Over in Africa it is the same story. Africa's representatives arrived with decent hopes but none has gone past the quarterfinals of the world's biggest soccer show.
The mood of the African people is hard to describe because while they would bask in one of their countries winning the World Cup, they didn't expect such an outcome since no African nation has ever reached the semis.
The one certainty is Africa's continued inability to make a serious mark at the World Cup has become something of a mystery.
This feeling of bewilderment started at the 1994 World Cup and kept growing through the 1998, 2002 and 2006 editions - four tournaments in which Senegal's 2002 quarterfinal remained the highlight.
However, it was Africa's performance at the 2010 World Cup that left most Africans gobsmacked. Held in Africa and with the highest number of participants - six - the continent has ever had, there was real hope an African country would reach new heights.
In the event, Africa could not have done much worse. Far from being Africa's great World Cup, it turned to be Africa's great nightmare, the details of which are well documented.
Four years on, the glorious stages of the World Cup remain out of Africa's reach. The question remains: what must Africa do to regularly flourish at the World Cup if not win it?
The problem for Africa is that the people who should be asking themselves this question aren't.
The overwhelming majority of Africa's football authorities continue to treat the World Cup like an accident even if it has happened every four years without fail since 1950.
Besides the general aversion to grassroots development, it is common for an African FA to hire a manager for their World Cup-bound team a few months before the event hoping he can outdo managers who have spent years with their sides.
The mystery with African football is not that African teams continue to falter at the World Cup.The mystery is that we don't expect them to.
The point is this: African football federations should start planning now for the next World Cup because the year is not 2014 but 2010.
But mainly because 2014 will be like 2010 if we continue to assume African teams are merely jinxed.