With the World Cup starting, many people are ready to watch the best soccer matches of the year.

The World Cup is the most viewed tournament out of all the sports getting averaged 3-billion-plus TV views per world cup since 2010. Over 180 territories bought the World Cup rights generating 4.6 billion dollars only in TV rights. Another fact is that the 2018 Russia World Cup was the most watched sports event ever accumulating 3.9 billion views. 

The Super Bowl only gets 240 million views, while the FIFA Women’s World Cup gets 1.12 billion views each time the tournament is hosted.

Senior Edward Lopez states, “Soccer unites all of us and it has something special that no other sport has which is why the numbers are so high”

The world cup features 32 countries that are played in the course of a month in the host’s nation. There are two stages played, the gorup stage, and the knockout stage. 

In the group stage, the teams are in eight groups containing four teams each. Each team plays three matchs to face the rivals in the group. The top two teams move on to the knockout stage and the last two teams are sent back home. We decide the two teams that move on to the knockout stages by seeing how many points they have. A win would give a team three points, a draw would give a team one point and a loss would give a team zero points. 

The knockout stage is a single game in which whoever wins gets moved on to the next round. If the 90 minutes end with a draw, then it goes to extra-time and penalties if necessary. The round of 16 (or second round) is when the top two finishers from each group compete against one another. The quarterfinals, semifinals, third-place match (in which the losing semi final losers compete), and final follows to end the tournament. 

Senior student Orlando Salas thrilly stated, “I think Mexico will win because they have a really good team and I believe that El Tata(Mexico’s manager) will make wise decisions and will bring the trophy home, I am a proud Mexican and will cry of happiness if Mexico wins” 

Senior student Vivian Dihn stated, “I hope Brazil wins because they seem to have a strong team this year”

Everyone around the world will be watching these matches on November/December and will be the months of soccer and happiness.