Daily Archives: June 3, 2026

Dima Maghreb will reverberate at Morocco matches. This is a country with belief and big ambitions

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“Dima Maghreb – Always Morocco. Oussama Marhoum is the capo of Morocco fan group RossoVerde — but he does not watch the national team’s matches. He stands behind the goal, back to the pitch, dictating the rhythm of the chants and drums. … Morocco head to the World Cup this summer eighth in the FIFA world rankings, having been named, in remarkable circumstances, winners of the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON). They were beaten 1-0 in the final by Senegal in January, having missed a stoppage-time penalty. But 57 days later the Confederation of African Football announced that they had been handed the title, due to the Senegalese players leaving the pitch in protest at the awarding of that late spot kick. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
NYT/ATH: Brazil are five-time World Cup winners. A new generation of fans are ‘chasing the sixth’ (Video)
NYT/ATH: For years, Canadian soccer fandom was confined to message boards – not anymore (Video)
NYT/ATH: For years, Every Qatar conversation comes back to 2022. But their fans want to cheer the Maroons to a new piece of history (Video)

For years, Canadian soccer fandom was confined to message boards – not anymore

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“… Life was supposed to be good, maybe even different, as a fan of Canada’s men’s team. But as day turned to night, Gauthier realized he had committed the cardinal sin of Canadian soccer fandom at the time. He had allowed himself to imagine. Two Cuban goals ended Canada’s Gold Cup hopes. They left the competition without an appearance in the knockout phase and would begin nearly a generation spent in the soccer wilderness. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
NYT/ATH: Above Bosnia matches, the sky will burn. Their fans’ fire is love, not anger (Video)
NYT/ATH: Every Qatar conversation comes back to 2022. But their fans want to cheer the Maroons to a new piece of history (Video)
NYT/ATH: Switzerland is a country of four languages. Its ‘Nati’ will unite the people at the World Cup (Video)

The making of England’s World Cup squad video: Sweating on Toney and a Beatles song debate

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“The night before England manager Thomas Tuchel named his 26-man World Cup squad was a nervous one. Not so much for the players: by then, most of them had already received the phone call telling them whether they were in or out. But for those responsible for producing the squad announcement video that the English Football Association (FA) wanted to go live at 10am the next morning. … The duo, who run creative agency Dirty Vanilla, had spent the previous three weeks working night and day on the project, from shooting the main running sequence on one of New York’s busiest streets, to tasking staff with creating hand-drawn animations and designers with computer-generated imagery (‘zero AI was used,’ Shaw points out). But there was only so much they could do without Tuchel’s final list of names, which landed with them around 7pm the night before the film was due to go live. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)

Is the World Cup vulnerable to fixers? Fears grow as ‘every sport in every continent’ faces corruption

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“The World Cup promises to be the most-watched event in the history of sport. As a consequence, it will also be one of the most lucrative events on which bookmakers have ever offered odds. With huge betting markets already established in East Asia and Europe, and the astonishing rise of prediction markets in the United States, games at soccer’s most prestigious tournament will invite wagers on everything from who will score the next goal to who will emerge the overall winner. With the vast sums of money involved in these betting markets, there is the risk that the World Cup will be targeted by spot fixing, the practice of manipulating events within a game — rather than the overall result — in order to cheat the bookmakers. An example might be a player deliberately receiving a yellow card in a particular window of time in a game. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)