Vigo with a flag

Cape Verde is an archipelago of barely 525,000 souls, a scatter of volcanic rock in the Atlantic with a population smaller than the Spanish city of Vigo. This month, on its first appearance at a World Cup, it walked out against Spain — European champions, co-favourites, the whole imperial weight of La Roja — and did not lose. It then declined to lose to Uruguay, twice winners of the thing, and to Saudi Arabia. Three draws, no defeats, and a nation that had never before kicked a ball at the tournament strolled into the last thirty-two as the smallest ever to do so, where Lionel Messi now waits.

The expansion that backfired

The competition was enlarged this year to forty-eight teams, a reform sold as a gentle escalator for the giants: more places, softer draws, fewer ambushes. It has delivered the opposite — the most chaotic group stage on record, the favourites sweating and the minnows, stocked with men who play every week in Europe’s best leagues, no longer afraid. The lesson is the oldest in sport, in a new suit. Reputation does not win matches; and where a single point can secure progression, the disciplined draw has significantly more utility than the glorious defeat.

The dog that didn’t bark

Hold that thought, and consider the spring’s other improbable survivor: the world economy. In March, Iran throttled the Strait of Hormuz, and the International Energy Agency called the loss of roughly a fifth of global oil supply the largest disruption in the history of the market. Brent rose fifty-five per cent and brushed $126; petrol reached four-year highs. By any 1970s reckoning this was the apocalypse — in 1973 a supply loss a third the size sent crude up three hundred per cent and the West into recession.

This time the patient barely stirred. Equities held; the FTSE actually rose on days Brent traded above $110. No recession has come. The economy, like Cape Verde, did not win its fixture. It drew it.

Fewer calories per mile

It could absorb the blow because it is no longer the gas-guzzler that stalled in the 1970s. The world now burns half as much oil per unit of output as it did in 1973; petrol has shrunk from a twentieth of American spending to barely one-and-a-half per cent. America, once the great importer with its neck in OPEC’s grip, has been a net energy exporter since 2019, so a price spike is now a transfer within the economy rather than a tax leaving it. And the larder was full: crude already at sea, the largest coordinated stock release in the IEA’s history, idle Saudi capacity. A record loss of barrels became a merely large move in price.

Cui bono

Which leaves the question the headlines forgot to ask. A shock that destroys little wealth still moves a great deal of it, and the interesting matter is not whether GDP survived but who got paid. The answer is awkward. Iran — its refineries bombed, its economy facing a decade’s rebuild — nonetheless sold less oil for more money: its daily crude revenue is estimated to have climbed from $115m in February to $139m in March even as its export volumes fell by nearly half, the discount it once granted China’s refiners evaporating just as the price soared. It charged tankers as much as $2m apiece for safe passage. The decade of sanctions meant to starve it had quietly built the smuggling machine that let it feast.

Age before beauty

There was a lesson, too, for those who declare the past obsolete. Messi, at thirty-eight, ended the group stage as the tournament’s all-time leading scorer; Ronaldo, at forty-one, was still finding the net. The market has lately fallen for the new and the scarce — compute, chips, the companies of the cloud — and written off the old and the tangible. Yet it was the tangible, the barrels and the pipelines, that did the quiet work this spring of moving wealth from those who consume energy to those who produce it. Reputation favours youth; cycles often reward experience.

The second half

We draw two conclusions, and a warning. A shock that does not bite still rewards whoever owns the scarce thing — which is why we would rather hold the producers of energy and real assets than the consumers of them. And the calm is not immunity but a lead at half-time. The buffers that muffled the blow are largely spent; inventories sit below their seasonal averages, and a billion barrels of restocking lie ahead. Cape Verde, remember, has only reached the knockouts. The hardest games are the ones still to be played.