Every four years, the World Cup produces results that make pundits look foolish and bookmakers look brilliant. Saudi Arabia beating Argentina. South Korea reaching the semi-finals. Greece — Greece — winning a European Championship. The narrative of international football is written in upsets, and yet the data beneath those upsets tells a more ordered story […]
One team. One trophy. One hundred and four matches reduced to a single moment on 19 July at MetLife Stadium, when the captain of the winning side lifts the golden prize above his head and thirty-nine days of football find their meaning. Every World Cup comes down to this: not who was the best team […]
Gary Lineker scored six goals at Mexico 1986 and won the Golden Boot without taking a single penalty. Salvatore Schillaci took it at Italia 90 with six goals despite starting the tournament on the bench. Oleg Salenko scored five in a single match against Cameroon in 1994 and still shared the award with Hristo Stoichkov. […]
Scotland are back at the World Cup and the Irish punting community is paying attention. Twenty-eight years of absence ended with a qualifying campaign that reminded everyone — Scots, Irish, and neutrals alike — that the Tartan Army does not do things quietly. They do them with noise, with passion, and with an optimism that […]
Twelve groups. Forty-eight teams. Seventy-two matches before a single knockout game is played. The group stage of the 2026 World Cup is the longest in tournament history, stretching across 18 matchdays from 11 June to approximately 28 June, and it will determine the shape of a knockout bracket that runs all the way to MetLife […]
Nobody saw Croatia coming in 2018. A nation of four million people, with a football federation that had spent the previous decade lurching from one scandal to the next, somehow assembled a squad that played the most beautiful football of the tournament and reached the final in Moscow. The bookmakers had priced them at 28/1 […]
FIFA dreamed big. Gianni Infantino stood at the podium in January 2017 and announced that the World Cup would expand from 32 teams to 48, effective 2026. The football purists groaned. The television networks cheered. The bookmakers started recalculating. Nine years later, the dream is about to become reality, and the betting landscape it creates […]
The Fortuna Arena in Prague holds 21,000 people. On the night of 26 March 2026, it felt like the walls were closing in. Ireland had come so close — ninety minutes of football, then extra time, then that terrible walk from the centre circle to the penalty spot, where everything you have worked for over […]
