What is it about the underdog that we find so irresistible?
There is something almost universal in the human response to the smaller party beating the larger one, the unknown defeating the famous, the nation of eight million people knocking out the nation of sixty million. We root for the underdog even when we have no stake in the outcome, even when we barely know the names of the players involved, because something in our nature recognizes the audacity of the attempt and feels that it deserves to succeed.
The World Cup has produced more of these moments than any other sporting event, partly because of its scale — thirty-two nations, six weeks, every match potentially decisive — and partly because football, more than most sports, allows a team of sufficient organization, spirit, and tactical intelligence to defeat a team of superior individual quality on any given day. Football is not the sport where the better team always wins. It is the sport where the better team usually wins, and the difference between those two statements is where all the drama lives.
Let's visit the greatest upsets.
USA vs England, 1950
The United States of America defeating England at football is, in 1950, approximately as plausible as me defeating Magnus Carlsen at chess. England — despite their long absence from FIFA and the World Cup — were considered among the finest footballing nations in the world. The United States were considered, politely, an enthusiastic beginner. England were 3-1 favorites. The match was expected to be a warm-up exercise.
It ended 1-0 to the United States. The goal was scored by Joe Gaetjens, a Haitian-born player who worked as a dishwasher in a New York restaurant and had only qualified for the US team because a somewhat loosely interpreted FIFA rule about residency was applied in his favor. The goal was a deflection off his head that the goalkeeper thought was going wide. He claimed it deliberately for years.
The English press, receiving the result by telegram, initially assumed it was a typographical error. When they confirmed it was real, the coverage was approximately what you would expect: bewilderment, disbelief, and the beginning of a national soul-searching about English football that has continued, more or less continuously, ever since.
North Korea vs Italy, 1966
Sixteen years later, a different kind of impossibility occurred.
North Korea — a country almost entirely isolated from international football, whose players the opposition could gather almost no information about — defeated Italy 1-0 in the 1966 World Cup group stage. The Italian team, one of the most technically accomplished in the world, conceded a goal to Pak Doo-ik in the 42nd minute and never recovered.
North Korea went on to reach the quarter-finals before losing to Portugal 5-3 in a remarkable match in which they led 3-0 before Eusébio scored four goals. The return of the North Korean players to their country was, according to what limited information has subsequently emerged, not straightforwardly celebratory. They had beaten Italy, which was glorious. They had then given up a three-goal lead, which was not.
But the image of the Italian players boarding their flight home from Middlesbrough airport — where the match was played, at Ayresome Park — is one of football's great scenes of humiliation. Italian supporters were waiting at Rome airport with rotten tomatoes and eggs. Some of the players chose different flights home.
Cameroon vs Argentina, 1990
The opening match of Italia 90 was between the defending champions Argentina and Cameroon, the African representatives who were appearing in their second World Cup. Argentina were among the favorites for the tournament. Cameroon were given approximately no chance.
Cameroon won 1-0. They finished the match with nine men — two of their players were sent off — and still won. The goal was scored by François Omam-Biyik with a header in the 67th minute.
Maradona, the greatest player in the world, had spent the match being kicked, pushed, pulled, and generally impeded with a level of physicality that the referee allowed more than a contemporary official would. The Cameroon tactic, essentially, was to foul him repeatedly and hope the referee didn't send off the entire team. They sent off two players and conceded only two yellow cards. It was not elegant. It was, in the purest competitive sense, devastatingly effective.
The knock-on effect of this result — of African football demonstrating it could compete at the very highest level — cannot be overestimated. Cameroon went on to reach the quarter-finals, losing to England only in extra time. They showed a continent what was possible.
Senegal vs France, 2002
We touched on this earlier, but it deserves deeper attention. Senegal's opening match of the 2002 World Cup was against France, the defending champions, in a tournament that France were expected to dominate. The French squad included Zidane, Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira — arguably the best collection of individual talent at the tournament.
Zidane was injured and didn't play. France lost 1-0. They were eliminated in the group stage without scoring a single goal, becoming the first defending champions to go out at the group stage without scoring since Brazil in 1966.
The goal was scored by Papa Bouba Diop, who celebrated by removing his shirt and dancing in the corner of the pitch while his teammates joined him. It was pure, uncontained joy from a group of men who understood they had just done something that the football world would talk about for decades. They were right.
Greece at Euro 2004, and Why This Matters for the World Cup
Greece won the European Championship in 2004, defeating Portugal in the final in Lisbon, and while this was not a World Cup, it belongs in any conversation about underdog achievements in football. Greece, under the German coach Otto Rehhagel, played the most organized, defensively disciplined, counter-attacking football the tournament had seen in years, and defeated home favorites Portugal twice — once in the opening match and once in the final. Their victory remains the most statistically improbable achievement in the history of major international football tournaments.
The reason it matters for the World Cup discussion is the questions it raises about what football is for and how it should be played. Greece were not beautiful. They were effective. They absorbed pressure and struck on the counterattack with clinical precision. Neutral observers found them difficult to watch. The Greek supporters found them impossible not to love.
Morocco 2022: The Wall That Moved
The most recent and, in many ways, the most resonant of the great World Cup underdog stories is Morocco's campaign at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Morocco became the first African nation to reach the semi-finals of a World Cup. They did it by beating Belgium, Spain, and Portugal — three of the most storied football nations in the world — with performances of tactical discipline, physical intensity, and collective spirit that converted neutral observers all over the world into temporary Moroccan supporters.
The semi-final loss to France was painful and controversial — the Moroccan camp felt that refereeing decisions had gone against them in ways that mattered. But the story of that tournament was not the semi-final loss. It was the image of the supporters in the stands, the flags of Morocco and Palestine and Congo and other African and Arab nations being waved simultaneously, the sense that something larger than a football match was being expressed in those celebrations.
Achraf Hakimi — the Moroccan right-back who had grown up in Madrid, in a neighborhood called Getafe, in circumstances that were modest — talked about his parents after the victory over Spain. His mother had cleaned houses in Spain. His father had been a street vendor. He was now playing for Morocco in the last eight of a World Cup. The emotional weight of that journey was visible every time he celebrated a goal.
These stories — the United States in 1950, North Korea in 1966, Cameroon in 1990, Senegal in 2002, Morocco in 2022 — are the World Cup's gift to people who love sport not just for the quality of the football but for what it says about the possibility of transformation, of the small becoming great, of the expected narrative being torn up and replaced with something nobody had written.
Here is your question:
Do you believe upsets are good for sport? Or does part of you want the better team to always win, to see talent and preparation reliably rewarded? What does your answer tell you about what you think sport is for?
And Morocco 2022: the players were from the Moroccan diaspora across Europe — raised in Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium. The flags of Palestine flew in the Moroccan sections. What does it mean for a national team to represent something larger than a nation? Who gets to decide what a team stands for?
The upsets are where the World Cup tells the truth about itself: that it is bigger than football, and more unpredictable than anyone can plan for, and that the story is never over until the final whistle.
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