I am planning on running a sweepstake* on the upcoming world cup.
One thing I’d like to do is to give a prize to the person whose team does the worst. That way, if someone draws a team that has little hope of making the semis, or gets thrashed in their group games, they can still hope to win some kind of prize.
Now, obviously there are different ways of defining “worst”.
So, what I am asking is, are there commonly-used standards of defining worst, either specifically for football or for knockout tournaments in general?
A sweepstake is like this: all participants pay the same amount to join. They are each given a team randomly (e.g. by drawing names from a hat). The money paid in is then paid out in prizes to those people who had the winning team(s).
Start with number of points, then goal difference, then number of goals scored. If there’s still a tie then split the pot or look at “whoever had the strongest opponents based on how far they progress”. If the eventual winner is in team A’s group then team B is the weakest. If both groups have say a semi-finalist as best performer, look at the second best progresser. If that is a tie, then I’d just leave it at that.
I agree, except I don’t think you need to go as far as suggested by Mr Shine - just go with fewest points (no doubt there will be a few teams who end with zero), then worst goal difference, then fewest goals scored (which is arbitrary, as it just rewards teams which attack slightly better than they defend at the expense of teams that defend slightly better than they attack - which is more justifiable from a tournament point of view, as it should encourage what is generally seen as more exciting play, but less so for this competition where the constraints you place will not have any chance of influencing the outcome. Still, it’s a differentiator so you may as well use it anyway). Then if there is still a tie (unlikely, albeit more likely than under Mr Shine’s system) then split the prize. Not that there is anything wrong with the previous post - it’s just a bit more complex to administer.
You could also consider having further prizes, for example best/worst displinary records (based on something like 1 point for a yellow card, 3 for a red, then calculate most/least points per game for each team). This helps to keep it interesting for the vast majority of players who will end up with a ‘middling’ team, i.e. one that is never going to win but also will never be in contention for the worst team. It’s true that one team could win two prizes under this system, so you decide either that you are happy with that, or say that these additional prizes can only be won by teams that have not already won a prize.