12 and 24 team tournaments don't work

[Samsonite]

Just a personal opinion from watching this summer's Gold Cup, Copa and U20 but I really don't like the 12 and 24 team formats. Having third place teams proceed to the knockout rounds just make the group stage seem worthless as just about anyone can qualify. It really seems to me that 16 and 32 is the magic number. Opinions?

[The-FIFA-kid]

agree...with 12 teams 18 group games in total just to eliminate 4 teams to 8 maybe only group winners and best 2nd but still not great so prefer 8 16 32...much better and slightly fairure in who goes through

[LOS_DE_ABAJO]

Posted by Samsonite-
Just a personal opinion from watching this summer's Gold Cup, Copa and U20 but I really don't like the 12 and 24 team formats. Having third place teams proceed to the knockout rounds just make the group stage seem worthless as just about anyone can qualify. It really seems to me that 16 and 32 is the magic number. Opinions?

I agree about 12 team tournaments not working out since there is little variety between games in the later stages but disagree about saying the same for 24-team tournaments I actually like watching 3rd placed teams have the opportunity to advance to the next round instead of just having to play the last games of the 1st round for their honor's sake. It's better to see more winners than losers and that holds even more truth if the majority of the players are only teenagers.
Plus, there aren't many federations with strong youth systems to have the luxury of doing a 32 team tournament and I just think that it would be a little depressing to see the hopes of hundreds of teenagers from many nations shred to pieces just because they got 2 bad results.

[MRschizoid21]

I agree about 12 team tournaments not working out since there is little variety between games in the later stages but disagree about saying the same for 24-team tournaments I actually like watching 3rd placed teams have the opportunity to advance to the next round instead of just having to play the last games of the 1st round for their honor's sake. It's better to see more winners than losers and that holds even more truth if the majority of the players are only teenagers.
Plus, there aren't many federations with strong youth systems to have the luxury of doing a 32 team tournament and I just think that it would be a little depressing to see the hopes of hundreds of teenagers from many nations shred to pieces just because they got 2 bad results.

I'd also have to agree that a 24 team tournament is good. Even with 3 teams from a group advancing, there are 4 knockout rounds, so these teams have to win 2 matches before there can be a rematch from a group. Look at the brackets for the u-20s. No teams from the same group can meet in the 1st 2 knockout rounds. Should this happen, it would also negate groups that are stacked with too many strong teams in one group relative to others.
Example, as a 3rd place team in 2001 with 4 points from the group stage and , Paraguay finished 4th overall.
In a twelve team tournament, there are only 3, so when a rematch happens it feels like it happened too soon. 12 teams tournaments really aren't so great.

[Jossen]

I agree about 12 team tournament. Maybe invite 4 more teams, one from each continent.

[KingJames]

I disagree. 3rd place teams advancing kind of makes up for flaws in tourney draws. For example, last summer the US MNT was in a group of four teams that were at least Round of 16 calibur (Italy, Ghana, USA and Czech Rep) where as there were groups where only one team was sweet 16 calibur (Spain's group for example, Ukraine, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia). Granted that could be fixed by FIFA waking up and seeding the teams but like in the case of Copa America for example, Group B and C were murder's row compared to Group A

[Gibraldo]

The 24 team mode with the k.o. phasis worked perfectly.

1) Look in 1994, there were two 3rd placed teams with 6 points (2 wins in 3 matches). Belgium and Bulgaria. Italy would have been out in the groupstages after finishing with 4 points. No Robby Baggio history.

2) You can see, the group matches as a warm up, but a good finish in a group could always boost your chances

3) It was suspense, which group teams get together in the round of 16. This is what bores most now. You could already guess the quater finals at the start of the tournament. I guess many expected Germany-Argentina in 2006, as it was easily predictibly. You also knew, that Germany could not face brazil before the semi finals. how boring.

4) In 2006 you had about 6 meaningless matches in the end of the groups stage like Serbia-Ivory Coast, Angola-Iran, Poland-Costa Rica, Trini-Paraguay. quite dispensible and not worth of such a tournament. FIFA should at least change it for the future, that group favorites must meet in the first group match as well as the outsiders.

5) The 24-system was more competitive. Is it just me, but the knock out phases of 1998, 2002 and 2006 are clearly behind those with legendary matches of 1986, 1990 and 1994.