I finally watched the US game replay, and those final 11 US players on the pitch were completely gassed. Maybe Pulisic missing the 2nd half is a good thing for Saturday if he comes back fully healthy. But a bit of bad luck for the US that they are getting the Saturday game instead of Sunday.
As a Redditor put it, Pulisic sacrificed his nether lands so that we could play the Netherlands.
I guess we’ll see.
I missed the beginning of the second half off the game today; tuned in as the U.S. was taking a free kick from just outside the box. I’ve seen highlights of the game, but non have shown the penalty that led to the kick. How bad was the penalty, and how close was it to being a penalty kick?
The Musah FK? It was a handball and like 5 yards outside the box.
How so?
One less day to rest, recover, and prepare.
Right. And the fact that Netherlands had a much easier time of it in their game. The 2 other teams to progress from these groups (England and Senegal) play on Sunday.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of elimination
I shall not fear, because El Diego is with me.
His left foot and his dribbling comfort me.
I think two group stages would be more interesting. Have the first round be traditional groups of four, so we go from 48 to 24. Then the second round can be groups of three, going from 24 to 16. Than have a traditional knockout round.
This is when we run into the same issues as the current plan for 2026.
If we must have 48 teams, which to me waters down the whole field and de-emphasizes the qualification process, then my first thought is 8 groups of 6 teams is better. The 1st round would be 5 games, and only the winner of each group advances to the QF’s. This would only add 1 total game played by each team. But I think with the inclusion of so many relatively weak teams in the field, the tie-breaker process would have to be something other than Goal Differential and Goals Scored. Otherwise, you might get 10-0 scores and such.
In theory group stages would be better at eliminating weak teams and keeping the strong teams in, for the same reason that a 7 game series is better than a 5 game series, which is better than a single knockout game, at determining the better team in sports like baseball, hockey, and basketball. Even if 2/3 of the team are advancing out of a group stage (and a second one at that, with the bottom half already gone), that should help the best teams, not hurt them.
Here’s a question for our thread members. A four team round robin seems too small to me because there are too many ties that have to be resolved via goal differential or, heaven forbid, a drawing from a bowl, which is just plain chance. So, wouldn’t a 5 team round robin or even a 6 team round robin be much better? It seems to me that there would be a significantly less chance for there to be a tie in the standings that has to be resolved by some weird tie breaking formula.
One of the good things about the current format is that it gives lots of teams something to shoot for. Iran has never made it out of the group stage; how thrilled would they have been to win yesterday and just make it to the knockout stage? I think a problem with your proposal, @JJ, is that it only gives 8 teams that opportunity. Do you think a team, and a country, is going to be stoked that they finished second in their group instead of third? They’re done either way.
Sure, but it would blow up the group stage enormously. If my math is right, the number of games in a group of n teams is n(n-1), so a five team group would mean 20 games per group and six teams even 30. I think that could become very boring, the real meat in a WC are the knock-out games.
With six teams there would be 15 round robin matches.
I don’t love the notion of one team from each group of six advancing, but in some sense that’s where we are with 48 teams… Either that, or some other contrived solution.
n(n-1)/2 surely?
Damn, so my math was wrong. I didn’t take into account that the teams only play each other once and not a home and an away game like in league football.
But my point about long boring group stages still stands.
One clever thing the new format does, FIFA gets 80 matches instead of 64, but the winner still has to play in only seven.
ETA well it turns out FIFA is still considering 12 groups of four. What a long tournament that would make.
This is exactly the problem. You could get around this, say by making the actual line used for determining offside calls slightly fuzzy, adding or removing a couples inches at random, to model the human eye, but that defeats the tech’s purpose.
Considering the number of major matches where a provably 100% incorrect call impacted the outcome of the game (and every cup before this one was filled with controversy over one game or another), I think this is an improvement.
The only reason not to do it previously was to avoid turning soccer into a turn based game like NFL Football, where every few seconds play is stopped for minites at a time. Now that the tech is good enough to make accurate calls on the fly, it is 100% a good thing.
Teams will have to adapt. Argentina fell for Saudi Arabia’s extra-impactful offside traps, and maybe if this game was being officiated the way games were last tournament they’d have won. But if Argentina is actually a good team, and if their coach is worth their salt, then they’ll adjust their game plan (as I think we have seen them do) to fit this new reality.