News: FIFA to expand World Cup to 48 teams in 2026, impact upon the USA

If they want to include more countries in the "World Cup," why not just make the final qualification stages part of the "World Cup"?

Have the two inter-continental playoffs, the four UEFA playoffs, the final CAF play-off as in 2013, as part of the WC finals already. That alone would increase the number of teams from 32 to 43.

 

They are apparently going to use penalties in group stage games. If they play it by the old 3/1/0/0 system, this won't happen, because the penalty loser would walk away with zero points.

Tournament would have taken too long, you have to schedule it as though a team needed to play 8 games to win (even though that's unlikely, it's possible, and you need to book in a rest for your 3 place team before its Round of 16 game). That's a non-starter as powerful European clubs would have revolted, so they needed to keep it a 7-round tournament.

 

That doesn't solve the collusion scenarios that involve no tied games. Example:

A 4-3 B
A 0-2 C
B vs. C closes it out.

C 3 pts, +2
A 3 pts, -1
B 0 pts, -1

Plenty of incentive to end up with a B win by one or two goals. Probably they don't explicitly collude to create that result from the start, but if it's the 65th minute and B happens to lead 1-0, and B is the more talented team, and/or they both have some reason to dislike A, what might happen?

 

Just one. A two goal victory would give B the group on goal differential and C a harder match in the next one.

I suppose they could get around the 1-goal win by seeding the next round (and thus giving the teams that got 6 points a better matchup than the ones that only got 3). But there's also no real incentive to collude here, unless like you say they just don't like team A. Team C doesn't have anything to gain by losing by a goal, so it isn't like the Germany-Austria situation where the point both pick up by drawing puts both in at the non-playing team's expense.

 

This could be more on Team A not getting a result in the second game....

Lets say the teams in the group are this...

Italy 4-3 Uruguay
Italy 0-2 Uzbekistan
Uruguay vs. Uzbekistan closes it out.

This is on Italy not getting a result against Uzbekistan.

 

Decent article on ESPNFC about how the tournament might work:

http://www.espnfc.com/fifa-world-cu...-like-with-the-usa-mexico-and-canada-as-hosts

 

Team C gains advancement by losing by a goal, so that is something to gain, whereas they might lose by three and get eliminated if the game is played in earnest.

The West Germany-Austria game was not a draw, it was a 1-0 West Germany win. The advancement scenarios were in fact exactly the same as in my example, with Austria as Team C and West Germany as Team B. Both teams advanced with a 1-0 or 2-0 German win. An Austrian win or tie eliminated West Germany, while a loss by 3+ eliminated Austria. West Germany took the 1-0 lead in the 10th minute and then the rest of the game was a kickabout.

Sure, if you win all of your games, you have nothing to worry about. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to organize the tournament in a way that creates collusion scenarios.

 

Hm. There are some things you could do.

One would be to make sure the seed is Team A, and doesn't play on the last match date. That doesn't do anything about the mathematical possibilities, but it would mean that it would take some pretty big upsets (a la Italy 0-2 Uzbekistan) to give that possibility a life.

Another is to make the head-to-head a tiebreaker ahead of GF. (If that's the case in the above table, there is no score by which Team C can advance without knocking out Team A in the process.)