On the role of tournament design in sporting success: A study of the North, Central American and Caribbean qualification for the 2022 FIFA World Cup

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how the design of FIFA World Cup qualifiers, especially the 2022 format, influences teams' chances of qualification, highlighting the impact of tournament structure and proposing probabilistic reforms to improve fairness.

Contribution

It evaluates the effects of tournament design changes on qualification probabilities and suggests a probabilistic seeding method to enhance competitiveness and fairness.

Findings

Qualification probability can vary by over 5 percentage points due to format changes.

Original design with two distinct sets increases competitiveness among different team strengths.

Probabilistic seeding could mitigate nonlinearity and improve fairness in qualification.

Abstract

Playing in the FIFA World Cup finals is an ambition shared by several nations. Since, besides luck and skill, the probability of qualification depends on the design of the qualifiers, the study of these competitions forms an integral part of sports analytics. The Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) announced a novel qualifying format for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in July 2019. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the organisers to return to a more traditional structure. The present chapter analyses how this reform impacted the chances of the national teams to qualify. It is found that the probability of participating in the FIFA World Cup finals can change by more than 5 percentage points under the assumption of fixed strengths for the teams. The idea behind the original design, to divide the contestants into two distinct sets, is worth considering due to the increased competitiveness of the matches played by the strongest and the weakest teams. We recommend mitigating the sharp nonlinearity caused by the seeding policy via a probabilistic rule to the analogy of the NBA draft lottery system.