The Cursed Goal

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Yesterday, the FIFA-ranked No. 2 team in the world, Belgium, exited the World Cup after a narrow victory over Canada, a loss to group winner Morocco, and a scoreless draw with the 2018 finalists Croatia.

But it was not just that it went out, but the way it went out that is torturous for Belgium fans. Despite having some of the most famous players in club football, such as the Manchester City playmaker Kevin De Bruyne, Belgium has yet to win a major tournament—a running joke among fans who regard the FIFA rankings as meaningless.

Belgium needed a win against Croatia to advance to the knockout stages. And it almost had it. Then it almost had it again. And again. And again. And again. But the ball just wouldn’t go in the goal.

Football analysts use the metric of expected goals (or xG) to determine the quality of chances— that is, how often a goal is scored when shot from a certain position under specific circumstances. The statistic cannot tell you which team should have won—that’s a more metaphysical question—but it helps measure how wasteful or clinical a team is by comparing how many goals they could have scored with how many they actually did. A particularly clinical team or player can score from low-quality shots, while a wasteful one will accumulate tons of xG but not many goals. A team with a low xG that scores few goals is struggling creatively. Belgium amassed 3.1 xG to Croatia’s 0.7 in their contest, which the analysts at Opta concluded was “the highest single-match xG at the tournament for a side that didn’t score.”

Or in other words, the ball just wouldn’t go in.

There’s a lot of sophisticated sports analysis one could make about how and why Belgium failed to score, whether the team is properly coached, and whether Belgium was overrated or too reliant on its most prominent players. At The Athletic, Liam Tharme has a detailed play-by-play of each miss by the Belgian striker Romelu Lukaku. And I don’t mean to take anything away from the diligence of the Croatian defenders—there’s a reason Croatia almost won the entire competition last time.

But I’m not here to give you meticulous, data-heavy, quantitative sports analysis. I am here to offer a far more abstract, superstitious, downright woo-woo explanation: A porta stregata. A cursed goal. (Technically “bewitched,” but that’s not quite the same in English.)

In Italy, in a match like this, when a team accumulates chance after chance but fails to score, they say there’s a “porta stregata.” It’s an apt description of a maddening phenomenon football fans know well, watching your team shoot over and over but fail to place the ball in the net. There is seemingly no plausible explanation for it. Time and time again, the ball just won’t go in.  Belgium certainly wasn’t the first team to face a cursed goal at the World Cup, and it won’t be the last.

In the game’s second half, Belgian coach Roberto Martínez brought on Lukaku, one of Belgium’s top scorers. Lukaku had won the Italian league Serie A’s MVP award for 2020–21 after scoring 24 goals that season, and helping lead his club Inter Milan to the championship for the first time in more than a decade. But he had a lackluster return to the English Premier League club Chelsea the following season, and returned to Inter this fall, scoring two minutes into his first match. He has since spent most of this season injured.

Lukaku was not coming on fully fit. Nevertheless, he’s the kind of guy you would bring on if you needed a goal—the Fox commentators wondered aloud in the first half whether Belgium would have been ahead had he started. I don’t mean to pick on Lukaku here—Belgium scoring one goal in three World Cup matches cannot be laid entirely at his feet. And the chances he missed were created in part by his ability to get himself into dangerous positions.

Lukaku got close. But the ball just wouldn’t go in. There was a weak header that went straight into the Croatian goalkeeper Dominik Livaković’s hands. Around the hour mark, Lukaku’s shot clattered off the post. A second header shot over the top bar a few minutes later. Nearing stoppage time, Lukaku got a pass in the box but was unable to control it, and it bounced wide of the goal. Then just before 90 minutes, Lukaku received another pass close to goal, but Livaković snatched it before Lukaku could get his foot on it. Finally, in stoppage time, Lukaku missed a ball sliding across the mouth of the goal.

“Surely this time!” the Fox News commentator Ian Darke shouted after once chance. “How did that stay out again?” He asked after another.

Only one explanation. Porta stregata. The goal was cursed.