A double-elimination format for a 48-team FIFA World Cup

TL;DR

This paper proposes a double-elimination tournament format for the 48-team FIFA World Cup, demonstrating it is fairer, more strategic, and more engaging, while fitting within the tournament's time constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel double-elimination format for the FIFA World Cup, addressing fairness, strategy-proofness, and match competitiveness issues of existing formats.

Findings

Double-elimination format is fairer and more strategy-proof.

It produces more competitive and exciting matches.

Can be implemented within the existing tournament timeframe.

Abstract

I present a double-elimination format for the 48-team FIFA World Cup that solves many of the concerns raised about the considered formats with mixed round-robin with groups of 3 or 4 teams and single-elimination strategies. Using a quantitative analytics approach, I show that the double-elimination format is fairer, more strategy-proof, and produces more competitive and exciting matches. It solves the problems of possible collusion in the group-of-3 form and the high number of uninteresting games in the group-of-4 format. Using the restrictions of the 2026 FIFA World Cup to be held in North America, I demonstrate that the double-elimination format can be implemented in a 35 days window, just a few more than the current format for 32 teams. I discuss how the format can be adapted to the particularities of the host nations in future editions to facilitate attendees' and organizers' planning.