SerpApi.Org
After a brief return to Premier League-dominated fare yesterday, we’re back relitigating the World Cup for the umpteenth time today.
And really quite literally, because no fewer than 29,400 Daily Express readers have spoken and demanded – nay instructed – that Argentina must be kicked out of the World Cup.
Questions are also being asked about whether the government should be cancelling UK-based Argentina players’ visas, if you’re wondering when and if some vague sense of normality might be restored a week on from England’s World Cup exit.
What have they been instructed?
It’s quickly become one of Mediawatch’s favourite tabloid tropes: the Daily Express asking its reliably calm and thoughtful readers to vote in an online poll, and then publishing the inevitably unhinged results of said poll as if it were actual news.
This one’s a cracker.
FIFA instructed to disqualify Argentina from World Cup in overwhelming punishment verdict
This is the best headline of its type they’ve come up with yet. Sure, the primary motive is just your common-or-garden boilerplate clickbait, but we absolutely love the sheer on-brand pomposity of that ‘instructed’.
It does rather neatly sum up the Daily Express reader: a person who simultaneously believes that they run the world while also being furiously certain that it’s in fact being run by a shadowy cabal of mad woke communists.
Anyway, let’s look into what Express readers are actually, specifically instructing FIFA to do here, because it is gloriously insane.
FIFA have been urged to retrospectively disqualify Argentina from the World Cup because of their antics immediately after Sunday’s final.
That’s right. This isn’t even the already-mad thing we thought it was. We thought Express readers wanted Argentina kicked out of the next World Cup as punishment. It would be absolutely wild were that to happen, which it obviously definitely won’t for so many obvious reasons, but we can understand the appeal and even to some very limited extent the argument for that.
But no. Express readers just want to lash out and kick Argentina out of the World Cup that has already happened because that will… well, we don’t really know what that will do. Nor do the Express, or the Express readers who, in a rare and out-of-character mis-step for them, appear here to have voted on something without really understanding what it actually means or what the consequences might be.
However, there are growing calls to disqualify Argentina from the final World Cup standings, which would see England promoted to second place.
Sorry, but are there f*ck and would it f*ck.
The vast majority of Express Sport readers believe this would be a fitting punishment. An overwhelming 98 per cent of over 30,000 respondents to our latest poll said that they wanted to see Argentina retrospectively removed.
Okay we take it back. This is very real indeed. Not sure how FIFA can ignore 98 per cent of 30,000 Daily Express readers.
This would be an unprecedented move with the potential to become the biggest controversy in football history. No team has ever been disqualified from a World Cup that has already taken place.
No, because it is a mental thing to do or frankly even to want, creating a vast all-consuming controversy that would inevitably drag on through the courts for years and all for no real reason and to no real end other than to briefly and marginally lower the blood-pressure of some of the UK’s thinnest-skinned gammon-hued snowflakes, who by next week will have gone back to being enraged by small boats.
But here at last comes the kicker as the Express finally grudgingly concede that 98 per cent of its readers live in a fantasy world of their own creation.
It seems extraordinarily unlikely that FIFA would make that decision, given the sheer scale of the mess it would cause.
It does a bit, yes.
Hasta la visa
The frothing doesn’t stop there from the Express, though, who also carry the following none-more-Express headline question:
Can the UK government revoke visas for Argentina players after World Cup behaviour?
The story itself runs to over 500 words of self-righteous indignation about the undeniably stupid (and clear FIFA-rule breaking) parading of that Las Malvinas son Argentinas banner, and also contains the thoughts of a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher because of course it does.
Allow Mediawatch to save your time, trouble and sanity by bringing forth only the relevant 30 words:
Despite the immense wave of domestic anger, legal professionals indicate it is highly unlikely that the mere presentation of the sign would justify the extreme measure of outright visa cancellation.
Or, to put it more succinctly still and as is almost always the case when searching for an answer to any question asked by a headline:
No.
Mediawatch also awaits with interest the arrival on the scene of the heroic free-speech absolutists who must surely be up in arms at the dystopian idea of people being kicked out of the country where they live and work for the crime of wrongthink.
Shallow pool
We’re aware there’s a degree of hypocrisy from Mediawatch here given our previous scornful reviews of outlandish ‘Dream [Team X] XI after [Number Y] transfers and [Amount Z] spend’ confections.
But if people must do them – acknowledging, as we must, that this includes those very close to Mediawatch – then at least do them with your whole chest.
If you’re going to do an outlandish and ridiculous Dream XI to reflect an outlandish and ridiculous outcome to an outlandish and ridiculous scenario, then you might as well really go for it.
So, Daily Express, if you’re publishing a star-studded Liverpool XI for a highly caveated hypothetical scenario under the following headline…
Liverpool’s star-studded XI if Jeff Bezos buys into club and pumps £387m in for Iraola
…then we demand to see something that grabs us by the bollards far more than Alisson, Livramento, Konsa, Van Dijk, Kerkez, Wharton, Szoboszlai, Wirtz, Barcola, Torres, Isak.
It’s a very good and exciting team, sure. But we’re not convinced it qualifies as a truly out-there Dream Liverpool XI even without Bezos chipping in nearly £400m out of the sheer goodness of his famously benevolent heart.
ONE is the loneliest number
A quick question for the Daily Mail about this headline:
Only ONE England player makes FIFA’s 2026 World Cup team of the tournament as fans choose Man United star in defence – and cult hero gets the nod
How many MORE than ONE were you EXPECTING?
Erstwhile divisive soloist Jude Bellingham was obviously a shoo-in, but after that it’s pretty hard to make a case for anyone else, isn’t it?
Harry Kane doesn’t have much of a shot at displacing anyone in a suitably outrageous and star-studded Mbappe-Haaland-Messi front three.
Djed Spence is in best-drummer-in-the-Beatles territory after somehow, despite everything, not even being the best Tottenham right-back at the World Cup.
Who else even is there to discuss? Elliot Anderson at a massive push, perhaps, but in a team that has – as teams of the tournament are wont to do because everyone loves attacking players best – essentially a one-man midfield he doesn’t even enter a conversation that starts and ends with the word ‘Rodri’.
So… yeah. Only ONE England player makes it to the surprise of literally NOBODY. This is not really ALL CAPS territory, we fear.
