So who do you like?<\/p>\n
What do you mean? In what?<\/p>\n
Well, despite its being buried somewhere beneath the downs of the Giants and the ups of Bryce Eldridge; the offseason drama of the San Francisco 49ers; and the ongoing quest of the Golden State Warriors to get younger while being older, the biggest event in the world has crept into town and began in earnest on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Sadly, I can\u2019t be there for the first game at Levi\u2019s Stadium, although every Qatari and Swiss that I know will be cheering on the ol\u2019 home team. Provided of course they were willing to spring for the price of admission. For this one: Cheap. Only $450 for the nosebleed seats.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sitting in a sidewalk cafe in Paris as I write this, and the only conversation (at least that I can understand) is about the World Cup.<\/p>\n
And frankly, it doesn\u2019t seem to be much about the Qatar-Switzerland matchup at Levi\u2019s Stadium. France you see, are the co-favorites with Spain to win the whole dang thing come July 19th in New York. By which time the teams in the Bay Area opener will be comfortably back in Doha or wandering the Alps.<\/p>\n
In fact, the good folks at FIFA \u2014 one of the truly worst governing bodies in sports \u2014 has decided that, while they\u2019ll be guzzling Dom Perignon in New York, they\u2019ve decided to throw the Bay Area a bottle of Ripple. They did give us six games and the best odds of a team winning the Cup after playing the first round locally are with Turkiye \u2014 at a robust 90-1.<\/p>\n
Austria will make a cameo appearance in the area \u2014 their odds to win are 150-1. The rest run from Paraguay, at 300-1 down to Jordan at a cool 2500-1. I do believe that Royal Jordanian Airways has a special on short turn around roundtrip tickets.<\/p>\n
Having both covered the World Cup and been there as a fan, I can unequivocally say there is no better event in the world of sports. The Olympic Games have that element of nationalism to them, but it\u2019s largely individual. World Cup teams have an entire nation in their corner.<\/p>\n
A perfect example was when Italy won the World Cup in 2006. My wife and I were in Florence on the night of the title game and we\u2019d made a reservation at a restaurant we\u2019d been touted on and wanted to go to for years. Ten minutes after we sat down, the maitre d\u2019 came to our table and said, \u201cyou must eat and be gone in 15 minutes or you may join the chefs and waitstaff and watch the game with us. The restaurant is closed.\u201d We understand the food is still very good there.<\/p>\n
One of the reasons I\u2019ve never been able to really embrace American soccer is that my first experience with the sport was the World Cup. That is the equivalent of the World Series being your first baseball experience and then being expected cheer wildly when your 14-year-old nephew makes a diving catch of a sinking liner in a Pony League game.<\/p>\n
True. American soccer has come a long way. But, in the big picture of international play, the U.S. sits behind Colombia and Morocco, and slightly ahead of Senegal and Uruguay. Their odds of winning the Cup right now stand at 60-1.<\/p>\n
And here\u2019s a fact that I had a little trouble wrapping my head around. There is not a single \u201cfootball\u201d player from the United States ranked in the top 100 in the world.<\/p>\n
Of the top 100 players in this year\u2019s World Cup, the United States has two. The favorites to win the whole thing are France and Spain. France has 14 players ranked in the top 100 in the tournament including three of the top five, while Spain has 12 players ranked in the tournament\u2019s top 100, including the No. 1 player in the world this year, Lamine Yamal. And here\u2019s a scary thought: Lamine Yamal is 18 years old, roughly the age of my sock drawer.<\/p>\n
There are, however, those who believe the good old US of A can actually win the tournament seeing as it\u2019s played on home soil. These are fans who also believe the New York Knicks can come back from a 29-point second-half deficit or that Bryce Eldridge can hit an extra-inning walk-off home run capping an eight run come-from-behind win. And, let\u2019s face it \u2014 we all know that those things can\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n
Nobody I\u2019ve spoken to in this Parisian sidewalk cafe thinks that can happen. Nor do they know who OG Anunoby is, and Bryce Eldridge must play for England because he\u2019s sure as hell not French.<\/p>\n
What they do know, is that their team is the favorite to win the World Cup. And, while they don\u2019t know (or care) about the Knicks or the Giants, they would like you to know who Kylian Mbappe is. And, I\u2019m quite certain come July 19 \u2014 you will.<\/p>\n
Barry Tompkins is a 40-year network television sportscaster and a San Francisco native. Email him at barrytompkins1@gmail.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So who do you like? What do you mean? In what? Well, despite its being buried somewhere beneath…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5,24536,24537,7,15419],"class_list":["post-34514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-france","tag-france","tag-marin-sports","tag-newsletter","tag-sports","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}