Mauricio Pochettino\u2019s team won their group after some impressive performances. But they\u2019d probably need to beat some of the world\u2019s best to claim the title<\/p>\n
Football Unites the World \u2026 in wishing it had paid more attention in applied mathematics class. Or so the Fifa slogan could have been expanded to say, given the mind-warping that arose from the formula for slicing the newly expanded 48-team tournament<\/a> down to 32 sides for the first knockout round<\/a>.<\/p>\n After all, why do a random draw when you can build a matrix with 495 possible scenarios in order to assign the fixtures for the eight best third-placers? Anyway, what matters is that Mauricio Pochettino\u2019s team will face Bosnia and Herzegovina in the round of 32, and no new format is going to stop us from \u2013 in time-honored fashion \u2013 speculating wildly about what may happen next while we still have the chance, with the potential for American wins rated using one of the mantra-loving manager\u2019s motivational rallying cries of choice.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mauricio Pochettino\u2019s team won their group after some impressive performances. But they\u2019d probably need to beat some of the world\u2019s best to claim the title Football Unites the World \u2026 in wishing it had paid more attention in applied mathematics class. Or so the Fifa slogan could have been expanded to say, given the mind-warping … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}