The Goal That Wasn't

This Guardian article from Taha Hashim, captures the mood for most of us today...the first pause in the World Cup schedule after 27 consecutive days of matches. It's a strange feeling not having any football games to cheer. But perhaps we needed this break to process Argentina's/Argenfifa's? dramatic comeback against Egypt?

Enter the Void
As Taha writes: "What do we do now? Stare numbly at a blank wall for the next 24 hours?...Endlessly re-watch Sidny Lopes Cabral’s curler against Argentina and his Pat Cash-style climb into the stands to celebrate?...We’re 96 matches down, just seven to go – eight if you are, for some reason, heavily invested in who finishes third. But maybe we do need a moment to chill, to decompress, after Argentina’s desperate comeback win over Egypt, an emotional cracker that even left Lionel Messi in tears at full-time. There’s so much to discuss: another spurned penalty by Messi before his redemption act; the wall that was Mostafa Shobeir; the anger felt by the Egyptians after Enzo Fernández’s winner. Space must, however, be given to the greatest goal that never was."

Yes, Egypt's first goal in the 15th minute was superb--Yasser Ibrahim beat Argentina goalkeeper Emiliano Martínez with a header into the top right corner to give the Pharaohs a 1-0 early lead. And then in the 58th minute, Haissem Hassan weaved "his way through half the pitch, a move straight out of the Messi playbook. He found Mohamed Salah, whose cute through ball met the perfectly-timed run of Mostafa Ziko, a first-time finish giving his side a two-goal lead against the holders. It would have been wrong if he hadn’t taken his shirt off to celebrate.

"...Cue the machinations of VAR, with Lisandro Martínez’s shirt pulled and foot stood on at the other end before Hassan’s otherworldly run, prompting the goal to be disallowed." 

But justice was served in the 67th minute when again Hassan connected with Ziko for their third second fantastic goal. Somehow, Messi and La Albiceleste clawed their way back and then in stoppage time Argentina scored an almost split reversal of Egypt's disallowed goal; this time Salah seemed to get fouled in the Argentine penalty, but play was allowed to go on and the counterattack that ended with Enzo Fernandes heading in the winner. Was it recalled? Was it even checked on VAR checked? Umm, no! At least go through the motions FIFA, don't be so blatant! This match was the best of football, and also the worst. Mabrouk ya Misr. Ja'alatmuna fakhurayn!

Profit is Opinion, Cash is Fact

The above saying emphasizes the distinction between reported profits, which can be kneaded/ engineered/ fudged, while actual cash flow, is more tangible and harder to manipulate. It reflects a company's real financial health. Three charts from Apollo Global Management related to the Magnificent 7 illustrate the point (click to enlarge).

Mag 7 Profit Margins

The Hyperscalers' Free Cash Flow

Mag 7 Recent Performance

Happy Birthday: America Turns 250!

In celebration of America's birthday, the U.S. Census Bureau releases some fun facts every year. E.g., in 1776, there were 2.5 million people in the 13 colonies (map below), including ~500,000 enslaved Africans (or 20% of the population). In 2026, we have 300+ million Americans (no enslaved) across 50 states. Virginia was the most populous colony (~500,000) in 1776, today California (32.3M) is the biggest state. Philadelphia (30K), New York (25K), Boston (16K), and Charleston (15K) were the biggest cities then, New York (8.3M), L.A. (3.8M), Chicago (2.7M), and Houston (2.3M) are the biggest cities today.

The 13 Colonies in 1776*

*Area that would become Maine (in 1820) was under Massachusetts.

These United States of Americas have certainly come a long way but its essential idea as a land of opportunity for all has, and continues to, attract a remarkable number of people from all over the world. And who better to explain the allure of America than an immigrant themself: Zohran Mamdani, mayor of a city of immigrants in a country of immigrants, delivered a speech marking America's 250th at City Hall sitting behind the desk once used by George Washington...Happy Birthday America!

World Cup: The Sweet 16

Here we are, down to the Round of 16 in the biggest World Cup ever. It's far from over, but already the 2026 vintage has been a resounding success. The tournament is boasting record-breaking attendance and soaring TV ratings. It's no surprise when have so many goals, late-game heroics, upsets, and big performances from football's biggest stars, including Messi and Mbappe.

Source: world-cup-26.com 

More goals have been scored in this World Cup than any other. Sure, more games have been played in this tournament (88) than any other as well. However, the previous high was in Qatar in 2022 when there were 172 goals over 64 games. The current tournament exceeded that in the 59th game hitting 177 goals. The 2.92 goals per match is the best since Mexico 1970, long considered one of the best World Cups (though Qatar 2022 produced the best final). And the stars are playing their part. Messi has come life, scoring at a blistering pace-- seven goals in four matches! Not to be undone Mbappe has now scored 18 goals in 18 World Cup matches (2018, 2022, and 2026)! This World Cup has also shown the growing footballing prowess of African countries. Ten African nations qualified for the tournament (Algeria, Cape Verde--oh Cape Verde, DR Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Morrocco, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia); nine made it to the knock-out stages! Cape Verde, DR Congo, and Senegal may have just fallen short against the traditional footballing powers, but Morrocco and Egypt carry on.

Here's to more drama, thrilling endings, and goals, goals, goals!

World Cup 2026: Ki Djogu, Kabu Verdi!

Before the 2026 World Cup, many (most?) people had not heard of Cape Verde, let alone find it on a map. But this tiny island nation off the West African coast with a population of just 530,000 quickly became the story of the World Cup, after drawing with past winners Spain and Uruguay in its first two games and making it into the knockout stage of the tournament in its very first appearance! 

Still, no one expected much of the 67th ranked FIFA team against reigning the world champions and the #1 ranked FIFA team. One headline before the match in Yahoo sports was "Salah Awaits Messi as Egypt Beat Australia on Penalties..." Well in the end, an exhausted and drained Argentina narrowly--very narrowly--avoided one of the all-time great upsets by edging out Cape Verde 3-2 in extra time in one of the best matches in World Cup history. An instant classic.

Messi got his seventh goal of the tournament with a deft touch to open the scoring in the 29th minute, and it looked like Argentina would score more. But Cape Verde, who started slow, came back from behind twice to level the game. Sidny Lopes Cabral's second equalizer, a wicked curling shot from the top left corner of the penalty box, was arguably the goal of the tournament:

Cape Verde's 40-year-old goalkeeper and Instagram sensation Josimar Jose Evora Dias, or simply "Vozinha", had another exceptional game with 10 saves against Argentina, including 5 against Messi. By the end of the 30 minutes of extra time, Cape Verde was increasingly looking like they were going to equalize a third time. Argentina's Emiliano Martinez needed to be a make a spectacular save to keep Sidny Lopes from scoring again in the 116th minute. By the end, Argentinian players were visibly wilting in the heat and humidity of Miami and just (just) managed to hold on. Highlights of Argentina's great escape here:

Super fans in Dhaka will be relieved. They were not expecting this.

This Day in Physics

On Jun 30, 121 years ago, Albert Einstein's groundbreaking paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (original German version: "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper) was received by the journal Annalen der Physik. In it, Einstein laid the foundation for the theory of special relativity, introducing key principles that transformed our understanding of space, time, and electromagnetism.

The following video provides the key insights of the paper:

Along with his other 1905 papers (photoelectric effect--for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, Brownian motion, and mass-energy equivalence), it became part of the 'annual mirabilis' works that transformed 20th-century science.

Who Will Win the World Cup...The Usual Suspects?

The 2026 FIFA World Cup began in North America Earlier this week. The World Cup is the showcase event of the world's most popular sport and easily the biggest sporting event on the planet--FIFA estimates five billion people tuned in at some point to watch the 2022 tournament in Qatar. This edition of the World Cup is expected to eclipse the last one. FIFA projects that the current tournament, hosted across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico with a record 48 teams, could engage up to six billion people globally.

Football/ soccer is played in over 210 countries; basically in every country and territory across the planet. There have been 22 past World Cups since 1930, with 80 different countries participating. Yet, time and time again, the same few countries manage to win the tournament. As shown below, only eight countries have World Cup: Brazil (5), Italy (4), Germany (4), Argentina (3), France (2), Uruguay (2), Spain (1), and England (1). That's it...no one else. Fairly even between Europe (12) and South America (10), but always seemingly the same few countries. A number of factors can help explain this phenomenon, including that European and South American nations benefit from higher league competition density, have deeper player pools, and longer institutional experience in elite tournaments. Is this unusual? Not really...As we noted previously, within Europe's major football leagues a just a few  teams similarly dominate.  

So, who will win this tournament? The prediction markets, Polymarket and Kalshi, provides possibly the best insights into what most people are thinking. Both have former winners Spain (16% Polymarket, 17% Kalshi) and France (17% Polymarket, 16% Kalshi) as the top two favorites (as of June 13). Surprisingly, both also have Portugal (10.8%, 10.5%, respectively) as the third choice; somewhat of an egalitarian choice. Buy hey, the wisdom of crowd concept does argue that the collective intelligence of a large, diverse group of people can often make better decisions or predictions than any single individual or a small group of experts. 

Speaking of whom, what do the geeks say? By that, we mean Wall Street forecasters of course! And who better than Goldman Sachs's pedigreed economics team. Goldman, and its German chief economist Jan Hatzius, apply the same approach they might use to make market calls. Goldman's prediction engine is based on nearly 20,000 international matches since 1978, using the Elo rating system to measure team strength (based on match results and opponent quality). The model incorporates: historical performance, scoring talent, team momentum, geographical factors, and the "winner's slump" to adjust for the challenges of repeating. The bank ran 50,000 Monte Carlo simulations to estimate win probabilities. Spain emerges as the favorite in Goldman's model with a 26% probability of winning the World Cup, followed by France (at 19%), Argentina (at 14%), Brazil (at 8%), and England (at 5%). All previous winners (see above). 

Likewise, a team of European academics also built a World Cup prediction engine utilizing machine learning. Their model blends four strength signals: team abilities from historic results (a bivariate Poisson model with exponential time-weighting), a bookmaker-consensus rating from 24 bookmakers, plus-minus player ratings, and transfer market values to produce probabilistic forecasts based on 100,000 simulations. This model also has Spain as the favorite to win the World Cup at 14.5%, closely followed by England and France at 12.4% each and Germany at 11.2%.

These models (or any model for that matter) almost by definition use comparatively limited information that is a small portion of all the information that’s arguably in the possession of the millions of people that have bet online into prediction markets. But they also have less bias and recency bias, so who knows. 

Then there’s AI. Anthropic’s newest model Claude Fable 5 also predicts Spain (18%) will beat France (14%) in the final, followed by Argentina (11%), England (10%!), Brazil (8%), and…Portugal (7%). 

So, whether it's prediction markets, econometric models, or AI it's still the usual suspects that mostly come up as projected winners... 

After nearly three days and seven matches, some observations:

Team USA had the most dominant first match (against Paraguay)

American Gio Reyna had arguably the best goal so far

Qatar had the most surprising result holding Switzerland to a draw with a dramatic late equalizer

Brazil vs Morocco was the most exciting game