Socceroos 2026: Our Second-Best World Cup

I've deliberately sat on this one. It's the manner of our exit that did it — last-gasp, on penalties, the cruellest way there is to go out and the surest way to scramble a person's judgement before they've even left their seat. The reaction was instant and molten. Within minutes the hot takes were rising off the moral wastelands of SokkahTwitter like heat haze off a car bonnet, and Tony Popovic was having his managerial obituary written by the very people who, an hour earlier, wanted a stand named after him. I didn't trust anyone's judgement that night — least of all my own.

It helped that I had my own re-entry to manage — a few weeks easing back into ordinary Australian life after chasing the Socceroos across the United States and Canada, with a couple of mezcal-flavoured detours through Mexico that took their own sweet time to wear off. Only once the smoke had cleared, and the hangover with it, did any of this start to look like something I could weigh rather than just feel.

And the more I looked at it, the more one conclusion kept staring back at me. The 2026 World Cup was Australia's second-best ever. Not my second favourite, not the most entertaining, not the one with the biggest names. Our second-best.

How can I prove it? Well, I've tried to take the emotion out of it, which is hard given there aren't too many moments in the day I don't think about football. So I've tried to look at the facts. Australia arrived at this tournament ranked 29th in the world, the lowest-ranked side in our group, and nobody outside Australia expected us to get through. Instead, we finished second in the group — 22nd of the 48 nations, beaten only on penalties, a handful of kicks away from the round of 16.

And when you judge every Australian World Cup by the only measure that actually survives across generations — where we finished as a share of the field — 2026 sits behind only Qatar 2022. Offer me that result before a ball is kicked and I'll snap your hand off.

Yet because we lost on penalties, we've somehow convinced ourselves the tournament was a failure. I don't buy it.

Football supporters have remarkably short memories

No manager is a genius on the Monday and a fraud on the Tuesday. Mostly they're just a bloke who made some calls.

The conversation around Tony Popovic has become absurdly binary. One camp is already building the statue, the other is sharpening the knives, and both are getting carried away. Did Popa get everything right? No. Did he make mistakes? Absolutely. Has any manager in World Cup history got everything right? Also no.

That's worth remembering because penalty shootouts distort everything. Lose one and suddenly every substitution becomes a disaster, every selection looks foolish and every tactical decision gets rewritten with the benefit of hindsight. Before we decide Tony Popovic isn't the man for the job, it's worth remembering how we've judged great coaches before.

Even Hiddink dropped a clanger

We have canonised Guus Hiddink, and fair enough. The back end of 2005 and the summer of 2006 remains the greatest month of my football-supporting life. But let's be honest about it.

First, the raw material he was handed. That 2006 side was, without much argument, the greatest Socceroos team ever assembled — a genuine golden generation. Up front, three players who could hurt anyone in Harry Kewell, Mark Viduka and Tim Cahill; a midfield of Brett Emerton, Marco Bresciano and Vince Grella; a spine at the back built around Craig Moore and Lucas Neill; and behind them Mark Schwarzer, the finest goalkeeper we've ever produced. And these were not squad players making up the numbers at their clubs. Viduka wore the armband for the Socceroos, Neill skippered the national side for the best part of a decade and captained in the Premier League too, Craig Moore captained Rangers, Josip Skoko had led Genk to a Belgian title, and Popovic himself was a mainstay of the Crystal Palace team that climbed into the top flight. Leaders, all of them. That was the hand Hiddink was dealt.

His decision to bring Zeljko Kalac on against Croatia backfired spectacularly, and we were rescued only by Harry Kewell's equaliser — a goal that, hand on heart, wouldn't survive thirty seconds of VAR today. Sit with that for a moment. Imagine the alternate history where Australia goes out in the group stage because of that goalkeeping change. We'd have run Hiddink out of the country on a rail.

And while we're being honest, when Italy were there for the taking — down to ten men — Hiddink blinked. He didn't chase it, Grosso did the rest in the final seconds, and Australia was out. None of that diminishes what Hiddink achieved. It's simply a reminder that sainthood is something we hand out afterwards, once we already know how the story ends.

We've already tried the foreign saviour

Which brings us to the calls to replace Tony Popovic with another imported European coach. They started before the players had even left the pitch. The obvious objection is the record — we'll get to that shortly — but the deeper objection is what those calls reveal about us.

Australia has always had a touch of the cultural cringe. We assume someone with a European accent and a Champions League CV must know more than one of our own. We've tried imported managers before. Some barely lived here. Some openly dismissed the A-League — and the NSL before it. Most had little interest in developing young Australian players.

You could see it in Pim Verbeek's conservative surrender against Germany in 2010 — four goals conceded without a recognised striker on the park. And I saw it first hand as I toured Russia watching Bert van Marwijk's team in 2018: the same exhausted eleven wheeled out game after game, a side set up not to lose rather than to win, eventually limping home with two goals scored, both from the penalty spot. I was there, and "joyless" is probably the kindest word I'd use.

But before anyone accuses me of believing Australian passports automatically make better coaches, let's remember Ange Postecoglou — and full disclosure, I'm a card-carrying Postecoglou fanboy, so weigh what follows accordingly. His 2014 side also finished bottom of the group; on paper it looks no different to van Marwijk's. Anyone who watched them knows they couldn't have been more different. Ange inherited a brutal group of Spain, the Netherlands and Chile and openly admitted the real target was winning the 2015 Asian Cup on home soil. When that young side got going, they played some of the bravest football we've ever produced — the comeback against Chile after going two goals down, Tim Cahill's volley against the Dutch, a generation of players given permission to attack without fear. Which is why I can't help wondering what he'd have made of the group van Marwijk wasted four years later; one can only imagine how much better the football in 2018 would have been under his tutelage.

Same finishing position; completely different legacy. The lesson isn't that Australian coaches are always better. It's that where a manager was born tells you almost nothing — what he believes in tells you almost everything.

Which is exactly why I think Popovic deserves more credit than he's getting. He inherited a genuinely ugly qualifying campaign after Graham Arnold walked away, and steadied the ship. He beat Japan. He rotated instead of running his squad into the ground, trusted young players, and handled Nestory Irankunda patiently instead of throwing him into the spotlight because everyone wanted to see him.

Did he get every call right? No. Volpato came off too early, and there are substitutions I'd love to have back. And let's not forget his most attacking player, Jordan Bos, was ripped in two by a horrible tackle against Egypt — I have no doubt that with him still on the pitch, we'd have won that game. But none of those decisions look like the work of a coach without conviction. They look like the decisions of someone who genuinely believes in Australian football.

And that matters.

Where we've actually finished

I promised you the record. Here it is — every World Cup we've played, ranked by where we finished as a share of the field. It's the one number that can't argue back.

Ranked by finishing position as a share of the field — final placing divided by the number of teams — because the tournament grew from 16 sides in 1974 to 48 in 2026, and 22nd of 48 is a very different achievement to 14th of 16. Final placing is our position among every competing nation, by tournament standings (points, then goal difference).

What no ranking measures

Here's the thing the table can't show you. We beat Turkey in a match that is, no exaggeration, one of the greatest I have ever been to — behind only the 2005 playoff against Uruguay, and from me that is the highest compliment there is. A young, inexperienced side that came within a coin-toss of the round of 16. And more than any of it, a team that captured the heart of a nation.

Because no other Australian team comes close to the adoration, the patriotism and the belief that the Socceroos and the Matildas carry.

And this time you could count it. Something like fifteen thousand of us made the trip across North America, a travelling green-and-gold army turning up in cities that had barely heard the word "Socceroos" and leaving them in no doubt. Back home, SBS pulled record World Cup audiences — the kind of numbers this sport is forever told it isn't allowed to have in this country. And in between, the live sites: thousands bundled up against the depths of an Australian winter, packing out big screens at three and four in the morning, because a kick-off on the other side of the planet was never going to be reason enough to stay in bed.

No other team looks like the real Australia — all of it, every suburb and every surname.