The Most Useless Game In Sports Is Happening Today
Why FIFA needs to kill the World Cup's third-place match for good
Today, twenty-two guys who just watched their World Cup dreams die are putting on their cleats and jogging out in Miami to play a game that means nothing.
France vs. England. Hard Rock Stadium. The third-place match. It needs to go.
I love this tournament, but this specific game, the one FIFA insists on cramming in 24 hours before the actual final, is one of the dumbest traditions left in sports.
FIFA adopted it in 1934, and it’s been permanent at every World Cup since 1954. Almost a century of making two teams that just had their hearts ripped out play a bonus round for a medal literally nobody grew up dreaming about.
UEFA had the same format for the Euros and got rid of it after 1980. Forty-six years ago. If Europe’s own governing body decided this wasn’t worth doing for its own tournament, I genuinely don’t understand why FIFA is still doing it for the biggest one in the sport.
Louis van Gaal basically said all of this out loud already, way back in 2014: “This match should never be played, I’ve been saying that for 10 years.” And then his Netherlands team went out and won the thing 3-0 against a Brazil team that was still in actual shock from losing 7-1 to Germany days before.
Managers know it too, which is honestly the funniest part. First-choice starters get benched across the board. Backup keepers start. In 2014, the Dutch brought on their actual third-choice goalkeeper with basically no time left just so he could say he played in a World Cup. And there hasn't been a single third-place game with fewer than two total goals since 1974.
This year’s version comes with $2 million in extra prize money attached, in the most physically brutal World Cup format we’ve ever had: 48 teams and 104 total matches. It’s a feast for us fans, but not for the players on the field. The 3rd place team gets $30 million USD, and the 4th place team gets $28 million USD. $2 million USD is still a big difference, just not for these guys.
To be fair, not everybody hates it. Kyle Walker defended the fixture back in 2018, said it was “still something massively to play for,” bragging rights, proof you’re the third-best team on the planet. Fine, I respect that he found something in it. But one player finding meaning doesn’t cancel out the actual injury risk FIFA is putting on a bunch of gassed athletes. The NBA doesn’t make its conference finals losers play for third. Neither does the Champions League. They’re doing just fine.
I get why FIFA keeps it. It’s another broadcast slot, another sponsor package, a few more million squeezed out of a tournament already printing money. But you have to ask what exactly you’re optimizing for at that point, because it’s not the players, and it’s not really the sport either.
France and England will go out today, play a game that decides nothing, take on injury risk for no real reason, and by tomorrow morning almost nobody will remember what the score even was. Meanwhile, the actual final kicks off 24 hours later like this detour never happened at all.
Ninety-two years is enough. FIFA already got the memo from UEFA decades ago. Let the semifinal losers go home with some dignity instead of one more game nobody asked for.
I wanna hear your thoughts on this in the comments below.
Special piece coming out tomorrow, people. Be ready.