Welcome to the Semis! Most of you are spending a hell of a lot more time looking at this than I am, so the path forward for many teams is listed above. Lot of sour grapes in the comments, notably ALL comments are by people who missed on Croatia! Standings below, but as noted, here are the possibilities for top 3:
1st/2nd are IPD and knoath
3rd is Maphisto if Morocco wins or if France beats Morocco but loses in the Final
If France wins it all, 3rd place goes to Outdoorman, by a point or two depending on the Consolation
DeepPurple, despite having Argentina alive, can only top out one point behind Maphisto
Yea, I did this in a few minutes and was wondering which of the soccer afficianados around here with beat the arbitrarily designed system. The dollar values were based on the social media craze of “build the best team you can with $15” and I knocked it down to $10 because I knew someone would just pick all cheap teams and clean up the early rounds. The pricing was based on the betting odds in wide swatches ($5 for anyone <+1000 to win, $4 for +1000 to +2500, or something like that). Morocco was on the border of $1 and $2 and was a ridiculous longshot at +25000, so they were the smart money pick all along in my book.
The NCAA Betting Game is my bread and butter, this one was more of a crap shoot. And it’s been a while since I ran my Fantasy Pope draft, but as the defending champ I’ll have to run that again when the time comes.
I think 2026 should be more productive for both the Canadian and US team due to four more years’ experience for a group of talented young players and the home field advantage.
I think so.
One of the issues with groups of three is that the last match between the two allows a draw (both teams beat the last place team) to put the two teams in the round of 32.
So, how to fix?
12 groups of 4? No, have to decide which third-place teams to take.
8 groups of 6? Take the top two after five matches. That seems reasonable, but adds one match for each team and 120 total matches in Group Stage (currently 48), which would take 20 days to complete.
I hope they realize that 32 is a pretty good Finals number, and instead add more half-spots to confederations.
Could have 24 whole spots and 16 half-spots. If that likely results in more Euro teams, so be it.
I thought 32 was more than enough teams for ANY sports competition but obviously I have to get used to 48. I just think the quality of many of the additional teams from some of the Conferences will be very weak so would like to see some winnowing process. Maybe some teams (top 16?) merit byes but I see flaws with that as well. Will just have to defer to FIFA’s usual wisdom in setting up the process.
12 groups of 4
Winners all advance, top 8 on pts, GD, goals seeded directly into round of 16
12 second and 4 first place teams seeded in first round
Given that there are more games, may have to move to 8 games a day early or go with 6 for first 2 matches and 8 for last match day. Yes, some teams with have an extra day going into last match. It also will push top teams to play hard the 3rd match in order to get a bye.
The 8 teams that get bye are assigned a location to go in advance and acclimate. The draw for opponent is not done until the completion of each game. So, game one of the round of 24 finishes, cut to the studio and the draw is done on who the next opponent is. Adds some drama.
Congrats to IPD (and Messi and Argentina, but mostly IPD) for winning this year’s World Cup (Betting Game)!!! Final results below, AO$100 to IPD, AO$25 to knoath, and Maphisto will be zooming off to Space Camp assuming it’s still open, haven’t seen it advertised since Global Guts back in the 90s.
