This World Cup group stage has been wonderful. The 32-team format is perfect. Shame FIFA are about to f*** it up for dollars. tickerscricket goes down a very enjoyable World Cup format rabbithole.
where one late goal would’ve swung qualification the other way, while Wednesday promises another such cracker in Group D’s Australia v Denmark as well as an absolutely smashing all-comers’ bunfight in a Group C blown wide apart by Argentina’s defeat to Saudi Arabia.
So not only is this a great format, this specific tournament has also been a great example of precisely why it’s a great format. And that’s a bit of an issue for FIFA. Probably not at the forefront of their minds right now – there’s other stuff going on – but down the line people will remember this and they’re going to compare the 2026 group stage to this one.
It’s also absurdly lopsided. There are all manner of ways for teams to benefit or suffer that are outside their own control. A third of teams, for instance, will play no part in the opening round of fixtures and have to play their first game against a team who have already played and will know precisely what they need to do to qualify. One team per group will play in the first and third round of games and get a lovely little break between games in the middle.
It would be nearly a hundred games, though; it’s almost like 48 teams is too many for a good World Cup whichever way you slice it. So you do have to go back to 1982 for the last time the World Cup format was a bit mad, but before then it was wildly, preposterously common for the greatest sporting event in the world to just be played under cover of daftness.
The great England-less, Dutch-despair World Cups of the 1970s were also a bit odd, looking back. Despite the apparent benefit of featuring 16 teams and thus having a really obvious and ideal format readily available, they too had second group stages for the eight teams who finished first or second in the first-round groups. There weren’t even semi-finals in those World Cups, and that’s just plain nutty.
Oh my sweet summer child. It was not sensible. Instead of having everyone in the group play everyone else like a boring normy group stage would, everyone only played two games instead. Each four team group had two seeded teams and two unseeded teams, and you played your two games against those that you weren’t. That is, the seeded teams played both unseeded teams but not each other, while the unseeded teams had two theoretically harder games and no easier one.
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