Every expansion in football history comes with the same warnings, and 48 teams were no different. Critics lined up early: bigger groups would mean more filler, more blowouts, a World Cup stretched thin. Then Cape Verde drew Spain 0-0 in their tournament opener, and didn’t stop there. The Blue Sharks followed it up with a comeback to hold Uruguay 2-2, and a goalless draw against Saudi Arabia ensured that they were the smallest nation ever to reach a World Cup knockout round before Argentina finally shut them out 3-2 in extra time.
Egypt matched the mood, grinding past Australia on penalties for their first-ever World Cup knockout win. Norway, back at the tournament for the first time since 1998, took down Brazil in the round of 16 clash on the back of Erling Haaland’s relentless finishing and Martin Odegaard pulling the strings. DR Congo held Portugal to a draw. South Africa quietly out-defended Mexico and South Korea to top a group nobody had them winning.
Egypt recorded its best-ever performance at the marquee event.
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FIFA
Age is just a number
Behind every shock result is a name that didn’t exist in the football conversation a month ago. Vozinha, Cape Verde’s 40-year-old goalkeeper, went from journeyman AFCON veteran to World Cup folklore with a seven-save shutout against Spain in his tournament debut. Yoane Wissa did something similar for DR Congo, scoring the nation’s first-ever World Cup goal and dragging the nation past the group stage for the first time in their history. Switzerland’s Johan Manzambi, barely a first-team regular at Freiburg before the tournament, came off the bench to score twice against Bosnia-Herzegovina and became the youngest Swiss player ever to score a brace at a World Cup.
From giant-killing draws to breakout heroes nobody saw coming, this World Cup has made its case in real time. Here is how the underdogs pulled it off, and it profiles the players whose World Cups went from anonymous to unforgettable.
Cape Verde’s story isn’t really about the three group-stage results anymore — those have been picked over enough. Facing the World Champion in the knockouts, they didn’t sit back and hope to survive on damage limitation; they matched the Albiceleste for large spells and forced extra time before finally going down 3-2. For a squad built almost entirely around players from Portugal’s lower divisions and mid-table European clubs, going toe-to-toe with Messi’s Argentina for 120 minutes and producing a World Cup classic wasn’t supposed to be possible.
Cape Verde fought tooth and nail in its debut campaign.
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Getty Images
For 79 minutes, Egypt had the World champion beaten. Two goals up with barely 10 minutes left, Mohamed Salah’s side had the great man’s World Cup career on life support — until Cristian Romero, then Messi, then Enzo Fernández scored three times in the space of thirteen minutes to turn the game on its head. Which is really the point: Cape Verde and Egypt didn’t bow out early because the gap in class was too wide. Call it bad luck more than failure: both sides played well enough to beat nearly any other team in the tournament; they just happened to run into the reigning World champion.
Making its presence felt
Paraguay had an impressive run in this edition after failing to qualify in the past. They endured a challenging path, finishing third in Group D with 4 points, which helped them progress to the Round of 32. La Albirroja made history by beating a German side stacked with talent 4-3 in a penalty shootout. They produced a spirited performance in the Round of 16 against a French attack led by Kylian Mbappe, Ousmane Dembele and Michael Olise, only conceding due to an unfortunate penalty in the 70th minute, which was calmly slotted home by the French captain, marking an unfortunate end to their fairytale run.
Paraguay earned a famous victory over Germany.
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Getty Images
Norway’s run wasn’t a shock in the same sense — this is a squad with genuine world-class talent — but its absence from the quadrennial extravaganza since 1998 made its round of 16 win over Brazil feels seismic anyway. DR Congo’s point against Portugal came from a team back at the tournament for the first time in over half a century, playing a compact, counter-punching system built specifically to frustrate bigger opposition. South Africa’s unfussy, well-organised defending saw off Mexico and South Korea to top a group nobody outside the camp gave them a chance in.
None of this happens by accident; none of this happens in the old format either. Give a team one shot at a giant and most fold; give them a tournament’s worth of room to build a campaign, and you get Cape Verde forcing extra time against the champion or the Norwegian juggernaut running circles around the pioneers of Jogo Bonito.
Every World Cup produces a handful of players who arrive as afterthoughts and leave as household names, but the expanded format has made this one particularly generous with its spotlight. The first breakout: Yan Diomande. The Ivory Coast winger arrived in North America on the back of a breakout Bundesliga season (12 goals and 8 assists), but nothing quite prepared anyone for what followed. His performance against Ecuador in the opening group match was, by Opta’s numbers, statistically unmatched by any player’s first three World Cup games this century. That’s not hyperbole from a hometown paper; that’s a data point. A tournament with eight fewer slots might never have had room for an Ivory Coast squad building itself around a 20-year-old still finding his feet at club level.
Johan Manzambi’s rise was even less scripted. Barely a first-team fixture at Freiburg before the tournament, the Switzerland midfielder made his World Cup debut off the bench against Qatar and followed it with a brace against Bosnia-Herzegovina, becoming the youngest Swiss player in the tournament’s history to score twice in a match. Reports linking him to a Premier League move surfaced within days. Nobody was scouting Manzambi for stardom in May. However, by July, he was on his way to the biggest league in the world.
Deniz Undav’s story cuts even closer to obscurity. As recently as 2020, he was playing third-division football in Germany, and he didn’t earn his first senior cap until 2024, at 27. Brought off the bench in Germany’s opening two matches, he produced five goal contributions in limited minutes including an equaliser and a stoppage-time winner against Ivory Coast. It’s the kind of redemption arc that is usually present in movie scripts.
Then there‘s Yoane Wissa, whose importance to DR Congo went beyond a stat line. Scoring the nation’s first-ever World Cup goal is one thing; doing it for a team that hadn’t appeared at this tournament since it played as Zaire, over half a century ago, gave the goal a weight that outlasted the match itself. Wissa didn’t just have a good tournament, he became the answer to a trivia question that will follow Congolese football for decades.
Morocco’s Ayyoub Bouaddi offered a different kind of surprise. Only 18, and a recent convert from the French youth setup, he needed just one half against Brazil to look like he belonged on the world stage, controlling a midfield with Premier League talent like Casemiro and Bruno Guimaraes. And in Cape Verde’s own story, its centrepiece is Vozinha, a 40-year-old goalkeeper who’d spent his career on the margins of the sport before a World Cup debut turned him into a folk hero overnight.
A 32-team World Cup has less room for a gamble, which means fewer uncapped 20-year-olds, fewer bench options who’d spent 2020 in the German third division, fewer squads built around a diaspora of academy prospects rather than the 15 names everyone already knew. 48 teams meant more federations willing to take those risks, and this summer, an unusual number of them paid off in real time, on the sport’s biggest stage.
None of these players are finished stories either. Diomande and Manzambi will walk into their next club seasons as wanted men rather than well-kept secrets. Undav has already forced his way from afterthought to first-team consideration. Wissa’s goal will outlive his career, cited every time DR Congo qualifies for another tournament. That’s the real inheritance of this World Cup’s size — not just the shocks it produced, but the careers it reshaped along the way.
Expansion was supposed to be a compromise. Instead, it turned into an argument for itself, told not in press releases but in stoppage-time goals and forced extra time, in unknown names becoming household ones. The real shift wasn’t that small nations occasionally beat big ones; that’s always been possible. It’s that this format gave them enough matches, enough minutes, enough room to turn a single good night into a run of results worth remembering. Nobody will look back on this World Cup and think of it as diluted.
If anything, it exposed how much talent international football had been quietly leaving on the table every four years, simply for lack of space. Forty-eight teams didn’t lower the ceiling. It raised the floor, and everyone from Cape Verde’s back line to a German striker who was playing in the third division six years ago got to prove exactly how high that floor now goes.
Published – July 14, 2026 12:20 am IST
