This can be a general discussion thread, but I want to start with a specific question: who should I adopt for the World Cup? No USA, and my hereditary background (Italy, Ireland) also didn't qualify, so I'm basically a free agent looking for a good team to hook my rooting interest to. I'm intrigued by Belgium, but that sort of feels like NFL people who get intrigued by Tampa Bay every offseason - they're a roster darling that hasn't quite put it together. I'd like to root against Russia, but I find the composition of that group as hard to root for as it was stacked to give Russia a pass to the knockout stage. My wife has some Swedish in her background, so I could get behind them, although with Germany and Mexico in their group I feel like that might be a short-lived rooting experience.

So I put the question to the board - as a free agent, who doesn't simply want to adopt a front-runner but who wants to root for someone with a reasonable possibility of making, say, the semifinals, who should I pick?