Holy shit. As an American seeing the marketing and advertising for the world cup is sick. It's so cringy... I feel bad for all the authentic people that love the sport.

I wouldn't doubt if there's some business going on with FIFA on large corrupt scale though... American football is losing its pull of American culture... They needed a new sport to help them create submissive people.

It's about to get soulless like Hollywood and marketed pop music. ...and the Americans will froth over it like hungry zombies.

The host countries are usually setup to get out of their group. US has generally been good enough on their own to get to quarterfinals when they qualify, but that’s when the real tourney begins.

You have the right of it otherwise, but one player usually can't carry a whole team on his own. Not even a phenomenon like Haaland.

Granted, they have a few other good players like Ødegaard too, but that's still not necessarily enough to beat a well-managed team and Pochettino managed a few of the biggest clubs in the world before taking the US gig.

Still, even if nothing else looks suspicious, the first withdrawn red card since 1962 at the request of the despot in charge of a host country is in itself enough to warrant an asterisk.

It genuinely feels like group stage was scripted to get them further in the tournament because they were a host nation. The team playing last night looked very different from the group stage team.

I feel like the script was for Balogun’s red card was supposed to be the reason for them to lose; but trump wanted to insert himself into the play to look like a hero “saving Balogun” so then they had to change the script on why they would lose.