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      Can Liverpool and City Win When the Bar Is Set Too High?

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      The Premier League leaders will compete for three high-profile trophies this spring. But does failing to win them all turn a great season into a bad one?Manchester City had everything ready. A few days before the 2019 F.A. Cup final, the club’s executives had already mapped out the route for the victory parade. They had booked the open-top bus. They had arranged a whole day of festivities. They were well aware it was tempting fate, but they had no choice: These things, after all, take time and planning.Besides, whatever happened against Watford at Wembley, there would be plenty to celebrate. Pep Guardiola’s team had won the Carabao Cup, the first and the least of England’s domestic priorities, a couple months earlier. The previous week, it had seen off the spirited challenge of Liverpool to retain the Premier League title. The F.A. Cup would complete the set.The only thing left to decide was how to brand the achievement. Everything needs a name these days. Everything needs a hashtag. The previous year, it had been easy. Then, City had become the first team in English history to claim 100 points in a single season; the players who had done it were crowned not just champions, but Centurions, too.They were now on the cusp of following that with an even more impressive feat: becoming the first side in English history to win a domestic treble, a clean sweep of the league title and both cup competitions.Inside the club, though, there were qualms about using that word — treble — too loudly. Some executives feared it was too closely associated with Manchester United’s 1999 team, the one that won the league, the F.A. Cup and the Champions League. Needing to qualify City’s treble as “domestic” might, they worried, cheapen it somehow.Ferran Soriano, City’s domineering chief executive, felt there was another problem. City, he was adamant, would have four trophies to parade. It had, back in August, won the Community Shield, too. That the traditional curtain-raiser for the English season is, in effect, a preseason friendly with some fireworks at the end of it did not deter him. It was a trophy, Soriano said. City should celebrate it. He even had the nomenclature ready: the Fourmidables.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockThere was more than a little unease at the suggestion. Several City executives cautioned that including the Community Shield would expose the club to accusations of résumé padding that were, in the circumstances, entirely unnecessary. Soriano, though, would not be swayed. Crucially, he had Guardiola’s support, too. A couple of days later, after City won the final, its bus picked its way through the streets of Manchester, the word “Fourmidables” plastered on its side.That Soriano was willing to ignore the concerns of his colleagues and subordinates, and withstand the allegations of hubris from rival fans, is instructive. Whatever else he might be — visionary, maverick, the sort of person one can imagine self-identifying as a “disrupter” — Soriano has an instinctive understanding of modern soccer. And in modern soccer, he knows, glory is measured in bulk.In the month or so since Liverpool lifted this season’s Carabao Cup, Jürgen Klopp has fielded questions about whether his team can win a “quadruple” — all of England’s domestic competitions, plus the Champions League — on an almost weekly basis. He has dismissed them equally frequently. “We are not even close to thinking about crazy stuff like that,” he said last month.Guardiola will know the feeling. He, too, has been peppered with questions — certainly since the turn of the year, if not before — about whether this edition of Manchester City can claim another treble this season, one that does not require the geographical qualifier. He, too, has done what he can to minimize expectations. “I try to say to the club ‘enjoy these moments during the season’,” he said. “Don’t wait to win the Premier League, the Champions League or the F.A. Cup to be happy. Enjoy the day. Enjoy the moment.”Once you’ve won the league, does the Carabao Cup measure up?Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockIt is not hard to trace the roots of this obsession with doubles and trebles and, now, quadruples: In several leagues across Europe, the superclub era of the last decade or so has rendered winning a single league title essentially meaningless for the likes of Paris St.-Germain, Bayern Munich and — until its self-inflicted implosion — Juventus.Their domestic leagues are so hopelessly unbalanced that the destiny of the championship is rarely in any real doubt. With that trophy essentially preordained, they are left to find other targets. That may be a streak — picking up nine or 10 titles in a row — or it may be supplementing it with a glut of other prizes. Failure to do so can, with increasing frequency, cost a manager their job.That has, slowly, turned this into soccer’s age of the multiplicative. When Manchester United won its treble in 1999, it was the only team in any of what we now think of as Europe’s top five leagues to have done so (though Celtic, Ajax and PSV Eindhoven had all pulled it off previously). Since 2010, it has happened five times. Barcelona and Bayern have both done it twice.Domestic doubles — winning the league and the (main) domestic cup in the same season — are now so commonplace that they pass almost without notice: five for Bayern and four for Juventus and P.S.G. in the last 10 years, as well as three for Barcelona.The landscape in England, of course, is different. Competition between the country’s Big Six means City is the only team to have done the double since 2010. But its superclubs are not immune to the broader trend. For them, too, the currency of greatness is no longer primacy, but dominance.Liverpool and Manchester City will meet in the Premier League and the F.A. Cup in April, and could square off in the Champions League after that.Andrew Yates/EPA, via ShutterstockThat approach, though, carries with it an attendant danger, the risk that great teams — teams that have enjoyed remarkable success, that rank among the strongest the Premier League has ever seen — will somehow find themselves cast as failures: not for not winning, but for not winning enough.The final eight weeks or so of the Premier League season has long been set up as a battle between Liverpool, pursuing a quadruple, and Manchester City, chasing a treble. As they are already set to meet directly in two of those competitions over the coming weeks, both of them, by definition, cannot succeed. The likelihood, even at this late stage, remains that neither of them will.That raises the prospect of two teams, each with trophies to display and achievements to celebrate, being told to look back on their seasons with regret. If Manchester City wins only the Premier League, would that represent disappointment? It should not, of course, but in an era defined by a gluttony for glory, it might be presented — or even feel — like an anticlimax.What if Liverpool emerges from this campaign with only two domestic cups? Is that enough? Klopp’s team would have missed out on the two trophies that it most covets, of course, but that is not quite the same thing as falling short. If the only true victory is one that is total, all-conquering, absolute, then it suggests the bar has been set a little too high, that we have somehow concocted a world in which even success can be dressed up as failure.The Ignorance of IsolationQatar is expected to be Lionel Messi’s last World Cup.Franklin Jacome/Pool Via ReutersBy the time Argentina next takes to the field — at Wembley, for a meeting with the reigning European champion, Italy — it will be nearing three years since it last lost a game. Since succumbing to Brazil in the 2019 Copa América, Lionel Scaloni’s side’s only defeat has come against Sao Paulo’s health authorities. Other than that, it is played 31, won 20, drawn 11.It is, without doubt, the sort of record that should stir Argentine souls ahead of a World Cup that has particular resonance: 2022 will, after all, likely prove to be Lionel Messi’s final bow in an Argentina jersey, his last chance to emulate Diego Maradona and carry his country to the greatest prize of all.But it must still come with a caveat. That meeting with Italy — the so-called Finalissima — will be the first time Argentina has faced a European opponent since drawing with Germany in October 2019. Its run, these past few years, has been a distinctly local affair, built and made in South America.Brazil, as it happens, is in much the same boat. Since losing to Belgium in the 2018 World Cup quarterfinals, Tite’s side has faced only one European team — the Czech Republic — and that, too, was three years ago. Brazil is currently rated as the favorite to win the World Cup, a status that is based almost exclusively on its ability to beat the same South American teams over and over again.Brazil breezed through World Cup qualifying. But the World Cup may end differently.Silvia Izquierdo/Associated PressThat sudden isolation, of course, is partly linked to the coronavirus pandemic, but it is also connected to the rise of the Nations League in Europe and the exigencies of South America’s endless round of World Cup qualifying and Copas América. There has, since 2019, been very little chance to play friendlies.But as the World Cup draws closer, that absence of varied competition leads to a sense of ignorance. We can be sure that Argentina (which drew Mexico, Poland and Saudi Arabia on Friday) and Brazil (which will play Switzerland, Serbia and Cameroon in Qatar) are competitive in South America. We can have no idea at all how they will hold up against the European teams that both must overcome to emerge triumphant in Qatar.Three Euro-Centric World Cup PredictionsBelgium sits right behind Brazil in the world rankings.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is no question that soccer’s approach to draws is, deep down, extremely ludicrous. All of the pomp and the ceremony, the droning speeches and the self-importance, the window dressing and the time-wasting, all for the very simple act of some men in the warm embrace of middle age pulling pieces of paper from a bag.At the same time, though, Friday’s World Cup draw is extremely important in a way that we do not, perhaps, acknowledge as much as we should. The order in which names are flourished by a selection of soccer’s great and easily booked will not, perhaps, determine who wins the World Cup. But it will go a long way to deciding the fates of a whole clutch of teams.A kind group, for example, might make the difference between Senegal’s making the quarterfinals, or exiting after the first 10 days. A difficult one might cost Gregg Berhalter his job. It might turn Ecuador into the story of the tournament, or the Netherlands into a laughingstock. Random chance matters.It also, of course, makes it very difficult to guess at what might happen in Qatar this winter. Still, there is no harm in trying.1. A European team will win the tournament. It is now 20 years since a South American side (Brazil) won the World Cup, and only one team from the continent — Argentina — has made the final since. The balance of power has shifted in favor of the industrialized youth development systems of western Europe, and it is, sadly, hard to see that changing.Kylian Mbappé and France are chasing a second straight world title.Kimmo Brandt/EPA, via Shutterstock2. The surprise packages will not be much of a surprise at all: They will, instead, be the teams with the greatest concentration of players drawn from Europe’s major leagues. Those sides drawn from domestic competitions — Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Qatar — will struggle to make an impact.3. For the (relative) minnows and the makeweights, firepower will be the difference. Outside of the traditional elite, very few teams can call on high-caliber forwards. Those that can, like Morocco and Iran, will have an invaluable edge.CorrespondenceWorkers inside Qatar’s 80,000-seat Lusail stadium. It will host the World Cup final in December.David Ramos/Getty ImagesA note from Alan Goldhammer, whose surname remains the single greatest thing about this correspondence section, on an issue that we will confront over the next eight months. “I will not watch matches played in stadiums built largely by ‘slave’ labor,” he wrote. “It might be a minority view, but it was a decision that I arrived at 18 months ago and it did not require a great deal of thinking. I am sure the World Cup will have a giant viewership. That viewership will be diminished by one and I would hope many more.”If that applies to you, too, I would be interested in hearing from you. It is something we all have to be conscious of, whether we engage with the World Cup as fans, as journalists, or even as players: To what extent is that interaction a form of complicity?Paul Rosenberg, meanwhile, wants to know if there is “any shock comparable to Italy’s loss against North Macedonia?” In World Cup finals, the answer to that is yes: France’s losing to Senegal in 2002 and North Korea’s win over Italy in 1966, among several others. For qualifying, it is a little trickier, but I would suggest Ireland’s beating the Dutch to reach the 2002 World Cup might be up there.And, of course, there had to be someone who would leap to the defense of deep-dish pizza. (This was genuinely the first email that appeared in my inbox after last week’s newsletter; it obviously cut deep.) That someone was Rich Johnson. “I must express my deep disappointment at your recent pejorative characterization of deep dish pizza,” he wrote. “As a Chicago native, I can tell you that the only thing better than deep dish pizza is stuffed pizza, which is perhaps the perfect meal.”It may or may not be the perfect meal, but a stuffed pizza — like a deep-dish pizza — is not actually a pizza. More

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      World Cup Draw Analysis: First the Picks. Now the Hard Part.

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      Louis van Gaal said it all with just the hint of a playful smile. The Netherlands’ draw for the World Cup was not easy, he said, with his characteristic bluntness, and nor was it lucky. It was, instead, “colorful.” That was a better word. Ecuador’s sunshine yellow, Qatar’s rich maroon, Senegal’s deep green and that blazing Dutch orange: colorful.He tried, as best he could, to hide his delight. He knew, after all, that the dice had fallen for him, and for his team, just as he had predicted — in graphic and not entirely serious terms — that it would. Everyone wanted to draw Qatar, the host and by a gulf the gentlest prospect of the top seeds. Only his team had been chosen.The #FIFAWorldCup groups are set 🤩 We can’t wait! 🏆#FinalDraw pic.twitter.com/uaDfdIvbaZ— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) April 1, 2022
      But van Gaal is too long in the tooth to be fooled. He knows, too, that World Cup draws are not just bombastic and saccharine and filled with time-wasting and content-filling and Idris Elba; they are chimerical, too. They have an oracular quality. Often, they do not mean what they seem to mean at first reading.Consider Spain and Germany, for example, drawn together early on in Group E. Their encounter will mark the end of the tournament’s first week; it is the only time two of the anticipated contenders to win the competition, to be crowned world champion, will meet in the opening phase. Both seemed to have drawn the short straw.A Guide to the 2022 World CupThe 32-team tournament kicks off in Qatar on Nov. 21.F.A.Q.: When will the games take place? Who are the favorites? Will Lionel Messi be there? Our primer answers your questions.The Matchups: The group assignments are set. Here’s a breakdown of the draw and a look at how each country qualified.U.S. Returns: Five years after a calamitous night cost the U.S. a World Cup bid, a new generation claimed a berth in the 2022 tournament.The Host: After a decade of scrutiny and criticism, there is a sense that Qatar will at last get the payoff it always expected for hosting the World Cup.And then the balls kept on rolling and the names kept on coming and it turned out that both had, in fact, landed on their feet. Japan will be no pushover, and whichever of Costa Rica or New Zealand fills out the group will hardly be content to go quietly. But none have the resources or the quality or the pedigree of Spain and Germany, and both will be confident of making it through.Or look at England, which managed to make the semifinals in 2018 — and the final of last summer’s European Championship — by virtue of winning knockout games, in regulation time, against Sweden, a pale Germany and Ukraine.Its good fortune seemed to have held, drawn with Iran, the United States and one of Scotland, Wales and Ukraine, a group far richer in geopolitical intrigue than it is in elite quality.“I prefer putting balls in the net than flowers,” said Dragan Skocic, Iran’s Serbian coach, when asked about meeting the Americans, a reference to the two nations’ exchanging bouquets when they met at the 1998 tournament. “Football transcends the political stuff,” said his American counterpart, Gregg Berhalter.Spain Coach Luis Enrique with his Germany counterpart Hansi Flick. Their teams were drawn into the same group.Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersBut the group stage draw is not really a draw just for the group stage: It is a road map for the entire tournament, too. If England is to win — as it believes it can, this time, with rather more logic than that of the stopped clock — the incline grows immediately steeper once the knockout stage starts. Senegal, the most complete team Africa has sent to a tournament for more than a decade, may lie in wait in the last 16. Then it could be France, the reigning champion, in the quarterfinals. Whatever lies beyond that may not be immediately relevant.There will, of course, be some teams who are pleased with their fates: France, certainly, should have little trouble with Denmark and Tunisia and one of Peru, Australia and the United Arab Emirates. The two South American contenders, Brazil and Argentina, will be confident, too.Even the United States should not be too displeased. “We have the youngest squad at the World Cup,” Berhalter said. “For us, that’s a benefit. The guys are fearless.” England might be comfortable favorites to win their group, but there is no reason to believe the United States — returning after an eight-year absence — cannot finish second.And there will, of course, be teams who are left to rue their lot. Canada, for example, gracing this stage for the first time since 1986, has a group without a true heavyweight but somehow harder for it: Croatia and Belgium finished second and third four years ago, while Morocco sailed through the arduous process of African qualifying.Ultimately, though, Van Gaal was right: There is no way of knowing, eight months in advance, who has been lucky and who has not, of which is the smooth draw and which the rough. After all the pomp and the circumstance, the video montages and the marketing spiel dressed up as mission statements, all you can say with any certainty is that it will, when it comes, be colorful. More

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      The U.S. World Cup Match Schedule Is Set

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      After all that waiting, the United States finally learned its World Cup schedule at the World Cup draw on Friday, and it won’t have to wait long to play once the tournament begins.The Americans will open the tournament on its first day, Nov. 21, with a match against the winner of a June European playoff: either Scotland, Wales or Ukraine. Each of the teams would arrive with its own World Cup story: Scotland hasn’t played in soccer’s biggest championship since 1998; Wales hasn’t qualified since 1958; and Ukraine, should it qualify for its second World Cup, and first since 2006, would be playing only months after Russia invaded its territory.A day-after-Thanksgiving matchup against England comes next, on Nov. 25, and the United States will close the group stage against Iran four days after that, on Nov. 29.The U.S. team has previous World Cup experience against its two known opponents. It last met England in the tournament in 2010, when the teams played a 1-1 group-stage draw in Rustenburg, South Africa. England had taken an early lead that day before goalkeeper Rob Green surrendered one of the softest goals in England’s World Cup history on a long-distance shot by Clint Dempsey.The Americans’ last meeting against Iran in the World Cup — in 1998 in France — was also the teams’ first meeting on a soccer field. Iran won that day, 2-1, eliminating the Americans from a tournament in which they eventually finished last.And while both teams made a show of promoting peace after years of bitter political fights between their countries, not everyone got in the spirit of it. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, released a statement broadcast by state television after the game, congratulating Iran’s players.“Tonight again the strong and arrogant opponents felt the bitter taste of defeat at your hands,” he said. More

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      European Playoff Will Determine Third U.S. Opponent in Group B

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      Friday’s World Cup draw assigned groups to the 29 teams that have qualified for the tournament in Qatar in November. But the moment the draw ended, fans — especially those of teams with a big “to be determined” in their groups — started asking: What about those three playoff spots?We won’t know who has won them until June.One spot — the European team that will land in the group that holds England, the United States and Iran — will come from the war-delayed European playoff: Ukraine must play Scotland, and then the winner will face Wales for Europe’s final place.Let’s do this. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/hTU7SNRDq0— USMNT: Qualified. (@USMNT) April 1, 2022
      The other two spots will come from so-called intercontinental playoff matches, which are effectively second-chance games for teams that didn’t qualify directly out of their regions. Those matches will be played as elimination games set to be held in Qatar (where, it should be noted, it will be blistering hot in June).In one, Costa Rica, the fourth-place finisher in Concacaf, will meet New Zealand, the Oceania champion, for the right to play Spain, Germany and Japan in Group E.In the other game, Peru, which came in fifth in South America, will play the last Asian survivor: either Australia or the United Arab Emirates. The winner’s prize there? Games against France, Denmark and Tunisia in Group D. More

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      World Cup 2022 Group Assignments Full List

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      Regional and historic rivalries were renewed on Friday as the draw for the 2022 World Cup set out the paths for 32 teams hoping to claim soccer’s biggest championship. The tournament won’t start until November, but for a few teams it might have already been lost: There is only so much luck of the draw to go around, after all.The United States, back in the field after missing Russia 2018, landed in a group with England, a finalist at last summer’s European Championship; Iran, a geopolitical (and soccer) rival; and a European team still to be determined. That will happen in June, when the final European place will be decided by games involving Ukraine, Scotland or Wales.Each team plays the other three countries in its group once, and the top two finishers from each group advance to the knockout stages.The #FIFAWorldCup groups are set 🤩 We can’t wait! 🏆#FinalDraw pic.twitter.com/uaDfdIvbaZ— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) April 1, 2022
      Here is the full list of groups:Group A: Qatar, Ecuador, Senegal, NetherlandsGroup B: England, Iran, United States, (Wales or Scotland or Ukraine)Group C: Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, PolandGroup D: France, (U.A.E. or Australia or Peru), Denmark, TunisiaGroup E: Spain, (Costa Rica or New Zealand), Germany, JapanGroup F: Belgium, Canada, Morocco, CroatiaGroup G: Brazil, Serbia, Switzerland, CameroonGroup H: Portugal, Ghana, Uruguay, South Korea More

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      Christian Pulisic Leads U.S. Past Panama and to Brink of World Cup

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      Christian Pulisic led the way with three goals, but the Americans still must go to Costa Rica to guarantee their place in Qatar.The United States men’s soccer team is not in the World Cup, not just yet. There is still one last trip to make, one last job to do, one last game to play.It would be hard, though, for a team to keep the Americans from going to Qatar now. And it would be nearly impossible to persuade them, or anyone else, that — at last — they do not belong back on soccer’s brightest stage.That was the biggest news to emerge from the United States’ 5-1 victory over Panama on Sunday night in Orlando, Fla. Bigger than the four first-half goals they scored against the overwhelmed Panamanians. Bigger than Christian Pulisic’s hat trick and the rested legs, bigger than the padding they’ve added to their goal differential that has made Wednesday’s trip to Costa Rica far less terrifying than it might have been.What’s left to do? The Americans head to Costa Rica knowing they do not even have to win to qualify for the World Cup. Merely avoiding a heavy defeat — a loss by six goals or more — will ensure the Americans will finish with one of the automatic qualifying places from their region, North and Central America and the Caribbean.Canada became the first team from the region to qualify on Sunday, thanks to a 4-0 victory at home over Jamaica, and only Mexico and Costa Rica remain in contention for the other two. (Panama was eliminated with its loss on Sunday night.)The U.S. has a much better goal difference than both Mexico and Costa Rica, however, and that reality — in the event of a tie for the automatic places after Wednesday’s final games — was its own kind of comfort in the glow of Sunday’s rout. What it effectively means is that even a historic defeat for the Americans at Costa Rica would come with a lifeline: a playoff against the Oceania champion in June for a last-gasp place in Qatar.That back door was the least of anyone’s concerns after a performance in Orlando that ranked as the Americans’ best of the seven-month qualifying campaign.“We want to go there and win the game,” United States Coach Gregg Berhalter said. “Just like I’ve been saying in the first two games: We go into each game preparing to win.”The tension that the Americans carried into Sunday’s game — a mix of injuries, illnesses and suspensions melting together with the lingering angst from a failed qualifying run in 2017 — dissipated in a flurry of early goals.Pulisic, a veteran of that last campaign, which ended with him in tears on a muggy field in Trinidad, opened the scoring by converting a penalty kick in the 17th minute. Six minutes later, the lead was two, thanks to a Paul Arriola header, and four minutes after that it was 3-0 after a slotted finish by the surprise starter Jesús Ferreira.Pulisic made it 4-0 during first-half stoppage time, converting a second penalty, and he completed his first national team hat trick with an effortless — for him — finish in the 65th minute. Pulling down a cross with silky control in Panama’s penalty area, he spun in traffic and slipped two defenders to slot home his third goal.“Christian’s a guy who’s been through it before,” Berhalter said later, and anyone who has lived through 2017 knew what he meant. Pulisic had worn the captain’s armband on Sunday, and played like the leader Berhalter needs him to be if the Americans are to close the deal on Wednesday.His only mistake against Panama, it seemed, was an awkward attempt at breakdancing after his second penalty kick and a yellow card for arguing only moments before Berhalter subbed him off. Other key players were soon subbed off, too, the Americans resting weary legs that had delivered a tie at Mexico and a big win in the span of four days, and still had one game to go.A fat goal difference — the Americans’ is plus-13 now, compared with Costa Rica’s plus-3 — will help.Canada became the first Concacaf team to qualify for the 2022 World Cup. Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images“We knew we had to come out on the front foot and getting that goal early set the tone for the whole match,” defender Walker Zimmerman said of the lopsided victory. “Those goals add up, and they’re huge for us.”But a late consolation goal by Panama defender Aníbal Godoy, who was at fault for conceding both penalties in the first half, served as a reminder of how things can still go wrong if Zimmerman and his teammates aren’t careful.In 2017, the Americans had also thrashed Panama in Orlando in their penultimate game. All the team needed to do after that was go to Trinidad and Tobago, which had already been eliminated, and avoid a loss.Instead, the United States got it all wrong, losing by 2-1 as other results around the region went against them. In two stunning hours they went from assuredly in to definitively, and shockingly, out of the World Cup. The margin was more narrow then, but the lesson has stuck with the current team, most of whom — with the notable exception of Pulisic — were not part of the squad back then.“The goal obviously has always been to qualify for the World Cup, and this is just another step in the right direction,” midfielder Tyler Adams said. “But at the end of the day we still have another game to play. We haven’t clinched yet.”It is a message he will surely repeat over the next three days, until the job is done, until the ticket is punched, until the United States is finally, officially headed back to the World Cup. More

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      World Cup Draw Time, TV and Rules

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      The hard work of qualifying is over. Now the teams headed to Qatar later this year will learn their opponents.The World Cup field is almost complete. On Friday, soccer teams will learn the answer to the critical question they and their fans want to know: Who will they play when the tournament opens in November in Qatar?The World Cup draw — part gala, part pep rally, part math seminar — will deliver intriguing clashes of styles, testy political collisions and, if past events are any guide, a few uncomfortable moments.But given the stakes of the draw, it is also one of the biggest events on the global sports calendar. Here is a look at how it works.When and where is the draw?Friday at noon, Eastern time, at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center in Qatar.How can I watch?Television coverage in the United States will be on FS1 and Telemundo starting at 11:30 a.m., Eastern time. The draw will be streamed at FIFA.com and on NBC’s Peacock service in the United States. The New York Times will also provide minute-by-minute coverage.How does it work?Each team has been assigned to one of four pots, based on its world ranking. One team from each pot will be placed in each of the eight World Cup opening round groups, to ensure the teams are divided by strength. There are also rules to keep them apart from regional rivals. Each group may have no more than two teams from Europe, for example, and no more than one from any other continent.The entire process can feel a bit methodical at times: First, a ball is pulled from one of the bowls containing the names of each team in that pot. Then a second ball is drawn to place the team in its position, which must be done carefully to ensure that rules about regional rivalries are followed.It can go badly wrong, as the Champions League learned in December. It had announced its highly anticipated knockout-round matchups before discovering its mistake, and had to stage an embarrassing do over.Who will actually draw the teams?Soccer luminaries including Cafu (Brazil), Lothar Matthäus (Germany), Adel Ahmed Malalla (Qatar), Ali Daei (Iran), Bora Milutinovic (Serbia), Jay-Jay Okocha (Nigeria), Rabah Madjer (Algeria) and Tim Cahill (Australia) will do the actual drawing of the balls out of the bowls.Who’s in Pot 1?Since the teams are ordered by their world ranking, Pot 1 traditionally contains the tournament favorites as well as the host nation. That means, in addition to Qatar, this year the pot includes Brazil, Argentina, Belgium, France, England, Spain and Portugal.What about the other three pots?Pot 2 consists of the United States, Mexico, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Croatia and Uruguay.Pot 3 is Serbia, Poland, Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia, Iran, Japan and South Korea.Pot 4, nominally the weakest teams (though perhaps not this year), holds Canada, Ghana, Cameroon, Ecuador and Saudi Arabia.Three teams that have not yet been determined will also be in that pot. A European spot will be taken by Ukraine, Scotland or Wales. Another spot will go to the winner of an intercontinental playoff between Costa Rica and New Zealand, and the last to one of Peru, Australia or the United Arab Emirates. All of those places will be decided by games in June.Who’s missing?The chief absentee is Italy, a four-time World Cup winner and the reigning European champion. After missing out in 2018, Italy was eliminated for the second straight cycle when it lost a playoff semifinal against North Macedonia.Whom will teams want to draw or avoid?Qatar, which has never qualified for the World Cup on sporting merit, is by far the weakest team in Pot 1, and every team in the other pots will be eager to land in its group. No one will especially want to play Brazil, because it is No. 1 in the world and because, hey, it’s Brazil. France is the defending champion.Germany and the Netherlands look to be the strongest teams in Pot 2, and Serbia and Poland (with the FIFA world player of the year Robert Lewandowski) could be dangerous from Pot 3. Any team that can qualify from South America is going to be strong, and Ecuador in Pot 4 should frighten many teams ranked above it.The same goes for Canada, which has a host of young talent and breezed to first place in its qualifying group ahead of the more traditional powers the United States and Mexico.Who is going to win the World Cup?The favorites are Brazil, France, England and Spain, in that order, bookmakers say. More

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      World Cup 2022: What to Know as Teams Prepare for Qatar

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      The World Cup draw is Friday in Qatar, even though the entire field isn’t yet complete. While we don’t know all the teams, we do know quite a bit about how things will play out. Here’s a primer on the world’s greatest sporting spectacle.When is the World Cup?The opening match is Nov. 21 (three days before Thanksgiving in the United States). Over the month that follows, all the games will take place in a tight circle of eight stadiums in and around Qatar’s capital, Doha, making it the most compact World Cup in history.The final is Dec. 18 — a week before Christmas, which means the Doha airport on the morning of Dec. 19 is going to look like the entrance to a Walmart on Black Friday.Wait, don’t they play the World Cup in July?They always had, until Qatar got it.Qatar, like the other bidders, initially proposed holding the tournament in its normal summer window, and brushed aside any suggestion it could not do so with the help of cooling technology that did not, at the time, exist. As The Times wrote on the day of the vote in 2010:“Qatar’s bid overcame concerns about heat that can reach 120 degrees there in the summer. Officials say they will build air-conditioned stadiums, spending $4 billion to upgrade three arenas and build nine new ones in a compact area connected by a subway system.”It took more than four years, but in 2015 FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, eventually concluded that a summer World Cup in 120-degree temperatures might bring unneeded problems (like, say, fans and players dying) and agreed to move the tournament to the relatively cooler months of November and December.The Education City stadium in Al Rayyan, one of eight built or remodeled for the 2022 World Cup.David Ramos/Getty ImagesWhat about the league games that normally take place then?Oh, the leagues grumbled. A lot. But they lost.The switch to winter will disrupt not only league competitions in Europe and elsewhere, but also the lucrative UEFA Champions League, and it will require starting seasons earlier or finishing them later, or both.A winter World Cup also would leave those professionals who do not go to Qatar — less than 800 of the world’s players take part — with a midseason break that could extend to two months, once pretournament camps and friendlies and post-Cup rest is factored in.Fox Sports, which paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the United States broadcast rights, will have to wedge in a month of soccer games around another fall sport that tends to demand attention that time of year. Maybe you’ve heard of the N.F.L.?How many teams get in?A total of 32. They’ll be split into eight groups of four. The top two finishers in each group advance to the round of 16. After that, the World Cup is a straight knockout tournament.Which countries have qualified?Qatar qualified automatically as the host, and 28 other teams so far have joined it. Those include most of the biggest teams from Europe and South America: England and Germany, Brazil and Argentina, France and Spain.Canada is in. The United States and Mexico joined the field on Wednesday night.Ukraine might still go. Russia will not.Three places remain unclaimed. One will come from Europe, where Ukraine’s playoff against Scotland was postponed by war. Those teams will meet in June, with the winner to face Wales for Europe’s final place.The other two entries will come from two intercontinental playoffs that month: Costa Rica will face New Zealand, the Oceania survivor, in one game, and Peru, the fifth-place team from South America, will face an Asian team, either Australia or the United Arab Emirates.Are Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo going?Yes and yes.Argentina, and Messi, qualified in November. But Portugal, and Ronaldo, needed to sweat out a European playoff after botching its guaranteed route to the finals in the group stage.Will Qatar be Lionel Messi’s last World Cup?Franklin Jacome/Pool Via ReutersWho won’t be there?Erling Haaland, for one. (Norway didn’t qualify.) Mohamed Salah. (Egypt lost to Senegal on penalty kicks for the second time in a month.)Oh, and Italy. But then that’s not new for them. The Italians missed the 2018 tournament, too. Whoops.When will the games take place?Qatar is in the same time zone as Moscow. So whatever strategy you used to wake up early (or stay up late) for the games in 2018 will work this time, too. But it will mean kickoffs as early as 4 a.m. Eastern, and no later than 2 p.m. Eastern.How can I find out who my team is playing?The World Cup draw is Friday in Qatar. In it, all 29 teams that have qualified and the three still to be determined will be placed in groups. So by the end of the day, you’ll know which three teams your team will face in the group stage, and have a good idea of who might await in the knockout rounds.Harry Kane and England made the semifinals at the last World Cup and the final at last summer’s European Championship. Could 2022 be their year at last?Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWho are the favorites?The usual suspects qualified early, so many of them, in fact, that our soccer columnist, Rory Smith, wrote in November that “the likelihood is that the winner is already there.”Quite what the tournament, riddled with scandal and concern from the day Qatar was announced as the host, will be like cannot yet be known. The identities of the teams who will contest it, though, are — for the most part — extremely familiar.Most, if not quite all, of the traditional contenders are already there: a 10-country-strong European contingent led by France, the defending champion, and Belgium, officially the world’s best team, as well as the likes of Spain and England and Germany. They have been joined by the two great powerhouses of South America, Brazil and Argentina.More than a dozen more teams have joined the party since those sentences were written last year. Which is to say that, in March, it’s still wide open. More