It’s Officially a World Cup Year!

It’s officially a World Cup year! The World Cup is a soccer tournament for every nation of the world to compete in. 

It happens every four years, but the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, more commonly known as Fifa, recently voted to have a World Cup every two years. So, after the 2026 World Cup (which will be hosted by the USA) the tournament will be every two years.

The qualifying games for 2022 have already begun. Qualifying games started all the way back in June, 2019 when minor countries from Asia began play. The qualifying games are still going and will finish sometime in mid-late March. 

There has been a lot of drama about some of the nation’s not qualifying and especially about Portugal. If you know soccer, you know that one of the best and probably the most popular players to ever play the sport, Cristiano Ronaldo, plays for Portugal. Portugal has not yet qualified for the tournament, and they have to beat Italy in order to qualify. The reason this draws so much attention is because this is Ronaldo’s last World Cup and Italy is a really good team; they just won the 2020 Euros which is about as big of a tournament as the World Cup.

This is also Lionel Messi’s (Argentina) and Neymar’s (Brazil) last World Cup.

The actual games start in November, and the teams that are playing still need to be determined. I am extremely excited for this World Cup and the USA is doing great in the qualifying games. The US Men’s National Team (USMNT) is ranked thirteenth in the FIFA’s world power rankings and the team’s age averages twenty-four years whereas the average age of most nations is around twenty-seven years. So hopefully our youngsters are able to do some good in this upcoming World Cup.