The World Cup - Daniela Fernandez

The involvement of Costa Rica in World Cups

The World Cup is a competition of the best countries around the world. Soccer is the most popular sport on Earth. FIFA foundation (Fédération Internationale de Football Association in French) was created in 1904 and the first world competition was in 1930 in Uruguay. We have been celebrating this event every four years since 1930, except in 1942 and 1946 because of the World War. The entire process consists of two steps: 1.The qualifying process; here, there are more than 200 teams; they compete to have a space in the 32 qualified teams. 2. The best 32 teams have a hard competition, for around one month, to know which team will be the World Champion.

The first time Costa Rica participated in a FIFA World Cup was Italy 1990; we were in the “C” group with Brazil, Scotland and Sweden. We classified to the next phase, but unfortunately we lost the soccer match against Czechoslovakia. The World Cup Champion in that year was Germany who played versus Argentina. What Costa Rica´s team did in that time caused a lot of happiness to Costa Rican people.

In 2010, Costa Rica did not classify on South Africa FIFA World Cup. CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football) is one of the six institutions belonging to FIFA. For COCACAF FIFA gave 3 spaces for all the 41 countries included in that confederation to compete in the first process before mentioned,  and the total of the contestant who went to this process were 116. I remember the soccer match Costa Rica versus United States (the elimination match to classify and participate in the 2010 World Cup). It was a really bad moment when USA scored in the last minute and Costa Rica was disqualified!

Despite that the Costa Rican team had suffered since that moment, in the elimination of 2014 Brazil World Cup, they demonstrated in the soccer match versus USA (they were playing and it was snowing) that the team would give us a lot of surprises. As always, there were many Costa Ricans citizens that distrusted the team. I was not part of that at all, in every single match I was “supporting” them and now we are living a great moment. Many people had to swallow all the bad commentaries. The biggest emotion was last Sunday when Costa Rica overcame Greece and we were included in the best 8 soccer teams in the world.

The next soccer match is against Netherlands, the runner-up of South Africa 2010. We need to remember this: Costa Rica is the last soccer team of CONCACAF in the World Cup. Now, every human is waiting for this soccer match, and I am sure that everyone wants to see Costa Rica in the final.

The improvement of Costa Rica is evident. People like Maradona, Mourinho and Ronaldo said that Costa Rica does not have the chance to beat Uruguay, Italy and England; even though Costa Rica classified being the leader of group D. Costa Rica, in every soccer match, exposed their endurance and that is why I do want to say to them: Good Luck!