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10 reasons why the World Cup is the greatest sporting event on Earth

Even FIFA can’t ruin the best argument for loving sports.

Most major sporting events do not live up to their names — literally, at least.

Major League Baseball’s World Series apparently envisions a world that only includes the US and Canada. The National Football League’s Super Bowl is only rarely super, as those of us who watched February’s 29-13 snoozefest between the Seahawks and Patriots experienced in real time. (A record FIVE field goals!) The Olympics, despite the Greek etymology of the name, do not take place in or around the ancient Greek shrine of Olympia. And the NBA Finals — I guess yes, they are the last games, though it seems like no one told the San Antonio Spurs that.

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But the World Cup (sorry, the FIFA World Cup, as the soccer’s international body repeatedly insists on us calling it) truly is the global sporting event, eclipsing all others. An estimated 5 billion people watched at least some of the 2022 World Cup, and with an even larger field of countries, the 2026 tournament underway now in the US, Canada, and Mexico is primed to be even bigger. And unlike nearly every other major sport tournament — and despite the rivers of red tape and bureaucracy and politics the whole event comes wrapped in — the World Cup is guaranteed not to disappoint.

There’s a new threat to the World Cup. FIFA might not be ready.

Let’s count the reasons why:

1) A tie can count as a nation’s greatest-ever sporting achievement

When World Cup debutantes Cape Verde — population 529,600 — tied tournament favorite Spain with a 0-0 draw in Atlanta on June 15, fans of the tiny West African nation must have felt like they had won the entire thing. And then two days later, the Democratic Republic of Congo — one of the poorest countries in the world, currently embroiled in both a deadly civil war and a major Ebola outbreak — somehow deadlocked with fifth-ranked Portugal and its too-handsome star Cristiano Ronaldo 1-1. With results like this even American fans might learn to love ties.

Speaking of Americans…

2) We might actually be good!

The main host nation kicked off its World Cup campaign with a 4-1 drubbing of Paraguay, which might be the single most impressive moment in US tournament history since........

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