This 2026 World Cup had reached the final rounds of sixteen without me watching a single match. It was by chance, lingering in a restaurant, that I caught a glimpse of the match between Lionel Messi's Argentina and Egypt. And to think that once upon a time, a football enthusiast would carefully draw up his own "final bracket", meticulously transcribe each result, immediately update the standings in each group: the configuration of the decisive matches would then take shape before his eyes and he would make predictions purely for pleasure without speculation. How distant that time seems, 1986, when I nearly cracked my skull against a lintel after Germany's equalizer, overcoming a two-goal deficit (only to eventually lose to Diego Maradona's Argentina). And all those "imprecations" (a charming euphemism) and other "smashings" over missed chances often preludes to bitter defeats and cruel eliminations that one broods over for four years.
The Argentine World Cup in 1978 had been arranged in four groups of four teams, the number of qualifiers was increased to 24 at the 1982 World Cup and the 1998 World Cup was the first edition to bring together 32 countries. The current expansion to 48 participants had sparked criticism about the sporting interest of teams like Jordan, Uzbekistan, Curaçao, Haiti, Congo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. At least, this global exposure gave visibility to the Cape Verde archipelago (Cabo Verde, 527,326 Portuguese-speaking inhabitants, off the coast of Senegal in the Atlantic Ocean