Brasil 2014

Ok, I’m enjoying all this old Pope vs new Pope World Cup memes. :smiley:

Germany vs. Argentina in Nazi Bowl III.

I’m into it. :slight_smile:

Argentina has the sixth largest Jewish community in the world, (A number that used to include my late grandfather) so those “Nazi” jokes are starting to rankle a bit.

hangs head in shame

Ignernt Yank here: Why is it called the World Cup when the trophy isn’t at all cup-like?

Metonymy.

The original cup was pretty cup like.

Well the original trophy (the Jules Rimet Trophy) was a cup… or at least had a saucer like top to it so you could drink out of it if you so chose.

edit: Beaten to it!!

Knockout competitions are always called cups, probably because the trophy of the original one - the FA Cup - was cuplike.

The current Word Cup trophy is the second one. The original one was the Jules Rimet trophy, but Brazil got to keep that one after the third time they won it in 1970.

The Jules Rimet trophy was stolen when England had the tournament in 1966. It was later found under a hedge by a dog called Pickles, in time for the matches starting. It was stolen again in 1983 in Brazil, and has never been recovered.

Considering the variety of disrespectful acts that have been performed on the Stanley Cup, the change was probably wise.

Thanks, everyone.

I like this short video someone has put together of Germany’s seven goals from Tuesday’s game.

The editing doesn’t really seem to change things very much. :slight_smile:

Can we have a separate thread via a via the final?

To expound on this a bit, most major football associations have two or three top-flight competitions. It’s not like the US where you have something vaguely resembling a round robin competition and the top-placed teams advance to a knockout competition (which, come to think of it, is not dissimilar from the format of the major international tournaments or the Champions League).

Instead you have one round robin competition - “the league” - with promotion and demotion from lower tiers. That’s invariably the main thing to win. Then you have “cups” which are based entirely on a knockout format. Spain has the Copa Del Rey, Italy has the Coppa Italia, England has the FA Cup, and so on.

Most European countries also have a “league cup” which is only open to league clubs.* In England it’s called the Football League Cup but it’s usually named after whatever the current sponsor is too (Capital One at the moment.) The FLC is somewhat unique in that the winner gets a place in the Europa League, the second-tier pan-European competition, in the following season. In other countries all UEFA spots are given based on league finishing position (the next few teams after the 2-4 that qualify for the Champions League). There’s also a European Cup Winners Cup for teams that win the FA Cup equivalent but didn’t do well enough in their domestic leagues to qualify for the Champions League.

The upshot of all of this is that a European club side could theoretically win up to four different competitions in a year - the domestic league, domestic cup, domestic league cup, and one of the European competitions (Champions League, Europa League, Cup Winners’ Cup.) The previous Champions League winner could also win a fifth title, the Club World Cup, but nobody really pays that much attention and it has been held intermittently anyway.

*The other cup is normally open to amateur sides and those in professional competitions below the lowest tier of the national league arrangement, though of course they never win.

I think we should respect the purity of the One True Brasil 2014 thread, and keep it all here.

Especially since the final will have Germany bundling in a goal from a messy corner in the fifth minute and then 88 minutes of mind-numbing backpassing.

That’s been gone for quite a few years, it got folded into the UEFA Cup which then evolved into the Europa League.

Back in the day, the European Cup was a pure knockout competition where only the League winners could compete, the Cup-Winners Cup was for the winners of the main domestic Cup competitions, and the Fairs Cup (which became the UEFA Cup) was for the top two or three runners up in the domestic League. (However it was up to the various national FA’s how to distribute the places between the latter two Cups, if say a team won the main domestic Cup and also finished 2nd in the League, or indeed allow the winners of the local equivalent of a League Cup into the Fairs/UEFA Cup/Europa League. )

The European Cup evolved into the Champions League, for reasons to do with money I believe, allowing more than one team from the biggest television markets into the competition. The Europa League is now for teams who finished 5th and below in the big-market Leagues (and the odd League Cup winner), and second or below in the smaller markets.

It’s really quite straightforward.

Huh. I didn’t know they got rid of the CWC.

Yeah, I agree, for some reason particularly because the OP left in a huff. It’s like his memorial.

He wouldn’t have approved of the “dicklickers” and their apologists getting to the final.

I still don’t get the difference between the FA Cup and the Carling Cup (besides that the FA Cup is much more prestigious). I think I started a thread about it a couple years ago but obviously the answer didn’t stick.

The Carling/Capital One/Football League Cup is only open to Premiership and Football League sides. The FA Cup is open to non-league sides too. And the FA Cup is run by the FA and the other one isn’t. The League Cup also has a home-home semifinal format for reasons I’ve never quite understood.