The future history of football: predicting the next sixty years

Like many people who went to elementary school in the 1980s, I grew up listening to wonderful stories of what the world would be like in 2000. Based on the fictions disseminated by my various teachers, we face one of the two future results: Soviet Union (remember them?) Would trigger a thermonuclear war, or we would all be spinning in jetpacks and flying cars, wearing strangely combined monkeys and eating only large pills and colored liquid. Of course, none of those things happened, and although my car is very attached to the mainland, the intervening years have brought a series of changes to society, which nobody would have predicted in 1984.

The point, I suppose, is that the forecasting business is, at best, a trap and, at worst, an opportunity for people to write things that subsequent events will make fun of. Football is not immune to stupid predictions, as anyone who has followed Pele's occasional comments in the press knows it very well. So, wanting to look to the future of football, but without wanting to expose myself to the ridicule of being shown that I am wrong, I will look towards the year 2062 and tell you what the world of football will be like in 54 years. By then I will be 85 years old, which means that I will be dead, senile or so happy that I finally got my flying car that I won't mind that I wrote something 54 years ago that makes me look silly. If I'm lucky, I would have seen my nineteenth World Cup. So what will Brian Fobi have seen in 2062?

1. England will not yet have won another World Cup. At the close of the 2062 World Cup, England fans will look forward to the 2066 Cup, knowing that fate will certainly be on their side as they contemplate the centenary of their last victory. England is the consummate quarter-final, and you can look back at Ronaldinho's hundred years of goals, Beckham's red cards, Rooney's red cards and Brookyln Beckham's red cards, and believe they are cursed, but the truth They are not that good. .

2. China will remain the next big thing. Based on everything you read in the news, in 40 years the Chinese will own, operate, manufacture, manage and dominate everything. FIFA expects great things from China, and certainly between then and now China will host at least one World Cup, but probably two. Chinese women will continue to do well, but unless many things change, I do not see that China brings together the type of national league and youth system necessary to produce 11 world class players. Also, be careful with Bubble Soccer. China could continue to grow at 10% over the next 50 years, or we can discover that a managed state and economy cannot bear the burden of its first major economic downturn. That discussion is best served elsewhere on another day, but it is enough to say that I am still not convinced of the perpetually bright future of China, and this goes doubly for football.