Cup Rookie and an Enduring Dutch Mystery

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      The Netherlands is Europe’s most reliable talent factory. Unless you need a goalkeeper.DOHA, Qatar — As they sat around the dinner table, Andries Noppert’s family raised the question as gently and as kindly as they could.He had been trying to make it as a professional soccer player for more than a decade. At 6 feet 8 inches, he had the physical gifts, and nobody would question his determination, his drive. But he was 26 now, and if everyone was completely honest, it did not seem to be working out. He had been at four clubs, and hardly played for any of them. He had made barely more than a dozen appearances in seven years.The constant disappointment, the ongoing frustration, was taking its toll, and that was before anyone even mentioned his misfortune with injury. Perhaps, Noppert’s parents suggested, it might be time to try something else. His wife wondered if a career in the police force might provide a more reliable salary for their young family.Two years on from that attempted intervention, Noppert finds himself at the World Cup, and not as a mere observer. He has barely played 50 senior games as a professional, but on Saturday he is almost certain to start in goal for the Netherlands in its round of 16 match against the United States. It is, as Noppert himself has put it, more than a little “bizarre.”His own interpretation of his unusual career arc — the long, slow burn, followed by the sudden and unexpected ignition — is that his progress was slowed not only by a succession of injuries but by his own failure to grasp his talent. “I may have made the wrong choices at times,” he has said.It is an assessment reinforced by those who have worked with him. Noppert started out at Heerenveen, his local team, before spells at NAC Breda, the Italian side Foggia, Dordrecht back in the Netherlands and, after he rejected his family’s attempts to persuade him to go into law enforcement, Go Ahead Eagles.It was only at the latter that he found regular playing time. Until then, he had been “at peace with being second choice,” according to Kees van Wonderen, who coached him at Go Ahead Eagles and then, last summer, returned him to Heerenveen. Noppert “lacked sharpness and hunger,” he said.Nopport with his children after a training session last week. His family once tried to persuade him to give up on soccer as a career.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Let’s just say that Andries didn’t make it hard to not pick him,” he said.Noppert’s individual case, then, might be filed in the same category as all of the other heartening stories the World Cup unearths at quadrennial intervals: the heroes who emerge from nowhere, the players seeking redemption, the sudden superstars.His story, though, does not exist in isolation. It is part of a pattern, and one that, from a Dutch point of view, is less touching and more troubling. A couple of years after he might have given up on his career, Noppert is at the World Cup not only because of his determination, his refusal to give in, but because the Netherlands cannot produce goalkeepers.There is, of course, one noteworthy exception: Edwin van der Sar, formerly of Ajax, Juventus and Manchester United. And there have been, over the years, a trickle of perfectly respectable, though hardly awe-inspiring, goalkeepers who have won the Dutch colors: Hans van Breukelen, Ed de Goey, Jasper Cillessen.The supply, though, has not been steady enough to dispel the impression that the Netherlands, a country that churns out some of the brightest young outfield talent on the planet at industrial volume, has a chronic blind spot between the posts.Noppert, after all, has been selected ahead of Justin Bijlow, who has spent only 18 months as Feyenoord’s first-choice goalkeeper, and Remko Pasveer, a 39-year-old who made his international debut this year. The reasons for that, as offered by Louis van Gaal, the Dutch coach, hardly amount to resounding praise.“He was in shape,” van Gaal said of Noppert. “We were impressed by how he played in the weeks prior to the World Cup. He only stopped the balls he could stop.”But then that, perhaps, is all that is necessary. After all, the pickings are distinctly slim. No major European team outside of Ajax employs a Dutch goalkeeper. Seven of the 18 teams in the Dutch top flight employ imported goalkeepers. Van Gaal has taken roughly a third of the qualified goalkeepers available to him to Qatar.The reasons for that veer from the loftily philosophical to the pragmatically economic, the former PSV Eindhoven and Feyenoord goalkeeper Patrick Lodewijks told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant earlier this year. Lodewijks spent five years working with the country’s soccer federation as a goalkeeper coach.Noppert and the Netherlands can advance to the quarterfinals by beating the United States on Saturday.Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesDutch teams invariably demand that their goalkeepers, as is the country’s tradition, possess the technical ability to take part in build-up play, he said, but it comes at the cost of neglecting the rather more rudimentary skills of saving shots and catching crosses.“The best goalkeeper in the Eredivisie is a German, Lars Unnerstall,” Lodewijks said last season. “A giant, top athlete, great reflexes. But he was second choice at PSV, because he couldn’t play soccer well.”The financial reality of Dutch soccer, meanwhile, discourages clubs from investing too much time in their goalkeepers. All Dutch teams are reliant on generating income from transfer fees — even Ajax, the richest and most powerful side in the Eredivisie, earned as much money in selling two players to Manchester United in a few weeks last summer as it does from all other revenue streams over the course of a year — and goalkeepers fetch significantly smaller fees than, for example, elfin attacking midfielders. The goalkeeper business is not a lucrative one.Lodewijks suggests the solution is a complete overhaul in how Dutch clubs think about the position: spending more time on dedicated training sessions, rather than focusing on how goalkeepers can be involved in general play; major teams sending the most promising prospects out on loan to smaller teams, where they may have rather more to do than watching on passively “as youth teams win big.”Until then, the position of Dutch goalkeeper will remain unusually fertile ground for feel-good stories like Noppert’s: a place for late bloomers and stray talents and prospective law enforcement officers.He does, at least, seem well-suited to such a rapid promotion. “He’s a real Frisian,” defender Virgil van Dijk said last week, referring to the part of the Netherlands where Noppert grew up, a place famed for its stoicism and straight-talking. (It is unclear how this differs from the rest of the country.) “He’s sober, but very direct. He’s a boy after my own heart.”Van Gaal, too, has taken heart from how unmoved Noppert was by the prospect of making his debut for his country at the World Cup. “He has the sort of personality that means he would not be too impressed by this championship,” he said. It would be a lot tougher, after all, being a policeman. More