The Greatest Show on Earth Returns

It is back, and it is going to be bigger and better than ever or so the organizers would lead you to believe.

Welcome back to Wiggi's alternative view on the world Cup. The idea of the blog is to hopefully help those who, whilst not being that interested in or not that knowledgeable about football but still want to keep abreast of what is going on.

Hopefully by reading this blog, you won't feel such an outsider, when the said event is the only thing that everyone else is talking about. The blog is intended to take a sarcastic, highly opinionated, hopefully humorous and not very politically correct view of the goings on at the world's largest extravaganza.

Of course, we must not forget that there is another very big event taking place this summer in the US of A and that is the nation's 250th birthday which will be celebrated during the World Cup on July 4th. Therefore, I would like to wish all Americans a happy birthday and hope that you can enjoy the football along with all the other celebrations. It is important not to forget that this world cup is being co-hosted by Canada and Mexico.

Another reason behind the blog was to help the good people of the old US of A who are not so well versed in the ins and outs of the worlds (yes there is a rather large world outside of the US of A) favourite sporting event.

This is even more applicable this time round as the evil empire known as FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association) is once again trying to breach the last unconquered frontier and spread the gospel of the beautiful game amongst the heathen natives of that great continent.

You readers can help with this task, by sharing these musings as much as you can.

I always open a tournament with a quick recap of the format for those who are not so au fait with the workings. This is very important this time round as for the first time since 1998 (seven world cups ago) the format has been changed with the expansion from 32 to 48 teams participating teams.

This time round, there will be twelve groups of four teams. The top two will go forward into the last thirty-two and the eight best third placed teams across the twelve groups will join them. From then on, it will follow a regular knockout format with the winner of a game advancing to the next round until we reach the final two teams left standing.

We will go into some of the interesting stories that this change may create and perhaps a brief look into why this change has happened in part two of the introduction which will appear tomorrow, before we start previewing the groups, 

It has been three and a half years since that titanic clash between Argentina and France in Qatar 2022 and time seems to have flown by, I have put a link to the highlights of that game below to whet the appetite so to speak. Let's hope for a fun tournament, as ever please feel free to comment and please pass on the link to anyone you feel would be interested.