Bellingham the villain as England go out in the quarters and other World Cup predictions
The World Cup is here and, whether we like it or not, we have to go along with it. It’s happening. A lot of it will be absolutely awful. But some of it will still be football. And football is ace.
Hurray for football in spite of absolutely everything. That’s how we plan to get through the weeks ahead.
On which note, here are 10 things that are guaranteed* to happen.
*not a guarantee
Portugal will win the World Cup
As ever, what we’ve asked ourselves when considering the question ‘who will win the World Cup?’ is ‘what’s the worst possible option?’ because that’s just the grim way we view the world in general and this World Cup specifically.
And we’ve concluded that the worst option is that Portugal win it. Not because there’s anything wrong with Portugal as such, but because a Portugal win will please a lot of the very worst people on earth and also set off all manner of exhausting conspiracy theories. We’re quite certain we live on a bad enough timeline for this to occur.
Even at our most pessimistic moments we can’t quite bring ourselves to accept we’re on the very worst possible timeline because not even the openly and cartoonishly despicable axis of beta-male evil that is Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino could manage to successfully rig this tournament to the extent that the USA win it.
But Portugal? They are genuinely really very good. They’ve got arguably the best midfield in the whole tournament, elite players all over the park and the waning but still potent stardust of Cristiano Ronaldo.
And it’s here that the worst people will start to get involved. The Ronaldo-Messi debate will reopen, which absolutely nobody should want. The conspiracy theorists will find it ‘very interesting’ that Messi was given a World Cup in 2022 and now Ronaldo has been given one in 2026.
Pi*rs M*rgan, already setting records on the back of Arsenal winning the Premier League, will mine levels of smug hitherto undiscovered in the entire course of human history.
And worst of all, Donald Trump will be delighted at the success of Ronaldo, a man with whom he quickly bonded over shared interests. And by shared interests we of course mean ‘being six foot three and under five per cent body fat’. Don’t know what you were thinking of.
READ: World Cup giddiness diluted by that ‘decomposing orange creature’
England will go out in the quarter-finals
Just seems the likeliest thing. Probably win their group in grimly unconvincing fashion. Probably beat a third-placed team in the last 32 in grimly unconvincing fashion.
Probably beat Mexico in the last 16 by playing surprisingly and deceptively well despite all manner of grave pre-match concern about ‘heat’ and ‘altitude’ and ‘should the Azteca even be hosting this game actually, could we not have it at Wembley instead, chaps? Because despite all that Mexico are physically incapable of going beyond the last 16 and England are not.
Probably lose to Brazil in the quarter-finals, huffing and puffing in forlorn pursuit of an equaliser for the final 27 minutes. That’s a lot of far too plausible probablys.
The England scapegoat will be Jude Bellingham
At which point, of course, England will require a scapegoat or sacrificial lamb. Let us obtain for you these animals. We thought about overcomplicating this one, and there are other possibilities, but let’s just go with the easiest, most obvious and above all almost certainly correct answer.
Sure, it could be Thomas Tuchel. Not a lot of people know this, but he is in fact German. And he picked a slightly funny squad, didn’t he?
He didn’t pick Harry Maguire, the most English of all the footballers. Phil Foden’s miserable record for England and Cole Palmer’s miserable record last season will be instantly forgotten and they will be hailed as the ‘potential gamechangers’ England lacked when looking hot, bothered and devoid of ideas when trying to chase an equaliser in the final 10 minutes against the Brazilians.
We’re genuinely not sure if other countries get like this, but in England we do like to get extremely het up about like the 23rd and 24th most important members of a tournament squad as if that might be the difference between success and failure.
Being out of the squad will always be better than being in the squad at this point. Shares in Lewis Hall will go up, shares in Djed Spence will go down.
Spence is another potential scapegoat, because he ticks a lot of boxes. Bit cocky and brash. Slightly odd pick who not many would have had in the squad and let’s face it everyone likes being proved right. And, let’s be entirely honest, black. Dispiriting as it is, let’s not kid ourselves it isn’t a factor in time-served England tournament scapegoat identification procedures.
But the most likely scapegoat is still comfortably Bellingham. The complete absence of the Premier League from his CV makes the press inherently suspicious of him. They just don’t deal with him day to day the way they do the players who have years of service in Our League. They simply don’t understand or trust a player who doesn’t particularly want or need the aggro of their day-to-day attentions and who shows no particular interest in playing Premier League football any time soon.
There have already been countless column inches of drivel devoted to Bellingham over the last year or so, but more worrying than all of that to us is the shift over the last week.
Suddenly there’s a raft of tabloid columns full of ‘Bellingham MUST start’ content. We agree with it, sure, but we don’t trust it. Not one bit. What are they playing at here?
They’re setting him up for a fall is what they’re doing. A big one. Can’t be the scapegoat if he’s not in the team, can he?
Scotland will go out in the group stage
Talking of not overcomplicating things. It is the history of the Scotland.
This is a country that has played in 16-team World Cups, 24-team World Cups and 32-team World Cups. Tournaments with one group stage. Tournaments with two-group stages. Never have they got beyond the first group stage.
And now here they are for their ninth attempt, and in a 48-team tournament. Surely they can at least make a last 32?
Well, very possibly not. A group containing Morocco and Brazil is familiar to those who can remember France 98, but not particularly welcome. Even the potential third-place safety net might not save Scotland this time around, with particularly grisly first-round exit scenarios now all too plausible.
For Scotland’s first game is against Haiti. No good can come of that game. Lose or draw, and Scotland are in deep and humiliating and familiar sh*t from the get-go, needing to get at least one result against two of the strongest teams in the competition to survive.
But even if Scotland win their opener, catastrophe is not far away yet now also accompanied by that most harrowing of all emotions: hope. Because it would still be no surprise were they to lose to Brazil and Morocco, and it then becomes entirely possible that Scotland pull off the spectacular trick of still going out in the group stage of a tournament that makes going out in the group stage really f*cking difficult, and doing that having won their opening game.
Scotland’s group being Group C means there could also be the added pain of waiting for other groups to finish before discovering whether three points will be enough to scrape one of the best third-placed team spots, only to discover at the very last that it is not.
‘And there will be some English involvement in the final stages…’
Congratulations to Michael Oliver and his team for being awarded the honour of refereeing the final, to the utter astonishment of the sort of Premier League fans who still say ‘We should get the best officials in from around the world’ in the mistaken belief that overseas referees are inherently superior and fairer and just better referees rather than simply being referees who you have not yet seen take charge of your team a couple of times and thus reveal themselves to be bought-and-paid for cheating biased bastards.
ITV hold out for about seven games…
…of stoically making us all listen to Sam Matterface talk about how warm it is while plugging some upcoming games or a new drama with all episodes now streaming on ITVX, before giving in and just chucking on some adverts during the drinks breaks to a collective sigh of relief from a grateful and already weary nation.
Trionda enters the wider football lexicon alongside Jabulani
We’ve only watched one warm-up game, we’re not maniacs. It was the England v New Zealand game, and it was quite enough thank you very much. Obviously not very good in any way, but also obviously not something to get overly exercised about.
It was a glorified training session played in crazy heat on a pitch that looked like the lads at the stadium in Tampa had only remembered they were hosting soccerball not handegg about 45 minutes before kick-off and hastily rolled out some turf hurriedly sourced from the local B&Q or its Florida equivalent.
So no, we weren’t worried about any of the football. What we were worried about was The Football. On this admittedly brief and sketchy early evidence it does very much look like A Bit Of A Floater.
Now we’re no scienticians here – nor formally trained or qualified scienticians, anyway – but we reckon when you throw in heat and altitude and a ball that looks like A Bit Of A Floater and you, my friend, have got yourself a Talking Point.
Sixteen years ago, ‘Jabulani’ entered the wider football language for its forecourt flyaway tendencies in South Africa, and we think Trionda is going to do the same.
When you watch even the famously reliable and accurate long-range shooting of Djed Spence lose its radar, you start to worry. Basically we’ve checked all other possibilities and it’s come down to the Trionda.
USA finish bottom of Group D
Less a prediction, more a desperate yearning. It would be funny, and frankly we all deserve it given everything else about this tournament.
There’s no chance we all get to just enjoy a lovely football tournament, so let’s hope here for the next best thing: schadenfreude out the wazoo. It will annoy Donald Trump, which is good, and make Gianni Infantino squirm briefly. It’s the very best we can hope for.
It will also prompt another round of that classic slice of American copium whenever their soccer stars come up short: “Yeah okay but dude, if we put our top athletes into soccer we would totally crush the World Cup forever” despite America also being a country that loses to Mexico at baseball.
It’s also semi-realistic in what looks like a genuinely impossible-to-call group also featuring Turkey, Australia and Paraguay. And thus one in which absolutely no possible permutation of finishing positions could be considered surprising or unexpected.
If we can’t have the USA bottom, then can we have them losing to Iran in the last 32 after both finish second in their groups? Although to be honest we’re not sure we can stomach the build-up to that game.
No major nations crash out early
More of a non-prediction this one, but still worth having, we think. There’s always a big team that makes a complete bollocks of a World Cup, descending into infighting, division in the ranks and a pitiful group-stage exit.
But our hot take here is that there will be no such team this time around. The expansion to 48 teams has, inevitably, watered down the competitiveness of the group stage as well as providing that huge third-place safety net for any big country that does get itself into a pickle.
We’re all going to have to end up convincing ourselves that, say, Austria’s failure to progress from Group J constitutes a major talking point and it will all be tremendously undignified.
The nearest thing we might get to a proper snafu is one of the favourites finishing only second in their group and carelessly placing themselves on an early collision course with another big beast.
Possibilities here include, say, England finishing second in Group L and facing a possible last-16 clash with Group H winners Spain, or Germany slipping up in Group E and ending up against Brazil in the second knockout round.
The best possible one of these, though, comes if defending champions Argentina make a slow start and manage only second spot in Group J. Do that, and they could immediately be facing Spain in the last 32. This would by definition becoming the earliest World Cup knockout game in history to feature a ‘you know, this would have been a worthy final’ clash.
A player, coach or official is detained at the US border and denied entry into the country
We did write some stuff here, but it’s irrelevant now because this one has already managed to come true between writing and publication after Somalia’s African referee of the year Omar Artan was turned away after touching down in Florida over the weekend. Sigh. Well done, America. Well done, FIFA. It’s going to be a long six weeks.
