Today, I learned about:

In my last two posts, the main subject has been football, and it is really an interesting sport. The basic rules are quite simple, the aim is to see to that a ball is kicked into the opponent’s goal. But, as you know, there are so many other sides to it. I had promised to give my opinion about the current state of football in the world, and here it is:

Ever since my childhood days, I have been fond of sports, not so much about exercising them personally, but mainly to accompany the professional actions involved. As you know, for many years, sports were considered as extra curricular activities, performed by amateurs, who thus could not, and would not, receive monetary compensation for their feat. We have some interesting examples of that over the years, e.g. the American Jim Thorpe, who was outstanding in pentathlon and decathlon during the Summer Olympics 1912 in Stockholm, was disqualified at a later stage. Thorpe lost his Olympic titles after it was found he had been paid for playing two seasons of semi-professional baseball before competing in the Olympics, thus violating the contemporary amateurism rules. In 1983, 30 years after his death, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) restored Thorpe’s Olympic medals with replicas, after ruling that the decision to strip him of his medals fell outside of the required 30 days. Official IOC records still listed Thorpe as co-champion in decathlon and classic pentathlon until 2022, when it was decided to restore him as the sole champion in both events. See also reference #1 below. But since huge sums of money could be made by those who arranged sports competitions, gradually professional athletes started to take the scene, and of course the very best also received big compensations for their efforts.

Let us now switch over to speak only of football (named scoccer in USA). The first World Cup in football was held almost 100 years ago in Uruguay, with only 13 teams participating. A driving force for that was the Frenchman Jules Rimet, who crossed the Atlantic with the winner’s trophy. See reference #2 below for an interesting video about that event.

There are so many negative things I can say about the way the World Cup 2026 was organized. FIFA has had some really bad decades with all levels of corruption, starting from the top with names such as João Havelange, Sepp Blatter and currently Gianni Infantino. I do not need to get into the details, you have all read the news about the political pressures and manipulations, but will give my idea about what would really be an interesting format for future World Cups: Return to the smaller format. Instead of expanding the number of participating countries to 32, 48 and the proposed 64, return to 16 countries, who would meet in a competition without a group stage, only a knock-out fixture, in one host country. One idea would be that the two top countries in each of the six different FIFA confederations would have the right to participate, plus the host country and the three best countries from the preceding edition. That way we would have an interesting three-week tournament with very little margin for political manipulation. In reference #3 is an interesting video about FIFA’s almight. It is in Portuguese, but I imagine that everyone will understand what it is expressing.

This month I am pleased to show some interesting photos taken by my friend Eliana och her son João Guilherme, who made a thrilling journey to Egypt in March, 2026. Besides the header photo, from Abu Simbel, here are some other beautiful photos. Thank you very much for your contribution!

That’s what I learned in school today! 

Ref.:

1: Jim Thorpe

2: 1930 World Cup

3: Almighty FIFA

4: Valley of the Kings

*: What did you learn in school today?