By Karolos Grohmann
BOSTON, Massachusetts, July 3 (Reuters) - The expanded 48-team World Cup has made giant-killings significantly more likely, according to experts, but the longer and more demanding tournament still favours the traditional heavyweight sides best equipped to sustain their level through five knockout rounds.
FIFA expanded the tournament from 32 to 48 teams, adding more than 10 days to the schedule. A newly created round of 32 means teams must now survive an extra knockout match to lift
the trophy, while eight third-placed finishers from the group stage advanced, creating more potential pathways for lower-ranked sides.
“We have an additional knockout match where the stronger teams will have a chance of one in three, one in four, one in five to proceed. This is the additional risk you get for the serious contenders to be kicked out,” Achim Zeileis, Professor of Statistics at Universitaet Innsbruck, told Reuters. “So it’s reduced to 80% or 75% of the probability they had without this additional problem.”
Zeileis, part of an international team of researchers using machine-learning models to simulate every possible World Cup match, said the revised group stage also introduces new uncertainty.
With eight of the 12 third-placed teams progressing, the final round of group matches becomes more strategically complex, with teams able to react to earlier results while permutations over potential opponents multiply.
“So the eight out of 12 (groups) is the much more serious problem because it gives you this time dependency problem that later group matches can strategically react to the earlier group matches, and they also lead to these many permutations that some top-ranked teams play against third-ranked teams, but they don’t know which one.”
The format also left several teams waiting days after their final group match before discovering whether they had qualified among the best third-placed finishers.
The tournament has produced several notable surprises. Four-time champions Germany were eliminated by Paraguay in the round of 32, and three-times finalists Netherlands lost at the same stage to Morocco.
The longer tournament is also changing how leading teams approach matches. With more games to survive and less recovery time between them, coaches are increasingly managing energy and risk rather than trying to dominate every opponent from the outset.
BIGGER CHANCES OF UPSET
“I think it (expanded format) probably it does (affect), because if you take an England … at times England have appeared to be actually quite conservative in the way that they’ve approached games,” Simon Chadwick, Professor of Afro-Eurasian Sport, told Reuters.
“In the (group) game against Ghana, against Panama and the (round of 32) against Democratic Republic of Congo, they were much more conservative and cautious, and I think the reason for that is that tournament management has actually become very, very important.”
Although the expanded format creates more opportunities for surprise results, sustaining them over five knockout rounds remains a far greater challenge.
“The more teams you include, the bigger the chances of an upset,” Stefan Szymanski, Emeritus Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan, told Reuters. “But teams now have (in the knockout stage) five games to go to win the World Cup… so it’s just not very likely.”
Any suggestion that the expanded tournament marks a broader shift in football’s balance of power away from Europe and South America is premature, according to Peter Alegi, Professor of History at Michigan State University and author of several books on African football.
MOROCCO THE EXCEPTIONS
Morocco are the notable exceptions. The North African side have benefited from sustained government investment in youth development, are the reigning Under-20 world champions and reached the semi-finals of the 2022 World Cup. As a result, they are widely seen as the only team outside Europe and South America with a realistic chance of breaking the traditional grip on the last four.
"I do hope there is a (African) team that makes it to the semi-finals, possibly Morocco," Alegi told Reuters, stressing that any of Morocco's success should not be seen as an accurate reflection on the health of the game across the continent.
"How can Nigeria, a country of 250 million, not make it to the World Cup is really an indictment of how football is organised and managed in that country," he said, "It is an exaggerated representation of the problems facing many African countries."
If the expanded format has made the road to the title less predictable, it has not fundamentally changed the identity of the favourites. Statistical modelling still points towards one of the tournament’s traditional heavyweights lifting the trophy.
“We would have to say the top four teams are now Spain, England, France and Argentina,” Zeileis said. “I would say these four teams, and it’s a pretty open race at this stage. I would not trust my pre-tournament model results to do a good distinction between these four.”
(Reporting by Karolos Grohmann, editing by Ed Osmond)
