2018 World Cup: Croatia is not the smallest country to have ever made a final … but it's close

Croatia has qualified for the 2018 World Cup final by beating England 2-1 in overtime on Wednesday and will face France on Sunday for the biggest trophy of international football.

It's an incredible achievement for Croatia because of the results they needed to get there, wow, there were incredible results, but because they were able to do it by being a country which is small enough.

(Early warning: These population statistics with respect to countries The creation of a good national team depends much more on the sports culture of a country than the number of people who live there: by example, no one sees Alabama better than New York, although New York has five times more people than Alabama, but football is much more important in Alabama than in New York.)

Croatia is a small country census census census putting the country in a little over 4 million people living there . By comparison, Germany, the last winner of the World Cup, has 82 million inhabitants.

But Croatia is not the smallest country, in terms of population, to have ever participated in a World Cup final. This honor goes to Uruguay who won the finals of the 1930 and 1950 World Cup. Currently, Uruguay has 3.4 million inhabitants and, if it goes back to 1930, it was estimated that 1.7 million people were living at the time.

Hungary, who made the final in 1938 and 1954, but lost both, had a good 10+ million people living in the country for both finals. Sweden, which was smoked by Brazil in the 1958 final, is probably the second smallest after these two, but it is not particularly tight. Croatia and Uruguay are the two smallest that have ever progressed so far in a World Cup, unless I miss something. It has been a long World Cup.

So it's an incredible achievement for this Croatian team, even though the population statistics are a bit wobbly and silly. (Seriously, if we use that as a measure to judge quality, China and India will face each other in the final every four years.) They only count 4 million people, but when One of them is Luka Modric, that can be enough.