🚨 Zlatan Ibrahimović on Japan crashing out of the 2026 FIFA World Cup after their heartbreaking defeat to Brazil:
“Football can be very cruel. Today Japan leave the World Cup, but they leave with their heads held high. They pushed Brazil to the edge, made them suffer and forced one of the greatest football nations in history to fight until the very end. That’s something no one can take away from them.”
“I don’t want to hear anyone calling this a failure. Failure is not giving everything. These players gave everything. They ran, they fought, they believed and they represented their country with incredible pride. Sometimes football rewards you, sometimes it breaks your heart. Today it broke Japan’s heart.”
“I saw the tears after the final whistle, and those tears tell you everything. They cared. They believed they could make history, and for a long time they looked capable of doing exactly that. The result hurts, but the performance deserves respect from the entire football world.”
“If Japan continue producing players with this mentality, this won’t be the last time they surprise the biggest nations. They have shown courage, discipline and personality throughout this tournament. Today they lost the match, but they won the respect of millions of football fans around the world.”
{@FoxNews }
During a World Cup football match, a QR code appeared on the stadium screen.
After fans scanned it, thousands of phone flashlights inside the stadium were synchronized to form a coordinated light display across the stands. 🤯
🚨 Ayase Ueda on why Japan always leaves the dressing room spotless after every match and why their fans stay behind to clean the stadium:
🗣️ “For us, it’s never something special or something we do for attention. It’s simply part of who we are and how we are raised.
From a young age in Japan, we’re taught that when you use a place, you leave it better than you found it. At school, we clean classrooms ourselves. Nobody tells us to do it — it becomes normal.
Football doesn’t change that.
When we enter a dressing room or a stadium, we treat it with respect because people worked hard to prepare it for us. Cleaning after ourselves is our way of saying thank you.
Our fans think the same way. Supporting the team is not only singing for 90 minutes. It’s also showing respect to the country hosting us, the people working there and everyone around us.
The stadium is not ours, but for those few hours it becomes our home. So we don’t believe in leaving a mess behind.
People see it and think it’s a gesture for cameras, but honestly, if nobody filmed it, we would still do the exact same thing.
Winning or losing doesn’t change our values.” 🇯🇵