The knockout rounds of the World Cup are featuring just one team from Africa and one team from the CONCACAF region, which is basically North and Latin America.

While this is not totally unexpected, it holds completely different meanings for each region.

With their best teams in the deepest groups, it was not out of the realm of possibility that none of the African teams would go through. But Ghana escaped what became the Group of Death and Tunisia, Angola still had chances on the last day advance. And most observers believe the Ivory Coast would have survived any group that didn’t include Argentina and Holland.

What these strong showings mean for Africa is that their future Nations Cup and subsequent World Cup qualifiers will be filled with 8 to 10 countries that can not only survive, but make a mark on the world stage. The competition for spots in international tournaments will only make the current world Cup attendees and the traditional powers like Cameroon, Senegal, and Nigeria even stronger.

On the flip side is the CONCACAF region where only Mexico survived the group stages. The Mexican and American’s high FIFA rankings always flattered and were never taken seriously, but both teams, the supposed class of the region, disappointed (this was written before the brilliant Argentina match) in this tournament, which does not bode well them or the other teams in the region.

Mexico had brief periods where they looked like they belonged in the World Cup but overall they did not perform like a team making their 5th straight finals. They were fortunate against Iran and were absent against Angola (again this was written before the brilliant match against Argentina). The USA only showed up for one of their matches and for much of the tournament did not look like they knew what they were doing on the field.

Trinidad & Tobago and Costa Rica also represent CONCACAF and were never expected to make much noise and didn’t, although the Trinidadians did have an outside chance of surviving their group.

The problem with this region is that the teams are amongst the most lightweight in the world outside of the Oceanic Zone (which Australia has decided to leave). Three of the four teams from the region that made it this year are likely to make it to South Africa in 2010 but will never gain the world experience needed while their only competition are countries like Aruba, Panama, and Haiti. All of the countries in the region need to find a way to develop more world class talent and play more world class competition on a regular basis.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 11:20 am and is filed under World Cup 2006. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.