World Cup: One big question for every round-of-16 team - ESPN

After the first four round-of-32 games in World Cup history, I think we were all asking the same question:

What?!?!?!?

Just like we all predicted, the first four teams through to the round of 16 are Brazil… Canada, Paraguay, and Morocco. Germany lost a shootout for the first time in World Cup history. The Netherlands also lost a shootout — and OK, fine, they always do that, but the forebears of Total Football played a game where they only had 32% possession, their lowest for any World Cup game on record. Also: Canada are currently the only team in World Cup history with a perfect, 100% win-rate in knockout-round matches.

With its 20-something shots per game and its two or three goals, soccer is random enough as is, but introducing an extra single-elimination round to the World Cup has added another layer of volatility to the world's greatest sporting event. The chaos is likely to continue, but even if it doesn't: we're still only four games into this thing, and four games isn't close to enough match-time for us to produce any kind of confident conclusions about who is left.

So, we're going to go a little deeper than the collective «what?» that you probably could've heard from outer space right after Morocco forward Ismael ‌Saibari's penalty hit the back of the net. We're going to pinpoint the biggest question for each team that qualifies for the round of 16, and we'll be updating this page as more teams qualify, with the most-recently qualified teams listed at the top.

All numbers come courtesy of the stats app Futi or Stats Perform data, unless otherwise noted. All projections cited come from Michael Caley's PADDLIN' model.

The big question: Will they keep this up?

Let's get this out of the way: Yes, that is an