"The teams have been improving. Until recently we didn't know much about Cape Verde, and there it is." Mexico coach Javier Aguirre said it almost with a shrug — and that reaction, more than any statistic, tells you where global football stands right now.
Before a ball was kicked at this expanded 48-team World Cup, the narrative was set: more teams meant weaker teams, and weaker teams meant dull, forgettable mismatches. UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin even said publicly there were "a huge number of matches that are completely uninteresting." He's going to need better evidence than that, because the numbers aren't cooperating.
The goal differential doesn't lie
Through the first 24 matches, the goal differential sits at 35. That's identical to where it stood after 24 games in Qatar in 2022. Goals actually went up — 75 scored this time compared to 57 four years ago — but the margins between teams haven't blown open the way critics predicted.
Yes, Germany put seven past Curacao. Canada dismantled host nation Qatar 6-0. Haiti went out after two games. Those results exist, and they're real. But they're not the whole picture.
Cape Verde — ranked 67th in the world, one of the smallest nations ever to qualify — held European champions Spain to a 0-0 draw. Congo, whose only previous World Cup was in 1974 under the name Zaire, forced a 1-1 draw against Cristiano Ronaldo's Portugal. New Zealand, the lowest-ranked side in the tournament at 85th, drew 1-1 with Iran. These aren't flukes manufactured by a favorable schedule. They're the product of something structural.
Why smaller nations are closing the gap
Coaches and analysts are pointing to a familiar but accelerating set of factors: more players from developing footballing nations competing in Europe's top leagues, top-level coaches taking jobs with smaller federations, and tactical and physical conditioning knowledge spreading far beyond traditional football borders.
Spain's Luis de la Fuente was blunt about what Cape Verde did to his side. "The team we faced was clearly inferior to ours, but it did what it had to do very well and defended very well. In every match you have to be fully focused and extremely precise." Coming from the coach of the European champions, that's not a compliment — that's a warning.
From a betting perspective, the flattening of results has real consequences. Backing heavy favorites to win comfortably is a shakier proposition than it looked on paper before the tournament. Cape Verde at 0-0 with Spain; Congo at 1-1 with Portugal. Handicap lines and Asian markets that priced in comfortable wins for the elite sides have already been punished once. There's no obvious reason that stops here.
- Cape Verde (ranked 67th) drew 0-0 with Spain (ranked 2nd)
- Congo drew 1-1 with Portugal
- Curacao held Germany to 1-1 until late in the first half
- New Zealand (ranked 85th) drew 1-1 with Iran (ranked 20th)
- Qatar drew 1-1 with Switzerland before losing 6-0 to Canada
Tunisia coach Hervé Renard put it cleanly ahead of his side's match against Japan: "When you are organized and together, you are able to compete. We have to follow this example and not be scared of defeat." He was talking about Cape Verde. He could have been talking about half the tournament.
The associations of Cape Verde, Congo, Curaçao, Haiti, Jordan and Uzbekistan issued a joint statement pushing back on Čeferin's comments. "Football does not belong to a select group of nations," it read. After the first 24 games of this World Cup, the scorelines are making the same argument.
