Brasil 2014

Absolutely none.

Actually not. Just World Cup '90 or World Cup Grandstand.

It actually has happened before. The US beat Germany 3-0 in Jacksonville, FL, in 1999. I was in grad school at UFlorida at the time, and I wanted to go. Sadly, I was going to be out of town. I told my German grad school mate about it, though. He rounded up some of his German buddies and attended. His report afterward, “Germany didn’t even try to suck.” I chuckled.

The combined wisdom of all bookmakers i could find:
Group A

Brasil
Croatia
Mexico
Cameroon

Group B

Spain
Holland
Chile
Australia

Group C

Columbia
Côte d’Ivoire
Japan
Greece

group D

Italia
Uruguay
England
Costa Rica

Group E

France
Schweiz
Ecuador
Honduras

Group f

Argentina
Bosnia Herzegovina
Niger
Iran

Group G

Deutschland
Portugal
USA
Ghana

Group H

België
Russia
S,Korea
Algeria

1/4:

Brasil-Columbia
France-Deutschland
Spain-Italia
Argentina-Portugal

1/2

Brasil-Deutschland
Spain-Argentina

3rd Deutschland
2nd Spain
1st Brasil
I’d love for more people to post some predictions. A fun way of finding out if you know anything about the game.

I remember that game. As pleased as I was to see the USMNST win that one I got the feeling right from the very get-go that the Germans couldn’t have cared less about the outcome of it. Three goals against Oliver Kahn? The same guy who wowed everybody with his save three years later in South Korea/Japan? I’m almost ALWAYS happy to see the German team lose but neither of the USMNST’s wins over Germany have really meant much (to say the least).

Weird. I have a very distinct memory of seeing the introductory titles on BBC or ITV with Nessun Dorma and “Italia '90” graphics spinning around the World Cup trophy, but only the first part is true. Ximenean has it right. :confused:

Huh. Could have sworn I read it was the first time that had happened. Well, my mistake. Thanks for the correction.

Any particular reason why you only translated some of the names? Trying to be a bit clever but then realised you couldn’t actually be arsed and so tried to get away with it?

Edit:
And whilst we’re at it, I’m pretty sure it is Nigeria in Group F, not Niger. Nigeria and Niger being different countries and all that. Maybe you should have just written them all in English.

Here are my uninformed guesses from nearly two years ago:

Pretty happy with all but the last still

Doh! Schoolboy error (and a very junior schoolboy at that). In my defence, I studied German at school rather than French. My general point still stands, though it does seem to be somewhat inconsistent. Perhaps the rule is “if it looks almost the same in the native language as in English [e.g. Italia, France, Brasil] we’ll go with that, otherwise just use English [e.g. Germany, Japan/South Korea].”

It’s odd how memory works, heh. If only my memories of the Scotland - Costa Rica game were similarly wrong.

Shrugs It’s not a big deal. I know it might look like I think it is, but this is a message board and so I consider a “Brasil/Brazil” debate to be an amusing distraction. It is a little weird because Brazil is the only country I can think of where people will deliberately spell it in a foreign way - I’ve seen it before in other contexts.

And I do say “Côte d’Ivoire” (most of the time).

I was looking into this and the naming of the tournaments does, to an extent, seem to follow this idea (of if it is broadly close to English we’ll use it) and has done (sort of) since 1970. If you look up the official world cup posters for past tournaments online, you get Mexico '70, Argentina '78, Espana '82, Italia '90, World Cup USA '94 and France '98 (I didn’t see posters for the tournaments I missed out - probably due to my own blindness). Then there is a real break point because they put it in two countries for 2002 and Germany 2006 seemed to be within a FIFA World Cup sort of thing, as was South Africa 2010. This seems to be the first tournament in a while that says “Country Year” as a piece of branding.

Everybody, it seems, LOVES to suck the German team off, but not being a fan of that team I will remind EVERYBODY that the German men’s national soccer team hasn’t lifted a trophy since 1996 and I REALLY don’t see it doing that this year, either. Not in Brasil (I’m not going to get drawn into a debate on this. Brasilians spell it with an “s” and I’m following suit). I hope I’m right.

And Colombia is spelled with two "o"s in Spanish. People getting that wrong sticks in my craw.

English isn’t exactly my first language, I wrote the names in a fashion I thought you’d understand.

It’s spelled that way in US English too. Took me a while to grok that.

I blame Columbus

Colombos. :wink:

Dictionaries are so hard to use.

Pro tip: go to Wikipedia and look at up the page in your native language for a given country. Then, on the left click “English”. Lo behold you get the page in English for the country you want, with an English title and everything.

Example:

Click on English:

There really is no excuse for being just wrong. And yes, I live somewhere foreign. I have to look shit up all the time.