World Cup Preview, Pressure, and USMNT Expectations with Abe Gordon

How excited are you compared to previous World Cups that you've covered or watched?

I'm pretty excited about the World Cup being here.

Obviously, I'm a little fearful of the format.

I wasn't in love with the format change to begin with, and before I see it play out, I'm not in love with it.

Maybe watching it could change my mind, but...

You know, you upgrade from from 36 teams, 32, excuse me, 32 teams all the way up to 48 teams.

You've got a bunch of third place teams that are going to advance into the knockout so that you can have a 32 team field in the knockouts.

It's just a more forgiving format than it previously was.

I'm not sure that's great for the competition level.

necessarily.

It used to be clear cut two teams out, two teams on, and you don't have that anymore.

I think the computing is going to get a little bit wonky in terms of third place teams and tiebreakers and stuff.

You really don't want teams to be advanced on whether it's gold differential or goal scores or, or gosh forbid, it's like the amount of accrued yellow cards, sportsmanship crap.

Like that's a terrible, terrible reason to not advance.

Yeah.

So I don't love the format, but it's also cool that you've got some first time teams and that wasn't going to take place with a smaller field.

But you've got a bunch of teams that are going to build up some cool stories.

You know, they're going to be kids that go down as legends in their country for scoring the first ever World Cup goal for X team or doing this in a game in which you beat whatever nation that you didn't expect to beat.

So those stories are always made at the World Cup and they're going to be a bunch of first timers with that opportunity, which is a cool story to follow, even though I don't love how this now feels very forgiving.

For sure.

Does this feel like a different World Cup besides the format or does it just feel like normal World Cup type building up to this point?

Well, the only thing that feels different is how you gauge success.

And I think at 32 teams, I think a lot of countries would gauge, and I'm not talking about the top contenders to actually win the whole thing, but I'm talking about the third tier or fourth tier, right? And success at that point was just get out of the group.

Second place in your group, you're going up against first place out of some other group, and you kind of like where you're at.

Yeah.