FIFA has a product that is a glittering diamond for ascending or old (authoritarian) regimes irrespective of whether FIFA exerts any influence on the content itself (the games). That just doesn’t matter and also isn’t necessary so why should they even try to touch that? Makes no rational sense.
FIFA’s job is to get the teams that make the glittering diamond to play in the WC without too much fuss and without making any problems. In that context doing shady shit on the playfield would even be counterproductive.
If all (important) national teams feel like the games themselves are fair and that they are heard when there are problems on the playfield then at least that‘s not an additional area of conflict.
For that reason I think it‘s extremely unlikely for corruption to actually extend to the playfield. It‘s just no needed and even counterproductive. I think that might actually be the thing that actually breaks FIFA‘s power, so I would think that they don’t touch it.
He touches his back foot while Di Maria is still running. BBC commentators all also agreed it was a clear pen(and I'm romanian just to dispel political bias hopefully).
Geopolitics that is in favor of Argentina?? That does not make any sense.
I would buy that story if it were for China - look at all the ads and they even built the stadium. Too fantasy though since China men’s soccer team is a total joke
They spend 10 times more than the other countries to host the world cup. They want it to be a big hit. That's why FIFA has been saying that this is the best wold cup ever and bla bla bla.
In 2018 there was 29 penalties in total. This year there is 17 penalties during the matches (including the final so far), with Argentina getting 5 out of 17.
That’s meaningless without a denominator. All other things being equal, the team with more time spent in the opponents box would be expected to have more penalty kicks.
EDIT: And just as I write this France draws a penalty!
I have no horse in this fight, just wanted to point out a curious fact.
That said, the denominator/ top team argument only holds if Argentina was the most dominant team in the cup by a landslide (considering the ratio of the total penalties). They weren’t, they performed mostly in the same pack of France/England/ Portugal. Brazil would be the only team that was blatantly more dominant. Another denominator could potentially be number of foul against, and I would be surprised if it is that lopsided.
It's not about France or Argentina. It's about the PSG, a club owned by Qatar (buye... ahem... host of the world cup), where both Messi and Mbappé plays.
I'm not defending France or anything. I dislike both teams, my team got eliminated a while ago.
But take a look at Argentina - Croatia. Argentina was way superior after the first 20 min or so, but Croatia was still holding. After the penalty Croatia was no longer playing football. When Argentina scored the second goal the defense was scared of even approaching the ball. A penalty in a tournament like this can kill the morale easily.
This happened all the time with Barcelona and Messi in the "golden" years. He's still a great player, but... ither should be allowed to play against fairly.
@Darmody, if only you had used a word like "commerce" or "business" instead of "geopolitics". This match and WC seems like good business. Also I'm not entertained but that was their intention I guess.
This is just an unhappy sports fan howling at the moon. The ref is a fallible human being who makes mistakes, but the consensus was that the match was called impeccably well. The penalties awarded were correct. Ref also carded France for diving that was really hard to see in real-time but he was definitely correct.
