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Comment by madcaptenor | Hacker News Reader

See also the Disgrace of Gijón (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgrace_of_Gijón). This is between West Germany and Austria, the last match in a four-team round-robin group in the 1982 World Cup. Before this match it was clear that if West Germany won by 1 or 2 goals, West Germany and Austria would both advance; otherwise one of those teams would advance along with Algeria. You can guess what happens: West Germany scores a goal and then both teams stop trying. Since then, in the World Cup the two final matches of the group start at the same time.

This is probably why the 48-team World Cup starting in 2026 will have 12 groups of 4 instead of 16 groups of 3 - there are similar opportunities for collusion in the final match of a three-team group, and no easy fix.

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That is something different, since Algeria could not change anything in the game at Gijon. That what makes it disgraceful.

In Barbados 4–2 Grenada, both teams still had the opportunity to act, albeit in unforseen and seemingly strange ways.

Just spit balling, one fix could be to just skip the group stage and go right to a big knockout stage, ala domestic cups. That seems too obvious/simple though, so I'm sure there's some reason why they don't do it this way. Maybe they want every country to have a minimum number of games...

Having a longer group stage will probably make these situation less likely as the best teams will pull ahead, but I don't think we want the players to play so many more games.

But the group stage won't be any longer - they're still groups of 4, so each team still plays three group games. However there might be more "pulling away" in a 48-team World Cup than in a 32-team World Cup just because there will be weaker teams in those groups for the strongest teams to beat up on.

By making the group stage longer, I meant that a team would play each other team in their group multiple times.

Going straight to the knockout stages means half the sides in the competition only play one game though, which isn't great for eager anticipation in those countries or travelling fans. Also increases the probability of big sides being amongst the sides going out early due to freak results when they're a bit rusty.

The actual solution - playing the final games in a four game group simultaneously - removes most of the incentives for playing out draws (and means that a side that might be knocked out if the two sides in the other game draw is busy trying to win their game rather than watching powerlessly from the sidelines)

There's not enough money made when you eliminate teams like that. You just eliminated ticket sales and broadcast rights. The tournaments are money making efforts that just happen to entertain people that are fans. Most of it is an excuse for the organizers to get stuff. (yes, I'm very cynical)

It's a really bad way of finding the "best" team too. I think this was written about by Babbage criticising the tennis tournament at Wimbledon but I don't have the reference to hand and my memory is unreliable.

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