Good Morning ☀️,

It’s Lucas here, your Chief Predictions Officer at What Are the Odds?

Today, we’re looking at one throwaway line after Belgium vs Senegal, and a money trail that makes it look a lot less throwaway… but more on that later.

First, let’s take a look at what’s ahead.

What’s ahead in today’s edition of What Are the Odds?:

• How one coach’s off the cuff comment probably missed the mark. 🎯

• Today’s complete match schedule. 🗓️

• Our top pick of the day. ✅

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🇪🇬 Egypt vs. Argentina 🇦🇷

• Stage: Round of 16

• Time: 12:00 ET

• Venue: Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta

🇨🇭 Switzerland vs. Colombia 🇨🇴

• Stage: Round of 16

• Time: 16:00 ET

• Venue: BC Place, Vancouver, British Columbia

Want to get the best odds on these matches?

If this World Cup’s delivered one thing, it’d have to be a fair smattering of casual racism. Particularly that directed towards African players — a lot of which can probably be best summed up as something along the lines of “African teams are physical but not smart,” with Belgium coach Rudi Garcia being the latest to take a dig. Senegal, he said, is one of “those teams” that “tend to lose their tactical structure.”

Now, we’re not about to spend a whole article arguing over whether the comment was, in fact, racist. Plenty of people better qualified than us have already been there/done that.

Instead, what we want to do is take the latest of these comments (Rudi Garcia’s) at face value and ask a simple question: is there really something fundamentally different about “those teams”?

Curiously enough, the answer here lies in a word Garcia used himself — structure. So let’s take it literally and drill down, starting with the apparent problem on the pitch, and keep asking why until we hit the bottom. So let’s start by granting Garcia his premise for a second — that a team can “lose its structure” late in a game.

But what is structure, mechanically?

Our answer — it’s eleven players holding a collective shape under fatigue and pressure without having to think about it. And the thing that lets a team do that isn’t just “composure” or “character” under pressure. More often than not, it’s more to do with cohesion — shared, automatic habits, so that when everyone’s legs are gone and the tunnel vision’s setting in, the basic shape remains cohesive with little more than reflex alone.

So, arguably, “they lost their structure” isn’t really the end of an explanation. Sure, it might be the start of one. But the real question remains — why would one team have that automatic cohesion and the other not?

Here, the best place to look is probably at the “machine” behind each team. So let’s start with Belgium.

A Belgian international player has usually played the same federation-mandated 4-3-3, taught through a single national methodology, since childhood. And that methodology is enforced from the centre, via a certification regime that grades every club academy against one shared model. Anderlecht alone runs 27 UEFA-qualified youth coaches. Players come up together, often beside the exact team-mates they’ll later join for the Red Devils. So, by the time Belgium’s coach gets them, the cohesion is already built — the coach inherits a machine.

Now, the tempting rebuttal here is that Senegal’s players largely got the same “level” of schooling — 23 of the 26 play for UEFA clubs, and around ten were developed in France — so why aren’t they as cohesive? However, that rebuttal assumes cohesion comes from individual coaching quality — that it doesn’t in anyway depend on a group moving through one system together. And that’s the exact thing Senegal’s players never did.

They didn’t for lack of talent or teaching — Senegal’s academies are excellent; Diambars, co-founded by Patrick Vieira, takes about 16 kids from 3,000–5,000 who try out yearly and sends graduates to the national side with their tactical habits already formed.

The problem is that there is no single pyramid they all climbed. Ten were formed in France; others through Génération Foot, others Diambars, others bought young into Chelsea or Monaco. Each is a decent finishing school — but still they’re eleven different schools. The players scatter across a dozen tactical cultures at 16, spend most of the year speaking different footballing dialects, and reconvene for a fortnight in the same shirt.

In other words, Belgium’s coach inherits a near fully-assembled machine; Senegal’s inherits a bag of parts and two weeks to try and bolt them together. That’s the cohesion gap. So why can’t Senegal build the one continuous pyramid that would fix it?

The answer here is likely because the players don’t stay long enough to be raised inside one. By the time they’re old enough to show any promise, they’re gone because the domestic game can’t compete for a teenager against a European club for one simple reason — money.

The Senegalese FA’s entire annual budget — every national team, both genders, all ages, the league, referees, admin — is about 10 billion CFA francs, or roughly €15 million. The Royal Belgian FA, on the other hand, runs on about ~€110M — seven times as much. And that’s before you reach a single club.

Down at club level the gap turns absurd: the FSF’s total 2025-26 subsidies came to ~€1.86m spread across 458 clubs, or about €15,000 per Ligue 1 club for the season. The average Belgian top-flight club’s youth budget alone is €1.7 million. One Belgian club spends more developing teenagers than Senegal’s federation gives every club in the country combined.

Naturally, a system that thin can’t retain a prospect, and it can’t plan continuity either.

And one number captures the precarity here perfectly — reaching the round of 32 earned Senegal a FIFA prize worth close to 90% of the federation’s whole annual budget. When a single tournament result nearly doubles your yearly money, you don’t build twenty-year pyramids — you survive event to event. And so, the talent leaves, the pyramid never appears, and cohesion never forms.

But there’s one more underneath this: it’s not that Senegalese football generates no money. It’s where the money goes.

Senegal is, in a weird sense, poor at football because it’s good at it. Its academies produce players who generate hundreds of millions in transfer fees. However, the country sees none of it.

The template is Génération Foot — the program behind Mané and Ismaïla Sarr, tied to French club FC Metz in a deal where Metz fronted €10m+ to run the academy in return for first pick of the talent. And the value capture is brutal. Génération Foot’s 13 academy-background AFCON players reportedly generated only €100,000 in initial transfer fees for their academies, while European clubs later sold them for a combined €81.2m, and across their careers those players generated €411m in transfer fees. As one local analyst put it as "we win on the pitch, but we lose in the boardrooms."

And that, right there, is a big part of the problem. The value Senegalese football creates is booked in European accounts by design while the domestic clubs stay poor. And so long as they stay poor, they can’t retain a teenager, which is why talent finishes its development scattered across eleven foreign systems. It is is why the national team is assembled rather than raised. It is why holding a cohesive “tactical structure” deep into the 89th minute is genuinely harder for them than for a side that’s drilled the same shapes together since primary school, through teenagerhood, and well into their professional career.

So, in more ways than one, what Garcia called a flaw in "those teams" is the lazy reading of a pipeline that runs money north and sends players home to be assembled in a mere fortnight. He looked at a squad hollowed out from the roots by a system somebody else profits from — a federation run on a budget just one fiftieth of his own; its stars sold at 16 and their value captured abroad by contract — and reached past every link of that chain to decided to put it on the players’ character.

That’s lazy. And it’s not like the real explanation wasn’t just sitting there fully documented in the academy contracts and the €15k-versus-€1.7m youth budgets, none of which requires made up theories about temperament.

So good on ya’ Rudi. Belgium scored late. Congrats. But next time you wanna talk about tactical cohesion, maybe take a moment to read the balance sheet first.

⚽ Argentina vs Egypt
🏟️ 2026 FIFA World Cup
📅 Tuesday 07 July; 18:00 (Europe/Paris)

• Why we’re watching: Argentina looks much stronger here than than the odds currently on offer would seem to indicate. That makes this one great value.

• Top 3 Stats:

  • Argentina is currently #2 in the FIFA World Rankings, and has 4W/0D/0L, 11 goals scored, and 3 conceded so far in the tournament.

  • Egypt is currently #24 in the FIFA World Rankings, and has 2W/2D/0L, 6 goals scored, and 4 conceded so far in the tournament.

  • Argentina won the last head-to-head match in this fixture, although that last time was in 2008.

• CXSports says: The game has one set of numbers that more or less spell out what’s likely to happen — Argentina’s attack, which is scoring close to three goals a game.
  
  Meanwhile, the Egyptian defence, whilst it’s managed to hold its own so far, is arguably only just being held together with little more than a little duct tape and hope. One left-back is virtually ruled out with a thigh injury; the other limped out of the Australia game; and a centre-back is touch-and-go with an ankle problem. And that’s likely going to be problematic against an Argentinian side that’s not only posted close to three goals a game on average largely thanks to Messi, who’s operating at a level that would trouble a defence at full strength — seven goals scored, and is the first man to ever hit that number in two separate World Cups. And let’s not forget the runs of Julián Álvarez and Lautaro Martínez and the devastation they could inflict on a patched-together back line. And now layer on Argentina's eight-game World Cup winning streak against African nations.
  
  Of course, Egypt still has a route to keeping this one close. But it will require leaning on Mohamed Salah, who currently has a big, hamstring-shaped asterisk hanging over his head. But, presuming he’s in full form, then he could be annoying for Argentina — Salah has created 16 chances at this tournament (more than any player entering the last 16) and is now within two of the all-time African record. So Egypt's whole approach here will be to defend deep, absorb, and feed Salah in transition — the same containment strategy that dragged Australia to penalties and produced 1-1 scorelines in three of four matches. The other encouraging sign for Egypt is Cape Verde, who fired 16 shots at Argentina and twice led on the scoreboard before losing in extra time, if only for the fact that it highlighted that Argentina does have some defensive frailties. And Salah with a good hamstring is a far more ruthless than anything Cape Verde could muster.
  
  Of course, the problem is that “keep it tight and hit Salah on the break” requires a functioning defence to keep it tight in the first place. And right now, Egypt may not have one owing to multiple injured defenders.
  
  So ultimately, there’s probably an exceptionally low chance of an upset here, even if there is the potential for goals at both ends (assuming Salah’s fit). However, Argentina simply has too many scorers, too much knockout know-how (10 wins from 12 matches that went beyond 90 minutes), and are unbeaten in 24 on neutral ground.

• Score prediction: 3-1 for Argentina

Bet Option #1

• Bet: Argentina Victory

• Odds Range: 1.24-1.39

Bet Option #2

• Bet: Both Teams to Score (Yes)

• Odds Range: 2.15-2.52

Make your sportsbook work for you!

That’s a wrap for today, and a wrap on the final 16.

Next up we’ve got the quarterfinals kicking off this Thursday with Morocco vs France going down at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts. And you can bet we’ll be back in your inbox with full coverage ahead of this game.

Until then, enjoy the football.