“I beg FIFA to change the position of the photographers during the national anthem,” said Tuchel, who felt deprived of a memorable moment at his World Cup debut: “Today was a very, very special moment. But I stood half a meter in front of a wall of 50 photographers and couldn’t see a single one of my players. That spoiled the experience a little for me.”
He took over the English national team at the beginning of 2025. He now understood “what it means to be part of a World Cup. It’s just incredible. I felt very, very alive in the last two days and didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world but here.”
Müller does not see the DFB team at world champion level
Former world champion Thomas Müller sees the German national team in a “2010 mode” at this World Cup. The DFB team is “a very, very good challenger”, but one cannot expect “that the team will march from A to Z towards the title,” said Müller on Wednesday (local time) at an event in New York about parallels to previous tournaments.
At the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, the German selection with many young players stormed into the semi-finals with enthusiastic football and only failed there at the hands of Spain. This year too, Germany has a young team. “We should give ourselves the chance to grow into this knockout phase and simply evaluate the performance,” said Müller, emphasizing: “We are still developing.” When he won the World Cup in 2014, his generation was at the “peak of development”.
Müller calls for realistic demands from the public. Since the triumph in Rio, “it’s always been about: When are we going to be world champions again? And I would like to change the approach a little,” said the former national player: “We should talk less about the final and more about the fact that there needs to be a way forward, and we’ll tackle it together.”
Ghana beats Panama in the last minute
In the second game of Group L, Ghana secured a win over Panama with a stoppage-time goal. In the rain in the Canadian city of Toronto, the “Black Stars” won 1-0. Caleb Yirenkyi delivered the decisive goal in the 96th minute.
FIFA deletes hundreds of thousands of hate comments
The world football association Fifa wants to protect all participants in the World Cup in North America from hate on the Internet and says it has already deleted hundreds of thousands of comments and posts. Fifa said 3.8 million requests to speak had been reviewed and 388,000 removed since the start of the tournament.