Anticlimactic

The World Cup is a great festival for the world. Not perfect, it is one of the few events where people from all over the planet come together to play.
For that, it is also strangely anticlimactic. The group stage brings abundance – 48 teams this year – and every day comes with countless stories about the teams, their countries, players, and fans.
In the knockout phase, the matches are supposed to be better because of the more balanced pairings and the all-or-nothing outcome. Also, the number of teams dwindles exponentially until the final, the most important game of football/soccer, where only two are left.
By then, most of the world already doesn’t care.