Some thoughts, now that everyone’s played two:

I don’t mind the water breaks per se. I do mind that they’re a mandatory three minutes long, which is way too much of a lull in the action. Cut them down to one minute, period. Have FIFA personnel run water onto the field, or have drones fly the water out there, or turn the sprinklers on. Run a TV ad if you need the money, but we need to get on with the game.

I’m in a love-hate relationship with VAR. I love that it’s made it possible to right particular wrongs, as in the case of Tim Ream and Miguel Almirón in our win over Paraguay. I hate that it interrupts the flow of the game as much as it does. I hate when it puts the game in limbo: maybe there was a foul or an offside, but play is continuing knowing that the referee might blow the whistle at any moment to check on something that might have happened 15, 30, 45 seconds ago… and even then it might turn out that it was nothing and play will continue. And I hate that it’s made me hate the current offside rule even more. It hasn’t fundamentally changed offside, it’s just brought my complaints about offside into sharper relief. I’ll write more about that in a different post.

The new tiebreaker arrangement is interesting. Used to be that if teams were tied in the group stage, the first tiebreaker was overall goal difference. Now it’s the “greatest number of points obtained in the group matches between the teams concerned,” i.e., the head-to-head results between the tied teams. One the one hand, I like the idea that if my team beat your team, but we finish tied in the group, then I’ve locked in the tiebreaker. It doesn’t matter that you beat other teams in our group worse than my team did– we beat you, so we win the tiebreaker.

But there are some weird effects. As of this writing– before any of them have played their final group stage game– five teams have clinched last place. They cannot advance. Five feels like a lot. I’ll grant that under the 32- and 24-team formats, you could get eliminated after two games, so technically this is nothing new. And with 48 teams in the tournament, you’re bound to have more teams knocked out after two. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just your incentive to get better results in your first two games.

The flip side is that four teams have clinched first place in their group. Congratulations to the USA and Mexico in particular. Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m thrilled that we’re through to the next round, that we’ve won consecutive World Cup matches for the first time since the Depression, and so on, but it is a bit weird that Turkey could beat us a million to nothing and it wouldn’t budge either one’s standing in the group. Oddly, there’s an extremely slim chance it could affect tiebreakers for the second and third place teams. Anyhow. I’m not sure which order of tiebreakers is better from a purely neutral standpoint, so… good thing I’m not neutral. Whatever favors the USA.

…

We’re only two games in, and I don’t have a “Game of the Tournament” favorite yet, but this past Monday might’ve been the “Day of the Tournament” so far. Messi, Mbappé, and Haaland scored two goals each on Monday. They’ve combined for 13 in 6 games between them. I cannot remember a World Cup, never mind a single day, where the biggest stars were scoring this fast. Insane.