Germany are through to the round of 32 at the World Cup. They’ll play at Gillette Stadium on Monday, June 29 for the right to move on to Philadelphia in the round of 16 on July 4.
There’s nothing wrong with that on the face of it but Germany still have a group stage match to play. Their points total can’t be matched by opponents Ecuador but a win for the South Americans would leave the door open for Ivory Coast to join Germany on six points.
It wouldn’t matter if they did. It still wouldn’t matter if Ivory Coast somehow overturned the Germans’ vastly superior goal difference. Germany won the match between the two, and that’s that. For the first time, World Cup group positions are being settled on head-to-head and Germany beat Ivory Coast in game two.
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There have always been dead rubbers and compromised fixtures but format failings are avoidable
Clearly, that’s not ideal. It’s a problem that will affect several World Cup 2026 groups one way or another and the idea of taking the edge off what should be a suite of thrilling concurrent group stage deciders is an unfortunate choice.
Group E illustrates some of the issues. Germany’s goal difference is skewed by their 7-1 win over Curacao. That might not seem like the most direct way to break a theoretical tie between Germany and Ivory Coast, but it would undoubtedly have made the last games more consequential.
There’s no right or wrong way to choose a tiebreaker but the way the group stage was laid out and has played out does leave a strange taste as these final fixtures get underway.
“Everybody knew the rules with goal difference,” writes Daniel Storey of The i Paper, who is driving solo across the United States to take in all the World Cup has to offer and more.
“You had three matches and all of those matches mattered equally. Now, one match is potentially undisputedly worth more but with the twist that you only find out which one at the end.”
That’s something of a consensus opinion among observers, pundits and commentators, and there’s obvious merit to it. If the tiebreaker isn’t an issue in one World Cup and becomes one in the next, it’s worth looking at what was changed.
There’s a bigger problem, though, and it’s not just Gianni Infantino’s fawning little brother complex in his pathetic worship of Donald Trump on football’s behalf.
Scotland and South Korea woke up at their World Cup training bases today not knowing whether they’re in or out after playing all three group matches.
Creating this limbo by reviving the World Cup’s lopsided format is a much more egregious error than opting for an admittedly inferior tiebreaker, which, incidentally, is obviously not applicable in the third-place ranking.
It’s possible to argue that goal difference is flawed just as head-to-head has predictable shortcomings. The one in use is worse than the one that’s not, but still, there are justifications for both.
Teams reaching the final whistle of their last group stage match and not knowing within a matter of moments whether they’ve done enough to make the cut for the next round is straight-up piping-hot nonsense.
32 is the perfect number of teams for a modern World Cup. 16 is too few and 64 too many by far, but anything in between – and the World Cup has now tried both 24 and 48 – doesn’t make sense.
It might not be unfair to rank third-placed teams and eliminate some and not others but the subsequent delayed destiny is avoidably awkward and a lot more detrimental to the competition than a wonky tiebreaker.
With the centenary of the World Cup imminent, there was a proposal to expand it again to 64 teams. 64 teams is too many. 128 matches is too much football. 96 group stages games is too long.
The idea was rebuffed in favour of a second 48-team tournament and the same problems all over again.
32 teams into a round of 16 is right there – no ranking of third-place teams, no waiting around to find out, no weird vulnerabilities to results in different groups entirely.
There are other ways to administer a 48-team tournament without expecting teams to sit around for half a week before sending them home anyway but none is as elegant as the mathematical beauty of a perfect bracket.
