We’ve covered the heartache for some highly-ranked teams who were among the possibly favorites at the 2023 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand — the group of national squads that didn’t make it past the group stages that included Germany and Brazil.
So let’s do something else and flip it to the other side. There were some teams who weren’t that highly rated that qualified for the round of 16 knockout stages by finishing top-two in their groups.
You could see what it meant to those teams when they realized they had made it, the emotions pouring out. It’s incredible to see.
So let’s run through some of the more surprising teams who made it through: