{"id":20555,"date":"2026-07-19T17:52:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T21:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/?p=20555"},"modified":"2026-07-21T15:13:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T19:13:19","slug":"the-world-cup-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/the-world-cup-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"The World Cup 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>World Cup Reflections:<\/p>\n<p>From the very start of this <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/FIFA_World_Cup\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">World Cup<\/a><\/strong>, it didn\u2019t take long &#8211; maybe about a week &#8211; for me to lock in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Spain_national_football_team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Spain<\/a> as my pick for the eventual champions. The matches were exciting, unpredictable, and full of speculation about who would rise to the top. Through all of that noise, I stayed focused. I never doubted that <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Spain_national_football_team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Spain<\/a> would push through and become the runners up heading into the finals.<\/p>\n<p>What really surprised me was <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Argentina\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Argentina\u2019s<\/a> journey. Watching them trail through so many matches, barely holding on, made their progress feel strange. There were moments where it seemed like they were checking every box just to stay in the tournament. Honestly, based on how they were performing early on, they shouldn\u2019t have made it as far as they did.<\/p>\n<p>At one point, I even came across talk about the FBI looking into <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Argentina\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Argentina\u2019s<\/a> dealings with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fifa.com\/en\/tournaments\/mens\/worldcup\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FIFA<\/a>. Whether true or not, it added a weird layer of tension to the whole experience. Things got even more chaotic when fans started turning nasty toward the streamer ishowspeed, especially during the final stretch of games. The match against <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Egypt_national_football_team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Egypt<\/a> was already intense, but the drama surrounding <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Argentina_national_football_team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Argentina<\/a> kept building until they were being called out left and right.<\/p>\n<p>I didn\u2019t fully understand what was happening until later in the tournament. Once everything started unfolding, the <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/FIFA_World_Cup\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">World Cup<\/a><\/strong> became more than just football it turned into a mix of competition, controversy, and pure chaos.<\/p>\n<p>By that point, I decided to tune out the drama and stay locked in on what mattered to me.<br \/>\nChampioning <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Spain_national_football_team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Spain<\/a> all the way to their final victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20554,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","iawp_total_views":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[667,669,668],"class_list":["post-20555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-journal","tag-667","tag-spain","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20555"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20559,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20555\/revisions\/20559"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashtonesia.com\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}