ranked outside the top third by bookmakers have reached the semi-finals: Croatia (1998 and 2022), South Korea (2002), Turkey (2002), Uruguay (2010) and Morocco (2022). Their runs to the semis had an average score of 1.1 versus 0.7 in normal time. New Zealand, ranked last by bookies in 2010, were the only unbeaten team that year, scoring twice across three draws. Put simply, for countries outside the elite, it pays to “park the bus” and pray—a logic that will apply even more strongly with 48 teams. There might be more goals in group-stage drubbings, but also more Davids hacking down Goliath in the knockouts. The possibility of winning the World Cup is so intoxicating that every game could be scoreless and billions would still watch. But football is competing in a global market for eyeballs, in which the governing bodies of other sports are trying to make their “product” more appealing. Sometimes that means making matches snappier, as Major League Baseball has done by introducing a 15-second limit for pitchers. Often it means making them higher-scoring, as both codes of rugby have done by refereeing the “ruck” more favourably to the attack, and the Indian Premier League has in cricket by adding a 12th “impact player”. Meanwhile, Formula One has increased unpredictability by changing several rules for constructors: this season Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen, champions in ten of the past 12 seasons, have yet to win a race. There is a long history of administrators making such tweaks. America’s National Basketball Association introduced a shot clock to force more attacking play in the 1950s, when matches averaged 160 points (it is now 230). But today the rate of experimentation is accelerating, amid fears that broadcast deals have peaked and that younger audiences are watching more highlights and fewer matches. In truth, teams in most sports play conservatively in play-offs, so organisers who do not innovate are risking an anti-climax as other leagues reach a crescendo. Some governing bodies even use external analysts to model how changes in gameplay and the behaviour of fans might affect their businesses. Football has historically been less open to this. The laws are largely untouched from 30 years ago—with changes few in number and mostly minor—though they are enforced more strictly: today you’ll get a red card for raking someone’s shin, with the video assistant referee (VAR) adding
extra scrutiny to every decision. Recently, however, FIFA, world football’s governing body, has realised that it too might need to innovate, to maintain the sport’s share of the attention economy—and, perhaps, to grow it in America, which will host 78 of this year’s 104 matches. Arsène Wenger, a venerated former manager who now works for FIFA, has suggested relaxing the offside law to apply only when there is “clear daylight” between the attacker and defender. This is being trialled in the Canadian league. The idea is to reinstate many goals that are currently being chalked off by VAR (though officials will still have to draw a line somewhere, so the debate over whether someone’s shoelace was offside will never end). Given how much fans dislike VAR—in a recent survey of British fans, 72% said it makes watching football less enjoyable—fixing it ought to be top of FIFA’s agenda. Using it solely when teams make “challenges”, with each given a limited number, as is common in other sports, should mean that only howlers get checked, while shifting some blame to the teams if something gets missed. That change, in tandem with Mr Wenger’s offside tweak, could mean more goals and fewer refereeing delays. For fans in the 47 eliminated countries that won’t lift the World Cup trophy, that would be a victory to celebrate. ■ James Tozer is a co-founder of Prospect, a sports analytics firm that works with governing bodies, teams, coaches and others. He was a data journalist with The Economist from 2014 to 2022. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//by-invitation/2026/06/03/why-the-world-cup-produces-an- ugly-version-of-the-beautiful-game
The pain to come in private credit It’s time to ditch assumptions built on cheap capital, stable growth and predictable exits, argues Hamza Lemssouguer June 4th 2026 TO UNDERSTAND TODAY’S private-credit market, broadly defined as loans to private mid-size companies made by investment funds, you must start with a simple truth: the current environment was shaped by a decade of very low interest rates and abundant liquidity, which flattered leverage and suppressed risk. Those conditions are unwinding, with implications that extend well beyond credit markets, to portfolio allocation, valuation methodology and risk-pricing across asset classes. The sector has grown from around $500bn in 2015 to an estimated $2trn or more today by promising investors—including pension plans, insurance companies and increasingly individual investors—an attractive, stable yield
with downside protection. Low interest rates and the hunt for yield fuelled investment in private markets and encouraged capital structures optimised for cheap money and seamless exits. That dynamic has now been fundamentally disrupted. Higher interest rates have reset the cost of capital. Private equity, long the engine of deal flow and liquidity, has slowed, with exit paths such as mergers, acquisitions and initial public offerings narrowing and holding periods stretching well beyond historical norms. Capital is, in effect, trapped. Refinancing has become more difficult. Layer onto this numerous structural pressures: a looming maturity wall as low-cost debt rolls into a higher-rate environment, the retreat of traditional bank lenders and sector-level disruptions, from AI-driven repricing in software to structurally higher energy costs, particularly in Europe. And then there’s the geo-economic context. The long benign period in which debt-laden businesses were supported by globalisation has given way to an increasingly fragmented world, with its higher costs of doing business. What does pain look like in this context? Many borrowers will face a financial shock, as the cost of debt resets to two or three times the levels before 2022, when markets began repricing risk after the long party. Some companies will adapt, preserving earnings power and restructuring their balance-sheets. Others will find that refinancing cannot restore sustainability. The dividing line will be the underlying resilience of each business. Software is likely to be the first industry of many where these pressures erupt. Investors thought they were allocating to diversified, defensive, even “boring” private credit. Instead they were buying leveraged, highly concentrated exposure to a single sector with relatively low recovery rates in a downturn. We will look back on software’s go-go years as a major risk- management blind spot. Many software firms took on piles of debt during the low-rate years, helping the industry to expand from about $8bn in 2015 to $500bn by the end of 2025. But the debt was often underwritten to aggressive growth assumptions
rather than durable cash generation. Now the industry’s business and financing models are under heavy strain. AI is lowering barriers to entry, enabling competitors to quickly and cheaply replicate unique capabilities and workflows. Higher financing costs are exposing fragile capital structures built on optimistic expectations. There will be winners, particularly firms able to integrate AI effectively. However, for many lenders, returns are likely to come under heavy pressure. Software businesses typically lack hard assets, limiting recoveries in downturns. When equity value is impaired, retaining senior engineers can also become difficult. These dynamics can compound in a restructuring. Recoveries for lenders may fall below historical averages, and in weaker cases could drop well below 50 cents on the dollar. Signs of this shift are already visible in public credit markets, where software firms seeking leveraged loans are struggling to attract demand at a cost of capital they can afford. In private markets these pressures are taking longer to surface, with lenders amending loans and deferring interest to extend timelines. Default rates are still artificially low. The recent benign period encouraged a belief that risk had been structurally reduced. In reality, it had often merely been deferred. This is hardly new in finance—and, indeed, the current transition follows a familiar pattern: as conditions normalise, overconfidence is corrected; and that adjustment forces a repricing of risk and a more disciplined use of capital. Despite the portfolio-construction and underwriting mistakes of the decade following the global financial crisis, private credit does not present a systemic risk to the financial system. Unlike in 2008, this debt is not concentrated on the balance-sheets of highly leveraged banks. In that sense, much of the post-crisis regulation has worked as intended. The repricing will take years rather than months, and managing underperforming loans will soak up plenty of time and resources, limiting private-credit firms’ ability to adapt in a fast-changing market. But the risk of widespread contagion appears limited. Nevertheless, the underwriting assumptions of the past decade, built on cheap capital, stable growth and predictable exits, can now be discarded.
The new environment requires a far more forensic assessment of resilience, not just growth. It is a private-credit market defined less by outright distress and more by widening dispersion between winners and losers. There will still be opportunities. For investors able to distinguish between temporary dislocation and lasting impairment, the goal will be to deploy capital at more attractive entry points and to work through capital structures to restore sustainability. The story of private credit today is not about excess giving way to crisis. It is about a structural transition from an era of abundant, undifferentiated capital to one in which liquidity is conditional, underwriting must be granular and outcomes will be increasingly unequal. The adjustment will not spark a broader financial meltdown, but expect it to inflict a good deal of pain— while, as always, giving those best placed to navigate choppier waters a chance to dig for treasure.■ Hamza Lemssouguer is the founder and chief investment officer of Arini, a credit investment firm with $20bn under management. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//by-invitation/2026/06/01/the-pain-to-come-in-private- credit
India’s population will soon be falling—probably quite fast Neither widespread poverty, nor high rates of marriage nor relatively young mothers are sustaining fertility June 4th 2026 IN THE SPRAWLING slum in Delhi where Parul Gayen lived in the 1970s, children were everywhere. It was not unusual then that her mother had been one of six, or her grandfather one of 11. Swapan, the handsome boy whom she often saw cycling to work, and later married at 16, had six siblings—the seventh did not survive infancy. But times have changed, says Ms Gayen, who is now 58 and lives with Swapan in a one-bedroom flat nearby. Of the couple’s three grown-up kids, only two decided to have children of their own. Both stopped at one. “One child feels lonely,” she says.