It’s all over bar the shouting. Senegal’s 5-0 win over Iraq in Toronto on Friday was the result that dropped Scotland out of the top eight third-placed teams, shifting them from theoretically in World Cup 2026 to theoretically out of it.
Scotland have no control over what happens now. They’ve been relying on results above and below them in the third-placed ranking since full-time against Brazil, knowing they conceded too many in that match and scored too few in their only win against Haiti.
There will be teams that go through with three points, but Scotland’s group stage goal difference left them vulnerable. Senegal’s win took them past South Korea, too. Like Scotland, their hopes are winking out in the dusk of the group stage.
The World Cup draw puts teams at a disadvantage before a ball is kicked
Expanding the World Cup to 48 teams has various consequences. One of the most important is that 48 teams divided into groups of four amounts to 12 groups. Another is that 24 or 36 teams can’t populate a round of 32 or 16 without serious compromise.
The inelegant solution, itself fraught with widely documented issues, is to send the top two teams from each group through and rank the 12 third-placed teams to identify the other eight teams to make up the 32.
Every team knows the deal at the outset so scandalous it is not, but the effect of putting some third-placed teams through and knocking others out is that there is cross-contamination of groups and, consequently, a clear competitive difference between teams whose records are directly compared.
It’s summed up thus: Senegal won 5-0 to bump Scotland out of the top eight on goal difference two days after Scotland had a chance to do anything about it.
There’s no sense in looking for excuses for Steve Clarke’s team. They left themselves in that position, and nobody else is to blame for it, but their example does highlight an inequity in a competition that’s supposed to be pure.
The only third-placed teams with three points in the completed first half of the group stage – Groups A to F – are South Korea in Group A and Scotland in Group C.
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Paraguay, Ecuador and Sweden all collected four points to avoid the silent impurity of the format.
If it’s not square, can it really be fair?
The last uneven World Cup was in 1994, last time it was hosted in the United States.
From six groups, two third-placed teams were eliminated: Russia from Group B and South Korea from Group C, albeit the United States went through in third place in Group A, and two of the three teams that went through playing after Russia and South Korea already had what they needed after two matches.
The first 24-team European Championship in 2016 saw Albania (Group A) and Turkey (Group D) eliminated, while the Republic of Ireland (Group E) and Portugal (Group F) achieved the results they needed in their last games.
Group B and E sent third-placed teams home from Euro 2020. In Euro 2024, Hungary (Group A) and Croatia (Group B) were the two third-placed teams eliminated from the group stage.
There’s no smoking gun, no unimpeachable body of evidence that teams drawn into the early groups have historically been hurt by later teams knowing that a draw or a win or a certain number of goals will reel them in, at least not yet.
There have been too many teams fall backwards into the knock-out rounds or pick up perfectly normal results at the end of the group stage to draw the conclusion that there’s a measurable disadvantage simply to being drawn in Group A or B or C.
But in FourFourTwo’s opinion, there’s a layer of unnecessary doubt that’s been introduced into tournaments by both FIFA and UEFA that makes the picture much clearer for teams in Senegal’s position than Scotland’s.
There’s no way to know how or even whether the creation of overlaps between what should be siloed groups can affect matchday three results, but even the possibility of a lopsided sporting equation would have been better avoided.
