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<\/p>\nIn 2000, World Soccer magazine commemorated the new century by interviewing FIFA president Sepp Blatter. One of the questions forced him to reach for his crystal ball: \u201cWhat will the next 100 years bring?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI cannot look that far ahead,\u201d Blatter replied. \u201cI will go as far as 25 years, however.\u201d<\/p>\n
So what did Blatter predict?<\/p>\n
\u201cI will forecast no radical changes in that time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Oh well.<\/p>\n
Maybe Blatter was wise not to bother speculating about the future. After all, even repeating the consensus of the time is far from a surefire way of looking clever in 25 years, because various elements of the sport where there was a broad agreement about the direction of travel have proved misguided. Some of the things that felt sure about the 21st century have not materialised \u2014 at least, not yet\u2026<\/p>\n
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\n Then FIFA president Sepp Blatter, pictured in November 2000 (Toru Yamanaka\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
The European and South American duopoly will come to an end<\/p>\n
In the same interview where Blatter didn\u2019t quite make a prediction about the next 25 years, he said his proudest achievement during his time with FIFA was moving football away from being dominated by Europe and South America. The World Cup\u2019s expansion from 24 to 32 teams for the 1998 tournament in France admitted more teams from other continents.<\/p>\n
But the idea that the game\u2019s superpowers are being challenged by outsiders is something of a myth. The nine current favourites to win next year\u2019s World Cup (England, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Portugal from Europe, Argentina and Brazil from South America) were also the same nine favourites going into the 2006 edition.<\/p>\n
Belgium and Uruguay, smaller countries from the same two continents, are the next most likely sides to triumph, according to the bookmakers. The biggest party poopers recently have been Croatia, another European nation who finished second and third at the World Cups in 2018 and 2022 respectively. But then, they also came third in that 1998 edition, so this wouldn\u2019t have been a huge surprise at the turn of the century.<\/p>\n
By now, we really expected things to be more different.<\/p>\n
The Olympics\u2019 men\u2019s football tournament is rarely noteworthy, but Nigeria\u2019s triumph in 1996, followed by Cameroon\u2019s four years later, suggested African nations were set to become a serious force. Pele had famously declared a team from that continent would win the World Cup by the start of this century, which was, in fairness, nothing more than repeating the consensus from the time; then England manager Walter Winterbottom said the same in 1962.<\/p>\n
Africa did finally get its first semi-finalists in 2022, when Morocco surprised everyone to reach the final four. But 14 of their 26 players were born outside the country; the majority in Western Europe. That doesn\u2019t take anything away from their success, but it\u2019s hardly evidence that Western Europe\u2019s dominance is fading, and it isn\u2019t a replicable template for most other African nations.<\/p>\n
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\n Morocco, in 2022, are the only African nation to reach the last four of the World Cup (Buda Mendes\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Granted, 2022 was a successful tournament for Africa, partly as they had such large numbers of supporters in Qatar, and the strength in depth across the continent means they will be the biggest beneficiaries of the World Cup\u2019s expansion to 48 teams for 2026. But Nigeria and Cameroon \u2014 and for that matter, Ghana and Ivory Coast \u2014 have not become regular contenders as once hoped.<\/p>\n
The other semi-finalists from outside Europe and South America were South Korea, on home soil in 2002; partly thanks to some charitable refereeing decisions, it must be said. But they haven\u2019t won more than a single game at any of the five tournaments since. Other \u2018outsiders\u2019 who briefly flourished \u2014 Australia, Ghana, Japan, Mexico, Senegal \u2014 had a good generation of players rather than transforming into one of the elite.<\/p>\n
It should be acknowledged that the women\u2019s game is more geographically diverse. Even then, though, the most recent Women\u2019s World Cup in 2023 produced, for the first time, a top three all from Europe.<\/p>\n
London clubs will move out of the city \u2014 and share grounds<\/p>\n
This week\u2019s news that Arsenal might play at Wembley while redeveloping the Emirates felt familiar to those who remember suggestions from around the turn of the century that the new Arsenal ground and the new Wembley might be the same project<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the 1990s, the trend in English football was clubs selling their traditional home and building a modern replacement on the outskirts of town.<\/p>\n In an alternative history of London football, Arsenal have moved north, to Alexandra Palace, and Tottenham are even further into the suburbs in Enfield. Chelsea repeatedly flirted with the Battersea Power Station site, Brentford tried to move to Kingston upon Thames and Wimbledon effectively did go to Milton Keynes. But Wimbledon fans formed a new club who are now back playing at their spiritual home at Plough Lane, and barring Chelsea, the others have \u2014 remarkably, in such a congested city \u2014 all found land to build new grounds within the boundaries of their rightful patch.<\/p>\n A related suggestion was that more English clubs would groundshare. The idea that England, Arsenal, Tottenham and West Ham United would all move to 60,000-plus capacity new grounds in the space of 13 years felt distinctly unlikely. The common line was that we needed to look to the continent: Juventus and Torino in Turin, and Roma and Lazio in Rome, and Inter and Milan, and Bayern and 1860 in Munich all shared at the time, and it worked for them, so why shouldn\u2019t it work for us?<\/p>\n \n Arsenal are one of several London clubs who have built new stadia since 2000 (Ryan Pierse\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n What we didn\u2019t fully appreciate was that, in various ways, it didn\u2019t work for them. And the same hasn\u2019t happened in England. English clubs have retained their identity, their geography and, less glamorously, their financial stability and earning power by owning their own grounds outright (with the exception of West Ham, whose fans are the unhappiest at their team\u2019s new home). Juventus, meanwhile, moved into their new English-style 41,000 capacity stadium in 2011, and don\u2019t share it with Torino.<\/p>\n But let\u2019s not forget that the FA had indicated it was open to Arsenal or Tottenham \u2014 or both \u2014 playing at Wembley permanently. David Dein, who held lofty positions with both Arsenal and the FA, was seemingly keen, but the club\u2019s then manager Arsene Wenger was strongly against it. Furthermore, Spurs\u2019 chairman at the time Daniel Levy refused to rule out a groundshare with Arsenal when both were planning to build new grounds.<\/p>\n Today, while there have been various groundshare agreements over the years, the 92 clubs that comprise the four tiers of the Premier League and EFL play at 92 different grounds.<\/p>\n More players will retire early from international duty<\/p>\n The explosion in wages towards the end of the 20th century meant players were desperate to squeeze another couple of years out of their club career. They could earn in a single season what had previously taken five. One way to make this viable, it seemed, was by retiring from international duty to focus on your club.<\/p>\n This wasn\u2019t an entirely new concept, of course, but Euro 2000 seemed a prescient example. Alan Shearer and Dennis Bergkamp, two of the most prominent Premier League forwards of the time, stood down from international duty after that tournament. Shearer was only 29, Bergkamp was 31, and both played on, for Newcastle and Arsenal respectively, for another six years. The more money in club football, the more players would prioritise it from a relatively early stage, right?<\/p>\n But maybe wages are now so high throughout a player\u2019s career \u2014 and there are more options abroad for one final payday \u2014 that this isn\u2019t as relevant today. OK, players still step back from international duty in their mid-thirties, or when they\u2019re no longer a regular, going out on their own terms, and you do get the odd surprise early retirement, but go back to the Ballon d\u2019Or voting from a decade ago, look through the names. Not only have none retired from international football particularly early, but the ones who did give it up \u2014 Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Toni Kroos \u2014 reversed their decision and came back to it anyway.<\/p>\n Football is increasingly focused on the club game, but players \u2014 particularly those who have spent much of their career abroad \u2014 still have a deep affection for representing their nation.<\/p>\n \n Cristiano Ronaldo is still playing for Portugal at the age of 40 (Attila Kisbenedek\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n Midfield will be about physical rather than technical play<\/p>\n Well, a mixed bag, this one. But the consensus at the turn of the century was that the game would become increasingly physical in the centre of the pitch. The pretty playmakers, particularly those deep in midfield, would be overpowered by athletic destroyers and box-to-box runners. Arsenal\u2019s Patrick Vieira, an excellent technician but also a huge physical presence, was considered the prototype for future midfielders.<\/p>\n \u201cI haven\u2019t changed,\u201d said Pep Guardiola, then near the end of his playing career as a midfielder for Barcelona, Spain and others, in a 2004 interview with The Times. \u201cMy skills haven\u2019t declined. It\u2019s just that football now is different. It\u2019s played at a higher pace, and it\u2019s a lot more physical. The tactics are different, too. To play just in front of the back four now, you have to be a ball-winner, a tackler, like Vieira or Edgar Davids.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you can pass too, well, that\u2019s a bonus. But the emphasis, as far as central midfielders are concerned, is all on defensive work.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Pep Guardiola alongside Marcel Desailly in 2004 (Karim Jaafar\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n Top-level football seems to have become more physical in the past few years, and midfield has, to a certain extent, become about power again, partly due to the emphasis on pressing.<\/p>\n So perhaps a 2025 midfield wouldn\u2019t look entirely shocking by the expectations of 2000, but there was a period in between, when both club and international football were dominated by the Spanish trio of Sergio Busquets, Xavi and Andres Iniesta, whose rise was partly due to Guardiola\u2019s management. The fact that Andrea Pirlo, a converted No 10, and the evergreen Luka Modric have exerted such a dominance on European football this century demonstrates that it certainly hasn\u2019t all been about physicality and defensive qualities.<\/p>\n The United States will produce world-class players<\/p>\n Perhaps the most universal \u2018prediction\u2019 towards the end of the 20th century was that the United States men\u2019s team would become a serious footballing force in the 21st century.<\/p>\n Their successful hosting of World Cup 1994, combined with their professional league and their track-record of dominance in other sports, seemed a surefire recipe for serious progress.<\/p>\n If you\u2019d told an average football supporter in 2000 that the U.S. would be the main host nation of World Cup 2026, most would have guessed they\u2019d be a serious contender to win it. If you\u2019d said they\u2019d miss out on World Cup 2018 due to finishing behind Panama in qualification, you\u2019d have been laughed out of town. The precise mechanics now accepted as holding back player development in the States \u2014 the pay-to-play model at youth level, the limitations of MLS \u2014 were not really considered.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/GettyImages-2199943355-scaled.jpg\")
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