Well, yes. But assumedly the question was could NZ face Australia in the round of 32, which is the first round of the knockout stage.
Were all the games today red v. white?
ETA: Nope, Uruguay were in pale blue. My goof.
Question asked on Bluesky: where does Salah rank in the all time African player list?
And lets say that means “played for a European national team” so that Eusebio doesn’t count. Most people were saying 4th behind Weah, Drogba, and Eto’o. Some also said behind Yaya Toure. I never watched Weah, but I don’t think it’s all that clear he’s behind either Drogba or Eto’o. Yaya is harder to compare, not being a goal scorer. Definitely ahead of Michael Essien or Sadio Mane.
Agreed in principle, but what if the tied countries have just finished playing different matches in separate cities? We are talking about a league, two simultaneous matches in this case.
And as the decision has to be taken, fair play and FAFO scores it will have to be. Of course an Ultimate Fight™ between the four captains all against all in the back of the White House would be better TV, but you can’t always get what you wanted.
Pretty sure it was a coin toss before rankings became a thing.
I think every drawn game should be followed by a penalty shootout. It wouldn’t affect the final group standings but could be used as a tiebreaker if the two teams finish tied on points and goal difference. Some competitions have this as a tiebreaker if the two tied teams are playing each other in the final game.
Yes, but what if the tied teams are in this case Uruguay (playing Spain in the last game of the group) and Cabo Verde (playing Saudi Arabia in a different city in the last game of the group)? It is not a drawn game, it is a drawn group, tied for second and third. Penalty shoot-outs do not work here.
Or, just imagine a group with three tied teams, instead of two or four. Never mind the two cities: how do you shoot out three teams? What are your rules for that?
Let the captains fight in an octagon in the back garden of the White House, I say. Mafiantino will be the referee and President Ineptstein will raise or lower his thumb in that obscene gesture he loves so much as soon as one is KO. /s
I’d have a shootout for every draw in the group stage. The vast majority of them will be irrelevant, but in the cases where teams are tied on points and goal difference at the end of the group stage, you have a ready made tiebreaker. In your example of Uruguay tying with Cape Verde, they would have already had a shootout after their 2-2 draw.
It will be interesting to see, come Saturday night, how many tiebreakers are needed to determine who advances, and the seeding of those teams who do advance.
Frankly, I have no idea how the first-place versus third-place pairings will happen. As I mentioned above, the winner of Group G plays a 3rd place finisher from one of five groups. How that will be determined is a mystery to me, and I’m far too lazy to delve into it right now.
Towards the end of this article from the FIFA website, one can find the matchups in the Round of 32. You will find games listed like this:
Match 74 – Germany v Group A/B/C/D/F third place - Boston Stadium
Match 77 – Group I winners v Group C/D/F/G/H third place - New York New Jersey Stadium
Presumably we’ll all know who’s playing who when we wake up on Sunday morning.
I think it all depends on which combination of the 8 groups the best 3rd placed teams come from. I assume there is some sort of algorithm/lookup that they use once the 8 teams are known. I don’t think it comes from a random draw.
Oh, I totally agree. But exactly how those 8 teams are first determined, and then seeded, is the mystery, at least in my simple mind.
It’s just a big table. Points, GD, GF, Fair Play, FIFA ranking to break ties.
How they determine which one plays which group winner I don’t know.
There are 12 choose 8 possible combinations for which groups the 8 3rd place teams come from. For each of those 495 possibilities there is a lookup table: 2026 FIFA World Cup knockout stage - Wikipedia
It’s a lookup. Of the 12 groups, 8 will produce qualifying third-place teams; there are 495 possible permutations of such groups. FIFA has published a table that looks up whatever that combination is (e.g. ACDEFGIJ), they look it up and do the assignment.
There’s a website calculating probabilities of said assignments, I’ll see if I can find it.
ninja’d. by snarky!
ETA: here’s the website; the first likely matchup is the one in bold, but based on what happens, others can occur. He’s still cleaning up some formatting and numbering issues. World Cup 2026 Live Bracket Odds
It looks like the winners of Groups C, F, H, and J will be playing second place teams instead of 3rd place teams in the round of 32. I wonder how that was determined. Were those four the weakest groups in total? Was there a coin toss or some other random method of deciding which first place group finishers end up having to play a 2nd place instead of 3rd place finisher?
Boss said “Today at 14:00 PM work stops”, so I’m closing up for the day.
Also trying to eat but I feel my stomach closing in anticipation.
See you all on the other side in about 3 hours!.
Sounds like Boss was simply reading the room!
Who you rooting for?
You honestly ask @Frodo this question? Haven’t you read the thread? 
(or any other football thread)
Pst, it’s Argentina. I answer for him because his mind will be already in a tunnel, 15 minutes before kick off.
My understanding of how FIFA came up with the 495-row mapping is that it wasn’t a completely deterministic formula. They had hard rules like
- Teams from the same group can’t face each other early in the knockout stage
And then constraints like
- Avoid matching teams from the same confederation
- Keep competitive balance in the bracket where possible
They came up with a mapping that does this and published it. As far as I know their actual process for constructing the mapping isn’t available publicly anywhere.