It's all football

How the World Cup keeps making me think about college football.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

The 2026 World Cup wrapped up group play Saturday night. This cut the newly expanded 48-team field to . . . 32. Maybe call it more of a trim. After two weeks of multiple matches a day, 16 teams had to go home.

Sorry, South Korea, 25^th¹ (Iowa) in the FIFA World Rankings entering the tournament. You ended up in a select group, being sent home, but now President Lee Jae Myung has promised a review of the entire program. International soccer is great.

I’m definitely not complaining about the firehose of sport the past couple of weeks. When I’ve realized it’s time for lunch this June, I’ve also realized there’s probably soccer on. My phone tells me I should go to bed. But there’s world-class soccer available.

It reminds me of fall Saturdays, but this is every day for six weeks. Maybe this is why I’ve spent a lot of time watching the World Cup and thinking about college football. It is our closest American equivalent—tribal and sometimes blatantly corrupt, but the games, man. They’re good.

So, this is my attempt at a tricky, trendy, crossover column. I know, I know, soccer can, I guess,² still be somewhat contentious in America. Just let me try it. This is about two different sports, but all of the world’s football, including ours.

Here’s the college football stuff the World Cup has me thinking about.

Expanded Cup/CFP

The college football powers that be and television partners will continue to debate the size of the College Football Playoff for the foreseeable future. FIFA’s over that bridge now, expanding the Cup to 48 teams for this 2026 tournament.

Through the first week of matches, I felt this was a worthwhile expansion. Curaçao (82^nd, Stanford) became the smallest nation to qualify for the Cup, thanks to the expansion. It was then promptly smoked 7-1 by Germany (10^th, Clemson)in its opener but responded with a valiant draw against Ecuador (23^rd, Indiana) before being eliminated. Cape Verde (67^th, Maryland), the third-smallest nation to ever qualify, “won” with a 0-0 draw against Spain (2^nd, Alabama) drew with its next two opponents and snuck into the knockout rounds. I realize three-draws-and-advance isn’t really beating any soccer hater’s charges, but I promise you each of those ties was thrilling in context.

That’s maybe the biggest difference between soccer and college football. The former is so much better at appreciating context. The latter tends to treat it like a plague, preferring a “regular season that matters.”

I’m generally in favor of a 24-team College Football Playoff, if some sort of rationale can win out over self-interest.³ I like more access and love more football.

But watching the expanded World Cup has made me question myself.

Carlos Quieroz is coaching in his fifth Cup and has led Ghana (73^rd, UNLV) to the knockout stage. He said the expanded field is turning the tournament into a “vulgar, ordinary competition,” noting that seven of 10 nations from South America qualified.

Gotta say, it’s a compelling rebuke. I need to watch the knockout rounds before deciding how this does or doesn’t make feel about a bigger College Football Playoff.

So far, I shade to the compelling stories it has produced being worth it.

Menschenfänger

Covering Nebraska football for the past 15 years means thinking a lot about coaching changes. Every time the Huskers have made one, there’s a percentage of people who really value a coach with ties to the program, someone who understands the place. I’ve always understood that point of view but felt it was too limiting. If the only person who can succeed is someone who’s been in Lincoln before, that leaves a lot of good coaches on the cutting room floor.

But the most interesting fact I read in the lead up to the World Cup was this one: No foreign-born manager has ever won the tournament. There have only been 22 Cup champions, so a small sample size, but still interesting.

Or maybe it’s just a reflection of supply and demand. The coaching pool for, say, Haiti isn’t quite as deep as France’s, which is why Haiti had a French manager.

I’m in the middle of a (so far) great book by Jonathan Harding, titled Mensch. It’s about why German soccer coaches have been so in demand in world football. Early on Harding writes:

I learnt that, just like many parts of work and society, it’s about being a Menschenfänger. This is a brilliant German word that highlights the beautiful logic of the language. Literally translated it means ‘people catcher,’ and while also a word for a pole weapon, the modern meaning is far less sinister. It means you have to be someone that people believe in.

I need to get deeper into the book to find out why this quality may or may not be particularly strong with German coaches, but I’m already asking the obvious question leading up to Matt Rhule’s pivotal fourth season: Is he a people catcher? I think it might be one of the things you can say with confidence about him to this point, but the results at Nebraska haven’t completely followed.

Was Scott Frost a Menschenfänger? He certainly was up to the point his Nebraska teams started playing games.

Which World Cup team is Nebraska?

About a decade ago I answered this question for myself with Argentina. Like Nebraska, Argentina had great history, but not the greatest, winning the World Cup in 1978 and 1986 with three runner-up finishes. That felt about equivalent. Then Lionel Messi and the Rest of ‘Em won it in 2022, a jolt of modern success that doesn’t marry with Nebraska’s 21^st Century.

You could go with England. It has one title, but it was a long time ago (1966) and two top-four finishes. Yet, fan interest and media coverage is intense. You could argue for Uruguay, which has five top-fours over two periods of distinct success, or maybe even, on the generous end, France with its seven top-four placements, all since 1958.

For now, I’m sticking with England. This year’s squad (4^th, Penn State) won its group and will face the Democratic Republic of Congo (46^th, North Carolina State) July 1 in Atlanta.

If this very short, non-expert argument has you ready to consider England as our summer Nebraska football equivalent, there’s some potentially good news. The Three Lions might have a manager predisposed to being a Menschenfänger in Thomas Tuchel. The bad news might be that he is German and not English.

Feels a lot like football season.

1. For the readers more aligned with college football than world football, I’m going to include the equivalent 2025 preseason SP+ rating to offer an exchange rate of sorts. If you remember last season, this can serve as a way to contextualize any of the soccer talk. Maybe it will be a terrible idea, but I think it will be fun and it starts off on a good note because embarrassed 2026 South Korea is 2025 Iowa.

2. My feeling is that 30 years ago the Venn diagram of college football and soccer fans would’ve barely overlapped. Now I feel like we’ve got a decent shared area, but that’s completely anecdotal. Someone with research money at a major university should investigate this.

3. Almost as big a long shot as Cape Verde against Spain, I know.