Team profile: Greece

Sokratis Papastathopoulos’s last name is too long to fit on the back of a shirt, so look out for his first name — and as the key man on Greece’s defense, he’s going to be one of the busiest men in the group stage in Brazil. Woefully short on star power and attacking talent, Greece tends to rely on disciplined defense and soaking up pressure for its progress in international soccer. Sokratis’s speed will be vital in Brazil given some of the forwards Greece will face. By way of a goal threat, look for Kostas Mitroglou — he had a miserable spell at Fulham in the English Premier League but has an impressive scoring record in his home country.

Greece has been to only two previous World Cups, during which it won just one game — so the 2–1 victory over Nigeria in 2010 would be the highlight. But the Greeks’ greatest international triumph came in 2004, when they won the European Championship in the consummate soccer Cinderella story.

It’s hard to see a squad so limited posing much of a threat to any of their group rivals, Côte d’Ivoire, Japan and Colombia.

The 2004 adventure proved that miracles do happen. It’s conceivable that the other three are so closely matched that a series of draws could create another Cinderella tale. Even then, of course, it would end at midnight.

Playing against Germany tends to invoke historical traumas in the minds of many European soccer fans — Dutch and English fans, for example, have for decades ritually evoked memories of World War II when facing the Germans. But it was not the World War II occupation that stoked Greeks’ passions when their team was drawn with Germany in the quarterfinals of Euro 2012 — it was the very contemporary politics of eurozone bailouts, and Greek resentment at the harsh austerity terms imposed by the Berlin-led EU for rescuing the Greek economy. Still, any hope that the economic pain of their compatriots would drive the Greek players to greater heights proved chimerical — Germany won the match 4–2.