Those Are Totally the Teams I Picked for the Euro 2016 Bracket. Fuck.

I love football (that’s soccer to you North Americans!) so much and the Euro championship is second only to the World Cup in international competitions for me. Every four years the best of the best in Europe face off for bragging rights.

I like to think that I know a little bit about football, and hopefully I’m learning more all the time, so I was excited to try to predict who would win each group, and who would qualify for the knockout rounds. I’m happy to report that I did incredibly well… I’m sure all the so-called experts will be amazed at how unerring my picks were!

With a feisty performance, Croatia came out ahead of Spain, who has won the last two Euros. Not many would have picked Croatia to top Group D, and I was not one of them.

Fuck.

I may be Canadian, but my spiritual home is England, and I think they’re going to go all the way this year, winning their first international tournament since World Cup 1966. I have so much confidence I knew they could purposely draw to Russia and Slovakia, allowing Wales to lead Group B, putting the whole competition right where they want them, and setting up a matchup with the overachieving Iceland.

God damn it.

You say Hungary hasn’t been good since they were world-beating in the 1950s? I totally knew they’d fool everyone and beat their former imperial partner Austria as well as achieve a high-scoring draw with Portugal and their star and arguably the best player in the world, Christiano Ronaldo.

Are you fucking kidding me? Hungary?!

Wales, Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland all moving on to the Round of 16? Called it!

I also predicted Golden State beating Cleveland in four straight, and that’s exactly what happened, right? I’m so confident in that prediction that I didn’t even bother watching the NBA Finals!

I didn’t enter a pool at work this year, or show any other living being my picks, so you’ll just have to trust me that I picked all sixteen brackets and no doubt have every slot all the way to the final correct. That’s pretty amazing, considering all the upsets and underachievers, don’t you think?

Piss on a stick.