May Madness: How a National Team Knockout Competition Could Work
It is the sort of classic "wouldn’t it be cool if..." suggestion that seems to come around during every interminable international break.
Wouldn't it be cool if there was an FA Cup—but for national teams?
No groups, an open draw, anyone can play anyone on the way to a showpiece final in some glitzy international capital. Wouldn't that be a great spectacle? Wouldn't everyone around the world get excited for that?
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Of course we would—but then again, that tends to be the case with things we know can never happen. Surely such a competition would never be viable, right?
The obvious answer is no, it could not; that it would be both a logistical and practical nightmare, with so many moving parts that even Albert Einstein could never bring all of them together with sufficient skill to make such an ambitious and unprecedented spectacle viable.
Having said that, nothing good ever came from simply giving up, so here is our attempt to take a look at how such a tournament—the International FA Cup (IFAC), as we are provisionally calling it—could theoretically be arranged.
The Essentials
The Basic Format
We should start with the outlines. The FA Cup is a straight knockout competition, in which English teams from all levels of the football pyramid are drawn against each other in a home-and-away format until only two teams are left. Those teams contest the final, which is held at Wembley Stadium in May.
If the first meeting between two teams ends in a draw, a replay is held at the home ground of the side that was away for the first meeting.
For the purposes of our competition, replays would have to be ditched—they are something of a relic these days anyway, but the modern football calendar simply does not have the space to accommodate unnecessary extra games, especially if we are talking about trips halfway across the globe.
In the IFAC, therefore, tied matches would go straight to extra time and, if necessary, a penalty shootout.
The home sides in the competition would choose where in their country the tie would be played, subject to IFAC approval. Ticket receipts and other revenues would be shared equally between the two countries involved (perhaps with a small cut going to the organisers—this is FIFA we are talking about, after all).
The tournament would be financed in great part by television deals and corporate sponsors. Television rights deals would be sold centrally by the competition organisers (FIFA, in conjunction with the continental governing bodies), with the money being split between the participants based in part on how far they reach in the competition.
As we will see, that should ensure the bigger nations should still profit from the competition more than they would if it did not exist—hopefully encouraging their initial agreement to be involved.
How Would It Fit Into the Calendar?
This, on the surface at least, would appear to be the biggest obstacle to such an event. The football calendar is already packed—if anything, governing bodies should be looking to reduce the number of matches, rather than increase them.
There is hope, however. By removing all friendlies from the calendar (initially, at least), there might theoretically be room amid all the qualifiers for other established competitions (the World Cup, continental tournaments, etc.) to run the IFAC alongside them.
Managers, for both club and country, might be angered by this move—friendlies are a valuable chance to experiment with sides, and for club managers a chance to withdraw their players from games they don't want to play with soft "injuries" and other feeble excuses—but since when is football dictated by the managers? The public want to see this competition, and so friendlies will have to make way.
Brazil, for example, have played 15 friendlies over the last 18 months—partly because they did not need to qualify for last summer's World Cup, but also partly because they have become something close to the Harlem Globetrotters of international football.
If they will play Argentina in Beijing, for example (as they did in October), then surely they can add the IFAC to their commitments without too much difficulty.
England, as another example, have played nine friendlies in that same time frame—with probably three more to come before the season is out (next week, for example, they face Scotland). Even removing the two World Cup warm-ups that are included in that tally, that theoretically gives us 10 match dates in which to play IFAC matches over the course of a two-year span.
The Time Frame
While an International FA Cup would be fun, it would lose its lustre somewhat if it took four years between its first game and its last to decide a winner.
Even if the international game naturally lends itself to less rapid fluctuations in the quality of teams, it would still dilute the impact of the final result if Spain won the tournament three years after a suddenly resurgent Brazil, as a random example, were knocked out. Not to mention the fact neutral observers would quickly lose interest at the glacial pace of the competition.
At the other end of the spectrum, a one-year run would be ideal, but similarly impractical for different reasons. With the volume of games involved, it would be virtually impossible to run the whole competition in the space of a season without messing significantly with club schedules.
A two-season run from start to finish would seem to be the absolute limit of what would be considered viable, while anything quicker would be almost impossible to slot into the calendar without causing havoc to domestic competitions.
With that in mind, it would seem to make sense to run the tournament in parallel to the qualification cycles of the World Cup and European Championship competitions; i.e. if the IFAC was to start at the beginning of the 2016/17 season, the final stages would take place toward the end of the 2017/18 campaign—just before the summer World Cup in Russia.
That has some added benefits—the World Cup qualification process for almost all teams ends before Christmas, leaving the entire second half of that season open for warm-up friendlies and, in our brave new world, the latter stages of the IFAC.
This, then, is the period when we will play the closing stages of the IFAC, with the final perhaps taking place during either the March or May international break that is currently an accepted part of the calendar.
The same qualification timetable is also true for the European Championships, although with other continents involved in other competitions (that also take place at different times), that particular cycle might prove additionally problematic.
For now, we’ll add that to list of problems we are going to conveniently ignore.
The basics are set, however. A knockout competition, with no replays, running over the course of two years, with the closing stages played out in the months leading up to that season’s World Cup/European Championships.
Now, on to some more of the complexities.
The Third Round
The third round is what makes the FA Cup special, and it is also what will prove crucial to the (theoretical) success of the IFAC.
For the uninitiated, the third round of the FA Cup takes place over the first weekend of January every year and is the round in which the Premier League and Championship sides enter the competition—where invariably a number of them are drawn with lower-league sides who have fought hard to reach that point.
That means that 44 of the 64 teams still in the competition at that point have not even played a game yet. It can be an overlooked fact that even the FA Cup is not a completely open draw—for so many reasons (not least that around 760 teams enter each season), that would be impossible.
If the FA Cup cannot find a way to be completely open, then neither can the IFAC.
Currently there are 209 member nations within FIFA. Not only do we need to get that number down to 64 at some point to then emulate the FA Cup, but we need to decide how many countries enter the competition at that "third round" stage (without a league system to delineate countries easily, we have to get more creative).
To make things both arbitrary and simple, we will settle on 32 "seeds" for the third round—meaning that, at that stage, of the 64 teams involved, 32 teams will have had to play their way into that round and the other 32 will enter the competition at that stage. The symmetry is pleasing, and it offers a reasonable balance.
How do we decide who those 32 seeds will be? Well, for the sake of saving the word count on this piece (well, slightly), we will go by the FIFA world rankings.
Over time, depending on the success of the IFAC, perhaps we will develop a coefficient (similar to the one UEFA uses to decide Champions League groups) to help assist in this process, where countries are rewarded or penalised based on their recent IFAC performances. But for now we will go with the world rankings for all seedings-related issues.
To avoid confusion, the world rankings at the start of August of the season each IFAC kicks off will be taken as the measure for the entirety of the competition. As of right now (in the rankings updated on October 23), Denmark are the 32nd and final team to automatically qualify for the third round of our competition. Cape Verde Islands, unlucky in 33rd, will have to find a different route.
The third-round draw itself will be open (so seeds can be drawn to face other seeds), as will all subsequent rounds. Barring a real Cinderella story—or a remarkable draw—it is unlikely a minnow will reach much beyond this stage of the competition, so logistically every round from this point forward should be relatively straightforward.
Unfortunately, it is the rounds before that cause the headaches.
Leading up to the Third Round
Remember when we said there are currently 209 member nations? Well, that odd number adds an extra headache to our planning, and we are not exactly short of them already.
With 32 seeds reaching the third round, that leaves 177 teams to be whittled down to 32 to complete the all-important third-round lineup. What is more, many of those 177 nations are barely much more than enclaves—Andorra, for example, or Grenada—without the financial resources to traipse across the world for that decisive away match against Bangladesh.
The multibillion-pound deal for television rights we would negotiate for this competition would give us the opportunity to assist the smaller sides economically, but even so it would make sense to regionalise the early rounds of the competition (the games are hardly going to be big media draws anyway) and thin out some of the no-hopers that would want to take part.
Even the fans of Andorra wouldn't get excited about a meeting with Nepal, after all. So what is the answer?
The First Regional Play-off Round
FIFA members are divided into six continental regions, but they aren't of equal size. Here is the breakdown:
| Members of FIFA | 52 | 46 | 11 | 36 | 10 | 54 |
Adding to the complication, the regions are of varying strength. UEFA, for example, has about as many teams as CAF (Africa) and AFC (Asia), but many more of them are of decent quality (which is part of the reason why UEFA has 13 World Cup spots—more than a third of the total available—and the others do not).
For reasons that will soon become clear, we want to reduce 98 teams to 49 in this first preliminary stage. This means we need to get pretty harsh about which regions have to "pre-qualify" a certain amount of their teams.
All of South America’s 10 member nations are pretty good, for example, so they escape this round completely. Africa, Asia and CONCACAF have a high percentage of tiny states as members, so a huge percentage of their teams will have to start from the bottom if they want to make a run in the competition.
UEFA get off lightly, relatively speaking, but the likes of San Marino and the Faroe Islands will still have to enter at the first possible stage.
| Teams | 15 | 24 | 9 | 25 | 0 | 25 |
The benevolent, magnanimous organisers that we are, we will allow the individual continental governing bodies to figure out which teams will be involved (again, the world rankings would seem the obvious answer—i.e. the worst 25 CONCACAF teams by the world rankings have to enter at this round).
But, one way or another, 98 teams will have to be whittled down to 49.
The Second Regional Play-off Round
With 49 teams progressing from the regionals, that leaves us with 128 teams still vying to be one of the 32 qualifiers for our fabled third round. Hey, that’s a round number!
At this stage, one option would be to play a straight knockout; from this point the 128 become 64, then 32. With just two rounds of games, we would be into the third round and the big teams. Bonanza.
Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, that comes with headaches of its own. Such a system would come with the very real prospect of a country like Turkey (currently 46th in FIFA's world rankings) being drawn to face a country like Laos (154th) or Tahiti (166th) away from home.
While you might think the Turkish FA should just suck it up and play that game, in this hypothetical scenario (where we seemingly chose to ignore some problems, and embrace others, with no real rhyme or reason) there is a very real prospect that the bigger sides would simply refuse to participate in such a competition from the outset if there was more than a minimal risk of them ever being forced into such a meeting.
To put it succinctly: We need more seeds.
To put it another way: The minnows need to be screwed some more.
Those 49 qualifiers? Let's put them together with an additional 15 seeds, again drawn from the six FIFA regions. These sides might be slightly above the first entrants in the world rankings, but they remain way down the pecking order in the grand scheme of things.
As the economic constraints of the participants are likely still to be in effect, this round will also have to be regionalised. That means a set number of countries from each governing body will have to be added into the mix and stirred, like some sort of poorly planned bolognese we are cooking.
For ease of reference, here is how we have worked out those 15 teams will be added.
| Governing body | UEFA | AFC | OFC | Concacaf | Conmebol | CAF |
| Teams | 2 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 4 |
That leaves a 64-team round. From those 64 teams, we get down to 32. That will leave us with 96 teams left in the competition still hoping to qualify for the third round—and allow us to finally (finally!) get to the first round proper.
The First Round Proper
The beauty of our system is that, after the regional preliminaries, the first round proper of the competition, the second round of the competition AND the third round of the competition will all follow the same basic format; 32 seeds and 32 qualifiers to make up the 64 teams involved.
In the first round proper, our 32 qualifiers have come through the gruelling regional qualifiers to get their shot at the big-time (well, the teams ranked between 65th and 96th in the world).
If a tiny side such as Belize (167) make it but need financial assistance to make the long trip to honour their draw, then the gracious organisers of the IFAC (that's us) will provide them with some of the money we have taken from TV companies and corporate sponsors.
To give you an idea of who the seeds might be, at this point in time, Uzbekistan are the 65th-best side in the world, while 96th-placed Cyprus would be the last seed into this round. Anyone could play anyone, however, so the seeds are not that important.
The Second Round Proper
Now we are cruising. The second round sees the 32 victors from the first round, along with 32 seeds.
Again, to give you an idea of the standard of those seeds—33rd in the world rankings are Cape Verde Islands (we have no idea how that has happened either), 64th are Montenegro. Again, open draw. We are on the home straight now, people.
The Third Round
See above. This is where the big sides of competition would enter—Spain, Brazil, Germany...and England.
In terms of a date for this competition, November of the second season (of the cycle) would seem to be the obvious date. Qualifiers for the World Cup and Euros tend to finish during the October international break, for example, with the final play-offs usually pencilled in for the subsequent month.
Hopefully, all 64 teams in the third round will have already secured their tournament spots or lost out on them. If some participants are in the play-offs, then alternative arrangements will have to be made, although exactly how that would be done is something that currently eludes us...
The Latter Stages of the Competition
Now we are cooking with gas. With no more seeds to factor in, the fourth and fifth rounds should be relatively straightforward affairs. So would the sixth round—the quarter-final stage.
Judging on past history, in the months before a World Cup, there are international breaks in March and May, with the possibility to play four games in total over the course of those two breaks. That would mean the fifth and sixth rounds could theoretically take place in March, with the semis and final coming two months later.
That would mean the third round is played in November (i.e. this time next year, had the tournament just started), with the fourth round coming later during that same break (play-off commitments depending).
That would cause complications—the fourth round would presumably have to be drawn at the same time as the third round, to give countries at least a small opportunity to make travel arrangements—but, timetable-wise, it would at least seem to be feasible.
The Semi-finals and the Final
These days the FA Cup semi-finals and final take place at Wembley (which will also be the case for Euro 2020, which, in a way, is a reasonable template for this idea). This is primarily a result of the English FA's decision to build the new Wembley Stadium and the need now to recoup their money on that outlay.
Before that, however, the semi-finals took place at two grounds around the country.
Ideally, we would follow that template—a final venue decided well in advance, with two semi-final destinations elsewhere around the globe.
Unfortunately, this could cause no end of problems. What if we awarded a semi-final to Rio de Janeiro's Maracana, for example, and then four European teams ended up comprising the last four? That would lead to a huge backlash, as fans may prove unable to make the trek to watch their team.
With that in mind, then, we will keep things simple. The semi-finals will remain an open draw, with the two countries picked to play at home able to decide for themselves where in their country the match will be played.
The final will be the one neutral match in the competition, with the venue decided at the outset of the two-year cycle. Perhaps, in future tournaments, the holders will get to host the final of the next iteration. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
Ideally we would want the final to take place at least a week apart from the semi-finals; not just to allow the players involved to recuperate to a desirable standard (and the fans to make arrangements to get there), but also to give the news cycle the relevant time and opportunity to build up to a frenzy about this remarkable spectacle.
"A huge success," as they will undoubtedly want to write about it.
| 1st preliminary regional | 98 | 98 lowest-ranked sides by region | Anguilla | September, Year 1 |
| 2nd preliminary regional | 64 | 49 1st prelim winners, 15 further seeds | Belarus | October, Year 1 |
| First round | 64 | 32 prelim winners, 32 seeds | Australia | November, Year 1 |
| Second round | 64 | 32 1st-round winners, 32 seeds | Turkey | March, Season 1 |
| Third round | 64 | 32 2nd-round winners, 32 seeds | Germany | November, Season 2 |
| Fourth round | 32 | November, Season 2 | ||
| Fifth round | 16 | March, Season 2 | ||
| Quarter-finals | 8 | March, Season 2 | ||
| Semi-finals | 4 | May, Season 2 | ||
| Final | 2 | May, Season 2 |
The Viability of it All
So, after all that, could it work? For the big teams, like Brazil, they would have to play a total of six games to win the competition. Erasing friendlies from their current schedule, that should not prove impossible to fit into the calendar, although a certain amendment of the current system might be needed just to smooth things out slightly.
For the Andorras of this world, however, they would have to play 10 games in total to win it all. In reality, though, they are likely to play five games at most (although fingers crossed there are some upsets), bowing out at or before the third-round stage.
Overall, then, it would seem only perhaps three of four countries will play more than five matches over a nine-month span, with the smaller sides playing their games during the course of the first season and the bigger sides getting involved more as qualification for the pre-existing world tournaments is winding down.
This proposal has still been simplified somewhat (he says, nearly 3,000 words later), but the basics are in place. With extensive negotiation between member nations, continental governing bodies, television companies and corporate sponsors, it would seem possible that the logistical and financial resources could be found to make this great (or ridiculous) idea a reality.
The Conclusion
This has to happen, people. We’ve done the hard work—FIFA, it's over to you (but please cut us in on a share of the profits).
