Get free access to the most comprehensive World Cup coverage in The Athletic app.You don’t often see a player walk into a post-match interview with an ear-to-ear smile on their face after a 7-1 defeat.Then again, you don’t often come across someone who has scored their country’s first goal at a World Cup. So you can understand why Livano Comenencia was happy, despite the heavy beating that Curacao had just taken at the hands of Germany.“I actually scored at the World Cup,” Comenencia said, still looking slightly dumfounded about what he had achieved. “I made history for myself.“(I dreamed about this) since I was a little kid, five or six years old, when I started playing football. It’s beautiful that my dream actually came true.”This is a dream on top of a dream. Simply being here is a thing of wonder for Curacao, the smallest nation to qualify for a World Cup. You could have fitted about half of the island’s entire 150,000 population into the stadium in Houston where Comenencia achieved the stuff of fantasy. It sounded like all of them were here after he slotted home, past Manuel Neuer to equalise and briefly make us think Curacao were going to give the four-time world champions a serious game.Things went south after that. The mid-half hydration break came at a bad time, two minutes after the goal and stalled any momentum that Curacao might have built up. Nico Schlotterbeck headed the Germans back in front, then a penalty just before half-time killed it as a contest and by the time Kai Havertz had clipped in the seventh goal, a few minutes from the end, you just wanted it to be over.On the face of it, this was the sort of result that those opposed to the expanded World Cup format have been warning us about. With 48 teams (increased from 32) comes an inevitable dilution of quality, the argument goes. And with that will come more uncompetitive games, more thrashings like this.More of these may well come. Cape Verde will face European champions Spain on Monday. Brazil were perhaps a little disappointing against Morocco but you fear for Haiti when those two face each other on Friday. France vs Iraq could get ugly.It’s not a ridiculous argument. Previous World Cups have featured heavy defeats, but they have been the exception. If there are too many more of these results, it will be hard to argue from a competitive point of view that the expansion is a good thing. It is a perspective backed by the president of UEFA, Aleksander Ceferin, who has said the new setup will produce more games that are “completely uninteresting”.That prompted a coalition of the smaller nations he was presumably talking about to release a statement rejecting his warning. “For Cape Verde, Curacao and Uzbekistan, qualification for the FIFA World Cup represents a historic achievement and the realisation of a dream shared by generations,” said the statement.It went on to say that “for our countries, there is no such thing as an unimportant World Cup match”, and that Ceferin’s comments were “deeply disappointing and fail to recognise the efforts, sacrifices and aspirations of players, coaches, clubs, football leaders and supporters across the world”.Curacao fans back home in Willemstad celebrate their team’s goal against Germany (Pong Pong/AFP via Getty Images)That is also difficult to argue against. Particularly if you witnessed first-hand how the Curacao players and fans reacted to their goal, an explosion of happiness that can only come from people who dreamt about such a moment, but perhaps did not dare think it was actually possible.Dick Advocaat has been around for a while. At 78, he is the oldest man to take charge of a team at the World Cup. He has seen it all. But as the cameras panned across his face before the game, his eyes were red with tears. And when Comenencia scored, he nearly went again.“This is because of the joy of the people in Curacao,” he said afterwards. “It might be my age, but this is when the emotion comes to the surface. The joy, despite the outcome, was fantastic.”And therein lies the real thing. The joy. The incredible rush of feelings that coursed through the bodies of every Curacao fan, player, coach and citizen when that goal went in. It’s not that it doesn’t matter they then went on to lose heavily, but it’s only half the point of the game. The rest is the joy.Comenencia was not the only one of their players to be smiling afterwards: if you watched the Curacao and Germany players walk through the post-match interview area, you would have had a tough time spotting which team had scored seven goals and which had conceded them. And that is because the one mattered more than the seven. They knew they had achieved something arguably bigger than Germany, because they had given everyone connected with their country a moment that they will never forget.So yes, expanding the World Cup to 48 teams probably will dilute the quality of the tournament. It probably will result in more one-sided games. But if that is the price for moments like Curacao’s goal, it is one we should all live with.Jun 14, 2026Connections: Sports EditionSpot the pattern. Connect the termsFind the hidden link between sports terms