In rugby there are no friendlies, there are Test matches. Every match is important for players and fans. I wish football fans thought like that. United States-Australia or Chile-Portugal should be important matches, not warmups. As I've said before, a 24 team tournament could have a groups phase of 6 groups of 4 teams, where thw top two teams of each groupd advance to a 12-team knockout phase. The best four teams advance directly to quarter-finals, and the next best 8 teams advance to a playoff round.
That helps some, but it doesn't resolve the overall problem of a wide field leading to inevitable missteps by teams with the rosters to make a fairly deep run and a poor ratio of contenders/knockout spots. It might not play out precisely the same way with only 2nd going through this time, but assuming it did : France (1) and Wales (4) with byes on one side Germany (2) and Croatia (3) on the other. Not horribly uneven, but Ger/Cro is more difficult. If we seeded the other two firsts and then the second in order of pts/goal diff/goals scored, then Italy, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland would have been on the France/Wales side. England, Iceland, Hungary, Poland on the other. That's a huge difference. Iceland was a nice story, but they were never real deep threats. Hungary was a nice early surprise but got crushed by Bel. England wasn't good. The big problem is that you need a couple of top 14 or so global teams in as many groups as possible to guarantee relatively even sides of the bracket. 7 of them over 6 groups won't cut it. This is why a 16 team Euro works so well at keeping the knockout draws pretty fair. You've got enough depth at the group to know that whoever is coming out is pretty darn good. The WC is the same way. We had some strange groups last time like the Spain group and Italy group. The bigger teams were more concentrated than they typically are. Even with the groups being what they were, there was enough quality for things to be fairly normally distributed across the knockout pool. There were 6 big teams on one side and 4 on the other. By the time we got to quarters, 7 of 8 left were bigger teams and the sole leftover was Costa Rica, who won a group w Uruguay, Italy, and England. They were clicking extremely well. That's what is missing from a 24 team Euro no matter how you handle the knockout stage.
I have a minor correction. Your results leave A with 1 win and 2 draws; B or C with 2 wins and 1 draw; B or C with 1 win, 1 draw, and 1 loss; and D with 3 losses. The team you said would have 3 points would actually have 4 points. A problem with 12 teams in the Knockout Rounds with 4 of them skipping the Round of 16 is the big difference in rest for a Quarterfinal game between a team that played in the Round of 16 (which could go to Extra Time) and a team that skipped it. Does anybody know the most consecutive days off a team has ever had in between games of a national team tournament? It could be the World Cup or any confederational tournament.
Fair enough. This being the UEFA forum I was speaking from a European perspective. For us just about anything is better than some of these terrible friendly matches - at least in my opinion.
Having uneven brackets happens because there's too many groups. The less groups, the better. It's not a problem, it's an award for winning the group. It encourages the top teams to win the three group matches.
It's the same with cricket. The small number of senior nations means there's always a degree of historical rivalry in every fixture. Add to that the low number of other competitive fixtures each year, and there isn't the same sense of international fixture fatigue. The Six Nations countries will, three years out of four, only play five competition games each season.
The tier 1 rugby teams play: 5-6 teams in continental competitions (Six Nations / Rugby Championship), 2-3 intercontinental matches in June 2-3 intercontinental matches in November. It's a total 9-12 matches, about the same as football. It's correct that there are traditional rivalries and tier 1 teams only play lower tier teams at the World Cup. But still, football friendlies could be better recognized.
That's what I was telling you in my reply. UEFA needs more quality in each group. If talent is more or less fixed, the only way to get there is to have fewer groups. That's why your proposal to give 4 byes + 8 prelim knockout matches in the current 24 team/6 group setup doesn't address this.
Some CONCACAF national teams that don't get far in World Cup Qualifying and Caribbean Cup Qualifying average way under 9 matches per year. Assuming they reach the Hexagonal and the Gold Cup Semifinals (there's a third place game so all the Semifinalists play the same amount of games), USA will play 8 Hexagonal games and 6 Gold Cup games in 2017. That's 14 games. In addition, USA could play friendlies as part of Camp Cupcake not on FIFA matchdays, friendlies before the Gold Cup, and friendlies in November 2017 (or a playoff vs. an AFC team if USA finishes fourth in the Hexagonal). USA could play 18 to 20 games next year. I'd be interested in the average and standard deviation of games played by all the FIFA members, but I'm not going to spend time calculating that on my own.
thats because we have nothing else to play for top teams dont even have to qualify for the WC - provided they make QF of previous WC all we have is matches between the top 7 or 8 teams, hence every match becomes important
For the FAs that would truly elevate the status of friendlies the four year range is 48-60 matches roughly it's not that much higher than rugby, but there are a lot of other reasons why soccer friendlies are lower profile 1-a higher proportion of soccer matches are in tourneys/qualifiers for tourneys, 2-soccer has a deeper player pool per country, so experimenting with rosters/lineups is more time consuming, which leads to a lot of mixed a/b and below rosters for friendlies. 3-soccer players make a lot more and their clubs are better branded, so player brands aren't really dependent upon matches outside of club and competitive international matches. There are only a handful of rugby players earning USD $1 million per year. Generally, the more money in a sport on the club side, the less important international play generally (and international exhibition specifically) becomes.
More groups => weaker groups => stronger teams should finish first => balanced brackets. I mean, that's just another way to look at it. I know weak sides of brackets are the latest fad given what just happened, but do you really see that as a perpetuating problem? Hasn't been an issue in the 32-team World Cup. Even in the case of Euro 2016 it was more a case of one really tough quadrant. If you were in the France quadrant of the "difficult" half of the bracket then it didn't look so difficult.