Germany Find Another Gear: Undav and the Art of Coming Back

Deniz Undav came off the bench in the second half with Germany trailing Ivory Coast, and did what substitutes almost never do at a World Cup: he changed everything. Not in the way the phrase is usually deployed — the vague, press-conference sense of a player who "made an impact." He scored twice. The second in injury time. Germany through, 2-1, the kind of result that gets filed under "character" when it should probably be filed under "nerve."

There is a version of this German side that nobody quite trusts yet, and Saturday's match against Ivory Coast was the reason. A team ranked among the pre-tournament favourites, built on the deep structural confidence that German football has always carried, found themselves behind to a side from a continent that has spent sixty years being told the World Cup isn't really theirs. Ivory Coast made it uncomfortable. They made it feel possible. And then a substitute from Stuttgart, a man who wasn't even starting, came on and settled it.

This is the strange arithmetic of the 2026 tournament so far. The Netherlands put five past Sweden — Brobbey and Gakpo both scoring twice, Houston witnessing something close to a rout — and yet the cleaner story is Germany's messier afternoon. The 5-1 tells you about Dutch quality. The 2-1 tells you something harder to name: that at this level, the margin between groups and knockouts is sometimes just one man's composure at the worst possible moment.

Newcastle understand this language. Their reported pursuit of a World Cup player currently contracted to a Premier League rival — valued at £20m, described internally as a bigger talent than Miguel Almirón's successor Yankuba Minteh — is exactly the kind of calculation that transfer windows are made of. The World Cup is a shop window that opens once every four years. Players who perform here don't stay priced the same for long. Newcastle's scouting team will have been watching the group stage with one eye on football and one eye on spreadsheets. They always do.

Meanwhile, the smallest nation ever to appear at a World Cup — Curaçao, an island of 150,000 people — has a head of medical staff called Dr Suzanne Huurman who is doing a job that nobody in world football has done before. Getting a squad to a World Cup from a territory that size isn't just logistical. It is an act of sustained belief across years of qualification. The tournament produces these stories alongside the Germanys and the Netherlandses, and the best ones tend to involve the people nobody has heard of.

Three nations have already been eliminated after two group matches — the FIFA rule changes reshaping the urgency of every fixture. The tournament accelerates now. The comfortable performances end.

Germany, fortunately, are already through. Just not comfortably.