[Soup] Washable with World Cup?

Hello dear readers.

The journey of the Korean national soccer team, which captivated us over the past two weeks, has come to an end.

The Korean national soccer team, who reached the round of 16 for the third time in Korean soccer history at the Qatar World Cup, had a really hard time!

Of course, even if they didn't advance to the round of 16, they deserve applause just because they represented Korea, but I think I can give them more powerful applause and cheering because they fought so well in the match against top international soccer players.

Now the opportunity to watch the Korean national team game with chicken and beer at dawn is gone!

Mabu News is trying to continue the momentum of the World Cup.

Today's topic for Mabu News is football.

It would be meaningful to analyze the game data of the Korean national soccer team one by one, but I do not have much knowledge about soccer, so I would like to talk about a wider topic, the World Cup.

This is the question Mabu News throws at the readers today.

In search of traces of the Korean national team

Readers, are you interested in soccer?

To be honest, there weren't many people interested in soccer among the Mabu News staff.

Nevertheless, the reason why I had no choice but to pay attention to this World Cup was that there were many stories that the national team's skills were different from the previous ones.

People around me praised the performance of the Korean national team, saying that it felt like watching European football, so even the Mabu News producers, who were not interested, had no choice but to watch it.

In fact, I couldn't help but be moved by the way our national players did their best to solve difficult matches.

Then, can't we check how hard our players played with data?

Mabu News searched for related data.

The data to be used is data uploaded to a soccer statistics site called FBref.

This site has data that allows you to track statistics of soccer teams and players around the world.

If you are a baseball fan, you must have heard of a site called Baseball Reference at least once, but it is a site created with soccer data from SPORTS Reference, which created the site.

Of course, you can also check the data for this World Cup.

You can see all 32 countries that participated in the World Cup, but as Korea advanced to the round of 16, we analyzed the countries that advanced to the round of 16.

If you look at the graph below, you will be able to see where Korea, marked in red, ranks among the 16 countries.

Looking at the shooting category, which shows the attack power, Korea ranked 6th in the average number of shots in 90 minutes and 6th in effective shots.

Korea's average number of shots on target in 90 minutes was 4.5.

There are only five countries in front of Korea: Brazil, France, Argentina, England, and Portugal.

As you can see from the names of the five countries, aren't they really great at soccer?

It can be seen that Korean players showed great performance, especially offensive power.

Even if you look at the pass data, you can see the excellent performance of Korean players.

First of all, Cross is ranked 2nd overall among 16 countries.

South Korea's crosses averaged 23 times in 90 minutes, and it ranked second with a narrow gap from the first place USA (23.3 times).

Passes into the penalty box also ranked fifth behind Brazil, Spain, Argentina and France.

In addition, the victory in the aerial competition ranked first among 16 countries!

It was tied for first place with Australia with an average of 18 times in 90 minutes.

Comparatively, defensive data was not ranked high, but blocking ranked second behind Spain.

How about a comparison between Brazil and Korea, which are strong contenders?

The green color indicates Brazil's ranking, and Brazil ranked first among 16 countries in three categories: number of shots, number of shots on target, and passes into the penalty box (PPA).

Overwhelming attack power?

Looking at the pass data, it can be seen that Brazil mainly focuses on short and medium-distance passes, whereas Korea mainly focuses on long-distance passes.

Also, the statistics related to aerial balls are at the bottom of the list to the extent that it makes me think that Brazil does not even compete in aerial competitions.

Sports + Washing = Sports Washing

Readers, have you ever heard of the word sports washing?

If you are a reader who has read Mabu News avidly, or if you are a reader who is interested in the environment, you may have heard the word greenwashing...

In the past, I talked about greenwashing in the letter <Greenwashing, how fooled were we?>.

Greenwashing is a compound word of green + whitewashing, and refers to the act of seeing economic benefits with an eco-friendly image.

Another expression is camouflage environmentalism.

Sports washing is also a coined word in the same form.

It refers to the act of laundering bad reputation and profiting from sports.

The reason I talked about sports washing is because the Qatar World Cup is a World Cup that is noisy in many ways.

First, there was the issue of homosexuality.

Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar, and during this World Cup, no one would be discriminated against.

In protest, the captains of seven national teams, including Denmark, England, France, and Germany, tried to wear rainbow logo armbands against discrimination.

Of course, I couldn't put it into practice because of FIFA's warning.

Not only this.

The treatment of the foreign workers involved in building the Qatar World Cup stadium was also controversial.

There is even an investigation by the Guardian that says more than 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar from December 2010, when Qatar hosted the World Cup, to 2020.

Of course, the Qatari government announced that there were only three deaths among workers directly involved in the process of building the World Cup stadium.

In Qatar, there is a patronage system of Arab culture called modern slavery, and because of this, labor rights are considerably underdeveloped.

FIFA says that the human rights of foreign workers in Qatar have improved a lot over the past 10 years of preparation, but the reality is that it is difficult for the situation to suddenly improve.

That is why labor groups continue to voice their criticism towards the World Cup in Qatar.

There was a constant voice saying that we could not play in a stadium built with the blood of workers.

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