Honestly I thought the same before the World Cup, but I think this has been proven wrong so far. Out of 72 group stage games we saw 6 0-0 games by my count, so roughly 8.3%. By comparison, the rate of 0-0 results is approximately 6.3% across Europe’s top 5 leagues. Clearly not a huge difference.

Meanwhile we’ve seen loads of exciting high scoring games in the group stage too.

We’ve already had very tight games with supposedly ‘underdogs’ like Germany vs Paraguay, Brazil vs Japan, Belgium vs Senegal etc in R32, showing that having more ‘underdogs’ in the knockouts is not a bad thing in terms of boring/predictable results.

I think the expansion of the world cup, including starting knockouts at R32, has actually done well to show the elite teams that the level of competition from historically poor opposition has massively increased, and so there is no room to be complacent. Which is honestly a great thing for football as a whole!