Reflections
How do you determine the best of 32 soccer teams? That’s the question.
One way is being tried out in South Africa right now. Seed some teams and make up 8 groups with 4 teams in each. Call it round 1. Let every team meet every other team in the group in round 1 and let the two best teams advance to the second round. In the second round the 16 teams play an elimination tournament, one loss and you are out.
In my opinion the system has several serious flaws.
- Not every match counts. You may lose a match in round 1, but if you advance to round 2 it is of no importance.
- Because of point 1 the early matches are less exciting as they may be of no importance.
- The teams do not play the same number of matches. If you don’t go to round 2 you play only 3 matches, while the finalists play 7.
- Some teams are seeded based on previous performance giving them an advantage. All teams should enter the tournament on the same footing.
- The system only determines the best team. The losing finalists may not be the second best team and for the other teams they don’t get a final score showing how well they did.
The good news is that all of these flaws can be rectified if a modified Swiss System is used. The system goes like this:
- In the first round who meets who is decided randomly.
- In all other rounds you meet a team you haven’t met before that has the same number of points as you (3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, and 0 for a loss) and the same goal average.
- For the cases where the rule in 2 does not uniquely determine who meets who one draws the opponents.
- Four rounds are played which gives a total of 64 matches. In the present system 63 matches (8 * 6 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1) are played.
- If some teams end up with the same number of points they play an elimination tournament to determine the winner. That way you have a final match where everything is decided.
- If the number of teams at the top after round 4 is not 2, 4, or 8 add the next teams to join them in round 2.
What do you think? Is this a better system?
June 20th, 2010 at 3:25 am
Your proposal is based on a flawed presupposition…that the purpose of the tournament is to absolutely determine the best team.
In fact I would argue that the purpose of the tournament is to attract interest (read “make money”), and that the need to seed teams to keep matches close or to force rivals to play in order to draw attention, is in fact a “better system” to use your phrase, to achieve their goal.
June 20th, 2010 at 7:14 am
I believe the proposed system will create more interest than the present. One main reason being that every match counts.
Teams are seeded in order for the higher seeds to not eliminate each other in round 1 and to give close matches in round 2. If the seeding worked the seeded teams should sail through round 1 without any problems. England should beat Argelia, Germany should beat Serbia, France should beat South Africa… etc.
June 21st, 2010 at 1:03 am
[...] The other day I suggested an alternative way of arranging the World Cup matches in soccer. Please have a look at Reflections. [...]
June 21st, 2010 at 8:54 pm
I think the average person prefers simplicity. Stats and rankings such as this are great during the run-up to the tournament. Once the tournament starts, however, brackets should be as simple as possible so as to be easily understood even after 4-5 pints of Guinness.