World Cup Format - Fair or is there Something Better?

As we head into the final stretch with the group Draw for the World Cup many times fairness.

They even asked on the Fifa.com website if they should change the number of teams involved in the final tournament.  So yes people think things should change or change is in the air.

As far as I understand the 32 team format for the final tournament has been around for at leas the last 4-5 world cups.  Interestingly, it seems so natural to have this number of teams in the tournament while in the near past it was a lot less and in the early days it was even as low as only 18 teams.



Some think that due to the maturing of Futebol around the world that locations like Africa or Asia should have more teams but, how do you do this without throwing in more from Europe where football is very mature.  However, are we trying to be fair or are we looking for simply the best play from teams around the world.   Is football so mature in Oceania or Asia?



The most interesting method would be to come up with the world rankings and then simply pick the top 32 teams.  Ye, this would leave out Asia or Africa many times and locations like North America would also be short on representation.  How in reality would you come up with enough games in a format that works to have some form of ranking?  Keep the games in the different confederation, or just do a huge random draw of everyone that can play and have a certain number of games?  You'd have a bunch of teams killing the weak and less mature say like Germany playing a Burma.  Or Brazil with a Maldives islands.   This would make thing a little different.



Under the current system several higher ranked teams from Europe for example have been left out since you find they did not make it out of the second round (playoffs).  This because you find you have representation from all confederations.

Going with the recently released world ranking you find a mix of teams from around the world but, mostly European.

FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking

Last Updated 28 Nov 2013

Nov 2013

	Rnk	Team	Pts	+/- Pos
	1	Spain	1507	0
	2	Germany	1318	0
	3	Argentina	1251	0
	4	Colombia	1200	0
	5	Portugal	1172	9
	6	Uruguay	1132	0
	7	Italy	1120	1
	8	Switzerland	1113	-1
	9	Netherlands	1106	-1
	10	Brazil	1102	1
	11	Belgium	1098	-6
	12	Greece	1055	3
	13	England	1041	-3
	14	USA	1019	-1
	15	Chile	1014	-3
	16	Croatia	971	2
	17	Côte d'Ivoire	918	0
	18	Ukraine	907	2
	19	France	893	2
	20	Mexico	892	4
	21	Bosnia-Herzegovina	886	-5
	22	Russia	870	-3
	23	Ecuador	852	-1
	24	Ghana	849	-1
	25	Denmark	831	1
	26	Algeria	800	6
	27	Sweden	793	-2
	28	Czech Republic	766	-1
	29	Slovenia	762	1
	30	Serbia	752	-2

	31	Costa Rica	738	0
	32	Romania	734	-3

If you use this list as a base you find that several teams on this list have not made it to the 2014 competition; Teams like Ukraine, Slovenia, Serbia etc.  You also would see no representation from Asia and Africa is really almost an after thought.  So this could be an interesting way to come up with the 32 teams for the final tournament..... but, if you want to continue to have a world wide representation with the best teams unfortunately, you have to leave a few from Europe out and include a few from the far flung parts of the world.

The current format seems to be working very well.  The last time they expanded things it was to include a couple more from North America, Asia and Africa.

Also the group play format if wonderful.  You have a method to eliminate the bottom half of the teams but, still allow them to play a fair number of games.  Think each group has play 3 games (6 in each group) and ties become really important.  This provides for interesting football and lets the better 2 teams pass out of group stage.  Then you start doing the single elimination.

I've run many a rain gutter regatta or pinewood derby with the Cub scouts.  I've seen what happens when your numbers get too big if you decide to do Round robin or even double elimination.
See my post on double elimination.
Many like double elimination due to the fact you have each player go twice.  This keeps people from feeling they got cheated especially if they get to change lanes or gutters.  Round robin is another interesting animal.  Since you complete against everyone it can take a long time.
An 18 team  round robin competition would require about 153 games or so.  Even if you have them going on constantly you are looking at like 15 games for each of 10 locations.  You'd still have the near month long competition if you want to include some rest days.  It would be double that for the 32 teams so round robin is not practical or even fair in some respects.  You technically could have a couple of teams that end up with the same number of wins, draws and loses.  You don't want to have to do some lottery draw to decide who is best.  And an additional penalty kick event could be a bit much.
The group play stage is like the first of the 2 double eliminations or both for that matter.  They make sure to have each team playing several games.  Then you simply kill of the loser.  Not that bad of a system.

There is also the issue of seeding for the world cup.  You have 4 teams in each of the 8 groups so you have a total of 4 pots to pull from.  They want to make sure that not to many come from each confederation in each group.  Does no good to have a group of Africa teams with say Belgium or mainly South America with say just Australia.  The play by confederation has already occurred and we don't need a repeat of that.   That make it almost a guarantee that each pot has some Europeans but not to many.  As of right now only 9 teams are left from Europe to be seeded.  That makes 3 per remaining pot.  Though that does give you the possibility of 3 or more teams from Europe in a group.  You'd likely want to increase the numbers of euro teams in a pot.  Throwing all the Asia team in a pot or all the North American team also makes sense if you want to guarantee they do not play each other.

Come Friday December 6th this will all be resolved  for the 2014 Brazil World Cup.
Then we can find out if there will be an iron group of power house teams.  With countries like Italy, Netherlands, France, Portugal, and Russia not being in the first pot anything could happen.  It could be just one of those times getting out of group play will be a pain.





Buaidh - NO - Bas

Cub Scout Space Derby

Well back at the beginning of the month we held our Space Derby.
This was the first time I've run one of these as a Cub Master.  There were a lot of things to resolve.  Compared to the rain gutter regatta this was not a walk in the park.

First I found out we were going to have to build the rack to hold the lines to run the rocket on.  We based it off of the information provided in the cub leader how-to book Cub Leader How-to Book I decided to make the rack of the Inverted "T" format.  This seemed simpler though I did add the gating system on to one side.  More on that fiasco later.  There were problems through out the process.  Nothing seemed to go as expected. And since this competition required such a technical track just like the pinewood derby you add an additional element that can go wrong.

And you have all the issues with the rockets.  These rockets require a set of rubber bands inside to make the propeller function.  That in itself create issues.  We had mostly broken rubber bands at the end of the night.  You also have issues with weight.  Several of the rockets could go no more then 1- 1 1/2 feet max even with the propeller wound 100 times.  They were just to heavy or unbalanced like the one I created.

Strangely we have some of the parts coming unglued as well.  We are not sure if it was the type of glue used, lack of glued used or a combination of the two.  We had the plastic carrier piece that fits at the top of the rocket come out on at least 2 rockets.  One was put in with Gorilla glue and eventually came out.  It may have been something to do with plastic to balsa wood.  Hard to say.

Not much was consistent at the event.  Just problem after problem.

The rack was giving us tension issues.  The fishing line has to be tight or there can be some sag in the line and performance issues shortly there after.  In the end we have a person on each end holding back the rack. It tended to want to bow inward and stability being and issues we could and did have the rack fall over more then once during the night.
We also had issues with the courier mounts.  Cheaply made out of out plastic the ones we got from the scout house had to be hot glued to even get some use out of them.  Some one has to design something better.  Expecting to have 2 small plastic knobs hold a critical piece together does not make good engineering sense.  I know that due to weight the whole thing could flop if the couriers were not designed as light weight as possible.  possibly a thin aluminum one would work better.  Just too many things that could and did go wrong to make this worth the effort.

It would be better to do a rocket launch for height then this event in the future.  I'll be sticking to the Rain Gutter Regatta when we decide to do big events like this.  The major issues with this is how to drain the gutters.  Mild compared to the Pinewood Derby or Space Derby.  And if outside how to make sure you have a level location and not let the wind effect things to much.

I did find a good multi-lane round robin scheme.  See Below.  This allows the person to race on each lane at least once and also against each other participant.  Good for 7 racers.

		Lane
	1	2	3
Rocket	1	2	4
number	2	3	5
	3	4	6
	4	5	7
	5	6	1
	6	7	2
	7	1	3

So put this down as one more learning experience.  I'll include pictures or the like in a future post.

Buaidh - NO - Bas

A word about Double Elimination and the Pinewood Derby

I current serve as Cub Master in one of the local cub scout packs.  Unfortunately our numbers are really small so we combine with another unit.  We then decided to join in with a different unit to hold a Pinewood derby.  For all the effort, issues and mistakes the boy really enjoyed the event.

However, it was not easy and there could have been a lot more problems.  For one we ended up with a moving target when it came to the number of participating Cub Scouts.  And have you ever tried to run double elimination on an odd number of participants with multiple lanes?






I learned after this that unless the number of people involved is fairly large doing round robin style is the best.  In round robin you have each person compete against all the other players.  Easy to figure out the heats when only doing two lanes but, a little harder for 3 and 4 lanes.

There is a great site that has both 3 and 4 lane heat sheets for various numbers of racers.
Round Robin Heat Sheets Pinewood Derby

Now the reason I ran into so much trouble with double elimination is that you have to separate the winners from the losers.  How do you do that with 3 cars per heat?  You always have an odd man out.  Do you keep only the best and keep dumping the others down in the losers bracket?
Normally those in the losers bracket keep going till they lose their second race, then you have new people entering as they lose out in the semi-finals etc.  Sadly in all this you have the issues of a bad lane, etc that can taint the competition at least from the parents perspective.

So I created a funky system loosely based on the methods used in the FIFA World Cup.
You have several heats that switch the winners and losers so you've mixed it up for the second run.  Gets kind of hard when you have odd numbers of racers or heats.  Then I had a raw score taken for the two races.  The lowest scores were given the lowest rank and that determined who headed to the semi-finals and who went on to compete for the Golden Wrench (slowest car).

Now I also decided to do the round robinish stuff in the final and golden wrench last heats.  In part due to the fact I planned things out for 15 racers.  The version for 16 racers using 4 lanes works much better after you have the rankings.  See the diagrams below.

Now if you can understand the diagrams a bit you will see quickly why round robin is best.
Everyone would get to rotate lanes and competes against all the other racers.  There is no possible issue with saying well I never went up against so and so and therefore, I may be better.
So for the future I'm sticking with the round robin like I did for the Rain Gutter Regatta.  Far superior method of running races.  If you'd like a copy of the excel spread sheets with the race information just leave a comment and I be happy to get you a copy.

I'm including a link to great movie covering the subject of the pinewood derby called "Down and Derby".  Enjoy   BUAIDH - NO - BAS
















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