Three days to go.
As we’re now into World Cup week, we’re bringing you even more SVQ than before. Today is the first of five daily newsletters from Opta Analyst this week. If you don’t feel 100% prepared for the tournament when it begins on Thursday, we’ll eat our hats, or at the very least, a large box of shame chocolates.
In today’s SVQ, we’ll be looking at a triple finalist, the difficulty of each 2026 World Cup group, and tasking you with finding the missing players from the 2010 final. We also have an Ask Opta question about the different rankings of all the teams at this summer’s tournament.
Let’s get cracking with your first daily dose of World Cup data.
👑 STAT - Three is the Magic Number… of Finals
For today’s stat, we’re borrowing from our colleagues at OptaJoe. If you’re not following them on X already, you’ll definitely want to do so during the World Cup.
With three days to go until the World Cup, their daily post today pointed out that there is only one man in the tournament’s history who has played in three consecutive finals.
It might not be a surprise to anyone that the player in question is Brazilian. The record five-time winners played in three finals in a row in 1994 (vs Italy), 1998 (vs France) and 2002 (vs Germany).