World Cup 2022 (Soccer)

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      That Awkward Moment When the Prince of Wales Says He’s Backing England

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      It seemed so nice when Prince William, the heir to the British throne, met with England’s national team to express his support for their World Cup campaign before they left for Qatar. A video released by England’s Football Association (president: Prince William) showed him doling out shirts to the players and declaring that “we’re all rooting for you.”Who the “we” is in that sentence became a matter of some controversy. As many residents of Wales speedily pointed out, Prince William is the Prince of Wales — and Wales was also competing in the tournament. In fact, the team is playing England today, the first time the two nations have ever met in a World Cup. (Wales hasn’t been to the World Cup since 1958.)“Not a shred of embarrassment?” the Welsh actor Michael Sheen, whose nationalist fervor has resulted in some Shakespearean-style inspirational orations to the Welsh team, tweeted at Prince William. “Or sensitivity to the problem here?”Prince William quickly did a bit of diplomatic maneuvering, saying that though he generally supports England in soccer and Wales in rugby, he was excited about both their prospects for the World Cup. He also said he planned to wear a Welsh bucket hat for the team’s match against Iran. (Wales lost, 2-0.) It is unclear what he intends to wear for the England-Wales game on Tuesday, but there is no doubt which team Sheen will be supporting. More

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      Why World Cup Games Will be Played at the Same Time for the Next Four Days

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      For eight straight days, the soccer smorgasbord that is the World Cup has unspooled at regular intervals, each match staggered to bestow it maximum importance, a full 90 minutes of splendor — plus an eon of stoppage time — on the global stage without intrusion from other games.Even if upsets abounded, a certain tidiness to the proceedings still reigned: On most of those eight days, there were four games, scheduled three hours apart, one after another after another. It was glorious, satisfying and, for those of us who crave order, rather life-affirming.Now, as of Tuesday, structure is on a brief hiatus. Dear reader, prepare for chaos.Starting with the Group A games at 10 a.m. Eastern time, each of the eight clusters across the next four days will stage its final round of matches simultaneously.Qatar will kick off against the Netherlands on Tuesday at the same time that Ecuador does the same against Senegal. After a break, the United States’ clash with Iran in Group B is scheduled to start at 2 p.m., precisely when England’s matchup with Wales begins.The change in schedule creates the closest conditions to competitive balance and fair play, assuring that teams do not know the result required to reach the knockout stage before they take the field. It discourages teams from improving pathways in the bracket by influencing results with such tactics as manipulating goal differential or not playing to win. It also inhibits match fixing.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      U.S. vs. Iran at the World Cup: How to Stream

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      The Americans will play Iran on Tuesday in their final match in the group stage. Here’s how to watch, and what to watch for.After a tournament-opening 1-1 draw with Wales and a scoreless draw with England, the United States has one more group-stage game at the World Cup in Qatar. The Americans can advance to the knockout stage with a victory against Iran.When will the United States play Iran?Tuesday at 2 p.m. Eastern time. That’s 10 p.m. in Qatar.How can I watch in the United States?The game will be broadcast on Fox (in English) and on Telemundo (in Spanish).To stream the English-language broadcast, you’ll need a subscription to a streaming package that includes Fox, like YouTube TV, Hulu, SlingTV or Fubo. (Some offer free trials.) Tubi will stream the game for free, but only as a replay, after the game is over.Peacock will stream the Spanish-language broadcast. (Peacock Premium is $4.99 a month.)What do the Americans need to do to advance?The situation is simple: If the United States defeats Iran, it will advance to the round of 16. If it ties or loses, it will be eliminated.With a victory, the United States will most likely go through as the second-place team from its group. But if Wales upsets England, the Americans will win Group B.Should the United States advance, it would play a game in the round of 16 on Saturday or Sunday, quite possibly against the Netherlands, although Ecuador or Senegal are also potential opponents. A quarterfinal opponent might be Argentina, Poland, Australia or Denmark. And it would only get tougher from there.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Qatar’s Loudest Fans Aren’t from Qatar

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      A heaving mass of flesh and energy has brought life to the host nation’s matches at the World Cup. They are Qatar’s loudest fans, but they’re not from Qatar.DOHA, Qatar — Midway through the second half of Qatar’s match against Senegal at the World Cup, the drumming stopped as a man in a bucket hat and sunglasses rose and asked for quiet.Moments earlier, a section of the crowd — more than a thousand strong, almost all men, all of them in identical maroon T-shirts with the word “Qatar” in English and Arabic — had been chanting in unison at the direction of four fan leaders. But now the sea of men understood what was expected, and they followed the order and fell into a strange silence as the match noise swirled around them inside Al Thumama Stadium.Then a signal was made. And the crowd exploded back to life.“Play, the Maroon!” they chanted over and over in Arabic, a reference to the nickname of Qatar’s national team. The men linked arms in long lines and jumped up and down. The floor below them shook.The scene was more reminiscent of soccer stadiums in South America and Europe than in Qatar, and the cheering section evoked those of the ultras, a highly organized soccer fan culture with roots in Italy that can be found across the globe, including in North Africa and the Middle East.That was the point. The fans’ noise filled the stadium, as it had five days earlier during Qatar’s opening game against Ecuador. Their numbers conveyed strength. Their relentless energy was infectious. But the body art on many of them gave them away.The tattoos, which are extremely rare and highly frowned upon in Gulf society, seemed to suggest the fans weren’t Qatari. So who were they? And where did they come from?An energetic supporters section has brought life, and noise, to matches played by Qatar.Manan Vatsyayana/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesImported SoundThe plan was hatched at the start of 2022, as the World Cup was finally coming into view. Qatar had been besieged by criticism ever since it won the rights to host the World Cup: over a corrupted vote that delivered it, over its treatment of migrant workers, over the ability of the tiny country to host and house more than a million visitors. But in the background was also another common criticism: that the country had no soccer culture.Qatar had never qualified for a World Cup on its merits. The Qatar Stars League is one of the richest in the region, with state-of-the-art air-conditioned stadiums. But the crowds for teams like Al Sadd and Al Rayyan often number in the hundreds rather than the thousands. Who, the organizers wondered, would fill the stadiums when Qatar played? Who would provide the soundtrack?The answer was to tap into the region’s already fertile ultras culture and import it.But that same culture is an unlikely fit with the commercialized reality of Qatar’s World Cup. The code of ultra culture is antagonistic and deeply anti-authority, and in constant conflict with the police and the news media. In the Middle East and North Africa, ultras have been politically influential, too: Egyptian ultras played a key role in the 2011 Arab Spring that toppled Hosni Mubarak as president, and such was their street power and popularity that ultras were barred by one of his successors, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, after he came to power in a coup.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      China Limits Crowd Shots of the World Cup to Avoid ‘Zero-Covid’ Comparisons

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      In Qatar, the maskless fans at the World Cup are joyfully screaming, packed elbow-to-elbow in crowded stadiums, seemingly having a wonderful time.The image presents a direct contrast to China, where continuing “zero-Covid” policies have limited large crowds, forced occasional involuntary lockdowns and ensured consistent mask usage in public. Seeing the freewheeling fun outside the country’s borders had some people on Chinese social media asking: Why not us?As China convulses from a rare outpouring of civil unrest, with protests springing up in major cities across the country against Covid restrictions, social media users and journalists in China have begun to notice they are not seeing the same crowd shots that the rest of the world sees in their broadcasts. In one example captured by Mark Dreyer, the founder of China Sports Insider, a close-up on Croatian fans was replaced on CCTV, China’s state-owned television station, with an image of Canada’s coach.Some people still refusing to see this, so decided to track it. Within a minute, there was this: close-up shots of Canadian and Croatian fans on BBC/international feed, replaced by a solo shot of Canadian coach John Herdman on CCTV. pic.twitter.com/V3DZRjHrzk— Mark Dreyer (@DreyerChina) November 27, 2022
      Similar videos have circulated widely on WeChat, the popular Chinese app, and have been spotted by other journalists.CCTV has long been cautious about live sports broadcasts over which it has no control, said Dreyer, the author of “Sporting Superpower: An Insider’s View on China’s Quest to Be the Best.” In 2004, a brief image of Tiananmen Square from 1989 was shown during the Super Bowl, sinking the N.F.L.’s growth in China and ensuring greater care by television officials in the future, he said.The games are shown on about a 30-second delay in China, giving CCTV officials time to replace close-up shots of screaming fans with other available camera shots, often of coaches or the bench, Dreyer said.The changes are not major. Some crowd shots are still shown, but most are replaced, he said.The growing awareness of the differences through the viral posts on social media has contributed to the growing frustration in China, Dreyer said.“It’s kind of one of those moments where you get a peek around the curtain, and you realize you’re being fed some kind of manipulated narrative,” he said.The growing frustration with Covid restrictions, which has bubbled over into a rare display of antigovernment sentiment after a deadly fire in the Xinjiang region, has been increasingly felt in the sports sector, as most of the rest of the world has moved on with its large-scale events.Sports fans in China have taken note of full stadiums in Britain for the Premier League and packed N.B.A. arenas in the United States and Canada. There was a large backlash on social media after the World Cup’s opening ceremony, Dreyer said.“That’s where people kind of said, well, hang on, how come we’ve got 60-, 70,000 people jumping up and down in close, confined quarters with no masks?” he said. “That’s obviously a stark contrast with what’s going on for the majority of people in China today, where a lot of people are confined to homes, working from home, wearing masks, testing on a daily or near-daily basis. And certainly not going to big sporting events like this.” More

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      Canada has one more game before turning its focus to 2026.

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      AL RAYYAN, Qatar — After the final whistle, after Canada had been eliminated from the 2022 World Cup with a 4-1 loss to Croatia on Sunday, its goalkeeper Milan Borjan stood in the middle of a huddle of his teammates and waved his arms as he spoke. According to the Canada captain Atiba Hutchinson, Borjan reminded his teammates of how far they had come, told that they still possessed talent despite their performance, and encouraged them — four years before Canada co-hosts the next World Cup — that they would keep getting better. Even reaching this far was an accomplishment. Canada toppled the United States and Mexico en route to winning their qualifying group and ending its 36-year World Cup drought. Once in Qatar, Canada showed flashes of its tantalizing potential — it outplayed Belgium in the teams’ opening match but lost, 1-0. But in its loss to Croatia, Canada then showed how far it has to go before it can expect to contend at the highest level.“You’re playing on a world stage, there’s a lot of quality, so there’s things that we’re going to have to learn as a team,” said Hutchinson, 39, who made his 100th international appearance for Canada on Sunday. “We didn’t get the result we wanted but we’ll learn from this and these mistakes that we made and we’ll get better and better, and the next World Cup will be in Canada. We’ve got great players and have more and more coming through the system. We just have to be ready to do what we’ve been doing.”The 2026 World Cup will be jointly hosted by Canada, the United States and Mexico, and in its expansion to 48 teams all three host countries are expected to qualify automatically. But Canada will certainly want to show more than it did in Qatar. With several standouts who are 25 or younger and play in some of the top leagues in the world — Alphonso Davies (Bayern Munich in Germany), Jonathan David (Lille in France), Tajon Buchanan (Club Brugge in Belgium) and Stephen Eustáquio (F.C. Porto in Portugal) — that may possible. “I know the future for this team is really bright and there are a lot of lessons in this World Cup,” defender Steven Vitória said. “We’re going to keep working to close gaps against the best teams in the world.”Canada still has one more group stage game left in Qatar, against Morocco on Thursday. It has already done better than its only previous trip to the World Cup — Canada went scoreless and winless in Mexico in 1986 — but that is not good enough for Davies, its best player and the scorer of its only goal in Qatar.“For me, I keep dreaming and keep believing and keep pushing,” Davies said after the loss. More

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      Germany Meets the Moment and Keeps its World Cup Hopes Alive

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      AL KHOR, Qatar — This is how fine the margins can be: Had Nico Schlotterbeck not raced back, his jaw tight with effort, to steal the ball from Álvaro Morata’s feet, Germany’s World Cup would hang by a thread. For the second tournament in a row, a group stage exit would loom. Questions would be asked, culprits sought, knives sharpened.But Schlotterbeck did race back, straining every sinew to close the gap to Morata, and he did slide in, his timing perfect, and he did steal the ball from his feet, and now it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Germany might find itself — in a couple of weeks’ time — preparing for a World Cup semifinal, the scent of unlikely glory in its nostrils.Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesThe irony, of course, was that Schlotterbeck’s intervention was just one moment among many thousands over the course of more than 100 minutes, a speck in terms of Hansi Flick’s team’s overall performance, and yet everything turned on that single instant. Every assessment of this game, every analysis of the health of German soccer, hinged on it; so, too, did the international careers of several players and, likely, of one coach.The truth of it is that this had been a hugely encouraging display from Germany, regardless of whether Morata, scorer of Spain’s opener, had added a second in injury time. It would have been even if Flick’s team had not sealed a point thanks to a goal from Niclas Füllkrug, the late-blooming striker added to the squad almost as an afterthought in the weeks before this tournament.That is not to say it was spectacular — far from it — but it was brim full of all of those other traits that are considered quite useful in these circumstances: grit and fight and industry and nous. Germany richly deserved its point, one that means it goes into its final game knowing that a victory against Costa Rica will, in all likelihood, carry it into the knockout rounds.After that, the field opens just a little. It might be Morocco in the last 16 and Portugal in the quarterfinals. Germany came within a whisker of yet another embarrassment in the World Cup. The margins, though, are fine. All of a sudden, it can see nothing but promise. More

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      Iran Calls for U.S. to Be Expelled From World Cup

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      DOHA, Qatar — A representative of Iran’s soccer federation on Sunday called for the United States to be expelled from soccer’s World Cup over social media posts that the federation claimed had “disrespected” Iran’s flag.The United States Soccer Federation drew Iran’s ire by including a doctored Iran flag in two posts on its official social media accounts on Saturday. A spokesman for U.S. Soccer said the decision to use an Iranian flag stripped of the country’s official emblem and two lines of Islamic script in posts on Twitter and Instagram was intentional, and meant to show support for the women of Iran — a nod to protests that have roiled Iran at home and followed its team to the World Cup in Qatar.Iran condemned the decision to use an incorrect flag, which it said violated the statutes of FIFA, world soccer’s global governing body.“Respecting a nation’s flag is an accepted international practice that all other nations must emulate,” Safia Allah Faghanpour, a legal adviser to Iran’s soccer federation, said in comments reported by a semiofficial state news agency in Iran. “The action conducted in relation to the Iranian flag is unethical and against international law.”The adviser’s comments were reported by Tasnim News, whose own social media profile includes an image of an American flag in flames.The United States and Iran are set to meet in a crucial game on Tuesday that was already fraught with political overtones and high stakes: The loser, if there is one, most likely will be eliminated from the tournament.Iran cited a specific FIFA regulation that it said called for penalties for anyone “who offends the dignity or integrity of a country, a person or group of people through contemptuous, discriminatory or derogatory words or actions (by any means whatsoever).”FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the dispute, and it is unlikely to intervene during the tournament.But Iran’s presence in the field has already made headlines: Fans arriving at matches with Iran’s prerevolutionary flag have been told it is not allowed inside stadiums, and Iran’s players have won praise — and criticism — for refusing to sing their national anthem at their opening game, and then appearing to grudgingly go along the second time they took the field.The U.S. Soccer spokesman, who requested anonymity to discuss internal discussions, said the American federation had not been contacted by FIFA about the social media posts. But it said it had deleted the two posts after a series of internal discussions on Sunday and would use Iran’s official flag moving forward.The US. players and their coach, Gregg Berhalter, were not involved in the decision to use the incorrect flag or to remove it, the spokesman said. More