Two teams with 1/4 of the world's potential customers did not make the cut for this year's tournament, more's the pity. The tournament will likely be expanded until these two teams can qualify.
Wouldn't it be easier for countries of 1+ billion people to find 11 players who can play at the level of other countries? The Asian Football Confederation is hardly the most competitive in the first place.
I don’t know about China, but India has a lot of fans and had pretty good viewership.
Whether a national team qualifies isn’t that strongly correlated to whether the sport is popular. Most of south and Central America are as fanatical as Brazil or Argentina, but they were not in the tournament.
Xi Jinping is a massive football fan and tried incentivizing China's own league early on in his first term. He was quite successful in that too - just that Chinese people preferred watching the European leagues rather than their homegrown ones.
Russia is not only on the precipice of giving up territory in Ukraine, it's likely to give up so much more because its ability to function as a country is being systematically destroyed.
The only barrier between Russians and anarchy is the last nine meals they’ve had. How's the summer harvest coming along?
Elon turning off Russian access to Starlink by whitelisting only authorized terminals in the region was a turning point for Ukraine's success. The conflict has proven that modern warfare depends on Starlink and its mimics.
'A new piece of electronic warfare equipment appears more precisely targeted, apparently capable of jamming Starlink terminals on the ground across an area of up to 20 square kilometers.'
The specifics of an implementation of this are objectively absurd. Power requirements alone make this a non-starter. If that weren’t enough, it would be a declaration of war.
Not to mention they are spending an awful lot of money on developing anti-satellite missiles for having a working directed-energy weapon that can do the same.
I'm sure they are experimenting with directed-energy ASAT technology though, because why wouldn't they?
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