The worst tournament design blunders

[Wouter D]

Inspired by this post and this reply: across all sports, what are the worst tournament design blunders?

To get us going, here are a few examples of what I'm after:

• the UEFA Euro tournaments now offer two paths of qualification: the one via the standard qualification groups, the other via the Nations League. Of all the teams that do not qualify through the standard qualification groups, the eight ones that ranked highest in the Nations League will participate in playoffs for further qualification spots. Now, Ireland find themselves in the position that they cannot qualify through their standard group anymore, but they are on the fault line of playoff qualification by virtue of their Nations League ranking. From their standard group, either the Netherlands or Greece will qualify directly. In the Nations League ranking, the Netherlands ranked above Ireland who ranked above Greece. Hence, it is in Ireland's direct best interest to lose their qualification group match to the Netherlands, so that the latter maximize the chance to qualify directly from the group which takes them out from above Ireland in the playoff qualification ranking, hence maximizing the chance that Ireland will qualify for the playoffs. Lose to win!
• the current Rugby World Cup has two systems that might individually still make sense, but in combination can lead to proper weird shit. On the one hand, there are bonus points to be had in each pool match: scoring four or more tries begets you one, and losing by at most seven points begets you another. On the other hand, the tie breaker system went in waves: if there was a three-or-more-way tie in the pool stage, one would first go through all the tie breaking criteria until a highest-ranked team was determined; subsequently, the remaining teams will have their tie broken using all the criteria again from the top. Results among the top teams was the first criterion; points difference was the second. So if A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A, the winner is determined on points difference, but whoever ranks second and third in points difference doesn't matter; those places are determined by the winner of the match between only those two teams. This led to a very contrived but still mathematically possible scenario where, if the last pool game went in a particular direction, Ireland would qualify for the knockout phase by either scoring or conceding a converted try, but be eliminated if the score stayed the same. Any movement wins, inertia loses!
• similarly, Barbados-Grenada in the 1994 Caribbean Cup qualification ended with a team that would benefit from scoring in either goal. A variant of the golden goal rule in extra time was implemented, where the goal would not only decide the match but also be worth two goals. Barbados was leading 2-1, but needed to win the match by two goals to qualify; Grenada would qualify with a single-goal defeat. So Barbados deliberately scored an own goal to level the game. Now Grenada would qualify if another goal was scored in either goal, but this didn't happen, and Barbados picked up the double-counting golden goal in extra time to qualify.

Of course, it wouldn't be a thread about organizational ineptness without FIFA taking the cake. We all know about the 1982 Disgrace of Gijon, but that is amateur hour in terms of unfairness/weirdness on display in this thread. The 1954 FIFA World Cup managed to ruin both the group phase and the knockout phase, rendering the tournament inherently unfair:

• in the group phase, in each group, two teams were seeded and two unseeded. The seeded teams only played the unseeded teams; seeded teams didn't play each other, nor did unseeded teams. So, each team only played two group matches. In case of a tie in points for second place in the group, those two teams meet in a playoff. Result: if you're an unseeded team, and you end up in a group with Brazil (seeded) and Gibraltar (unseeded), you are going to have to beat the other seeded team in your group not once but twice in order to qualify out of the group. This exact scenario happened in two out of four groups.
• in the knockout phase, the bracket was not predefined. Instead, each round was drawn stratified randomly: in the quarter finals, teams from group 1 were drawn against a random team from group 2, and teams from group 3 were drawn against a random team from group 4. The semi finals were randomly drawn such that each match contained one team from groups 1 and 2 and one team from groups 3 and 4. Random draws sound completely fair before you actually make them, but the coins were flipped in such a way that all the group winners ended up in one half of the draw, and all the group runners-up in the other half of the draw. So, fair principle, least fair possible outcome.

I feel that this 1954 FIFA World Cup is quite possibly the worst-designed tournament ever played in all of sport, but I would be happy to be corrected in that feeling. So: do you know of any ludicrously badly designed sports tournament, and to what weird/unfair results did it lead?

[ursus arctos]

Barbardos - Grenada was my immediate thought when I saw the thread title

[Janik]

There was the 2012 Olympic badminton ‘scandal’. The scandal being, in my opinion, that blame was placed on players trying to improve their chances of winning a medal (by losing matches) rather than on the administrators for setting up a tournament where this might happen. Not that the tournament structure was all that unusual - 4 groups of 4, top 2 in each advance to QFs. It was just inappropriate for Badminton Doubles, where the leading two pairs were Chinese and desperate to be on opposite sides of the knock-out draw as the team ambition was gold and silver medals.

[Satchmo Distel]

In cricket, the 1979 Benson & Hedges Cup group format enabled Somerset to qualify by declaring after one over without losing any wickets, as their bowling strike rate (the tiebreaking criterion) would not be affected. This led to the banning of declarations in limited-overs cricket.

https://magazine.cricketarchive.com/...index.html#8/z

It seems very odd in retrospect that the rate of taking wickets would be a tiebreaker in a format where the aim is to score runs at a fast rate. Nobody goes into a one-dayer thinking "how quickly can we take wickets".

[tee rex]

Great idea for a thread. Obviously the winner is and always must be the boundary rule in the 2019 ODI World Cup, but plenty of contenders for second-worst.

One factor is teams playing a different number of games. This would apply to merit tables and the like. And once upon a time, cricket's county championship ,...

1928 County Championship - Wikipedia

[ursus arctos]

Along similar lines, I give you the US college gridiron "national championship", which regularly produced competing abd irresolvable competing claims for over a century.

Due to the lack of an official NCAA title, determining the nation's top college football team has often engendered controversy. A championship team is independently declared by multiple individuals and organizations, often referred to as "selectors". These choices are not always unanimous. In 1969 even President of the United States Richard Nixonmade a selection by announcing, ahead of the season-ending "game of the century" between No. 1 Texas and No. 2 (AP) Arkansas, that the winner would receive a presidential plaque commemorating them as national champions. Texas went on to win, 15–14.

While the NCAA has never officially endorsed a championship team, it has documented the choices of some selectors in its official NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Records publication. In addition, various analysts have independently published their own choices for each season. These opinions can often diverge with others as well as individual schools' claims to national titles, which may or may not correlate to the selections published elsewhere. Currently, two of the most widely recognized national champion selectors are the Associated Press (AP), which conducts a poll of sportswriters, and the Coaches Poll, a survey of active members of the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colleg...Division_I_FBS

[Southport Zeb]

Another oddity of the 1954 World Cup was that the seeded teams were selected before qualifying finished. One of the seeded teams, Spain, had a qualifying group in which their only opponents were Turkey. Spain won the first match 4-1 but lost 1-0 in Istanbul. Goal difference was not a tie breaker, so the two sides played a third game in Rome. This was drawn, so the final qualification was determined by a blindfolded Italian boy picking lots. He picked out Turkey, who qualified for the finals and also took over the seeded position for the finals that had originally been given to Spain.

[Snake Plissken]

It's not as egregious as some, but the current NHL playoff format is pretty bad. It's basically designed so that you will probably lose at least two of the three strongest teams in a conference in the second round of four. In 2017-18 the two top teams in the league met in the second round, the season before last the best team and the fifth best team in the league again met in the second round.

Last years playoffs had a Stanley Cup final where the Vegas Golden Knights - the 5th best team in the regular season - played Florida, the 17th best. Florida had to beat the teams in 1st, 4th and 2nd overall in the league in that order to get to the Final, whereas Vegas had to play the teams who finished 14th, 6th, 8th. Vegas won, not only because Florida weren't all that good, but also because by the time they got to the Final, they were knackered.

[Uros Predic]

Another oddity of the 1954 World Cup was that the seeded teams were selected before qualifying finished...

This also happened at the 2022 World Cup, with the Wales v Ukraine play-off delayed due to the war in the latter, the winner of this play-off was placed into Pot 4; had they waited until after it's completion Wales would've been in Pot 3, and would have avoided Iran... and who knows what might've happened*.

(*we'd have played badly and been defeated by somebody else)

[longeared]

Great idea for a thread. Obviously the winner is and always must be the boundary rule in the 2019 ODI World Cup, but plenty of contenders for second-worst.

That was as much a case of an idea that must have felt reasonable to somebody until it came into contact with the real world. It were a crap tiebreaker in both concept and execution, but at least it was clear to everybody what they needed to do in the closing stages - Stokes burning up wickets because they weren't relevant, deliberately hitting the final ball on the ground to ensure at least a super over, NZ knowing they needed to score a run more - and there was no dispute who had won on the day. 1992's rain rule was worse in the semi final, turning South Africa's 22 off 13 balls into 21 off one. Although my sympathy for them was somewhat limited given the way Kepler Wessels slowed the game down to ensure England didn't face their full allocation of overs. In both cases justice may have been done but it certainly wasn't seen to be done.

International cricket has long been fond of having multiple group stages with teams carrying through results from the first group - it was used in qualifying for the current World Cup. It first came into use in 1999 and threw up a couple of bad outcomes. Australia v West Indies was reduced to a farce as Australia slowed their scoring right down once the match was essentially won to try and improve WI's net run rate in the hope they could come through with them - Aus had already lost to New Zealand, who won the following day and qualified ahead of Windies anyway. In the other group South Africa finished above Zimbabwe but the latter took more points through as they'd won the head to head match, Zimbabwe benefitting from the fact they'd beaten the teams they qualified with and lost to the teams who had gone out. Zimbabwe didn't win a game in the Super Six and would have qualified for the semis had Herschelle Gibbs not dropped the World Cup, or if India had beaten NZ at Trent Bridge the day before.

The ICC changed the points system for the next World Cup so results against eliminated teams had some influence and that worked - Kenya had beaten Sri Lanka and "beaten" NZ who they qualified with but lost to South Africa and Windies who hadn't, so they essentially had to win a Super Six game to reach the semis. Which they managed, ironically against Zimbabwe. In that same tournament Sri Lanka pointed out that if they forfeited their final group game against SA it would guarantee their progress to the Super Six. They eventually agreed to fulfill the fixture in the interests of cricket, and because the ICC threatened them with disqualification. That were the game where SA got knocked out because they misread the Duckworth Lewis table.

Cricket Australia attempted to reduce the influence of net run rate by introducing a bonus point system in their tri-series. One year they had three evenly matched teams in Australia / New Zealand / South Africa and there was a game late on where New Zealand's best outcome was to win it, and their second best outcome was to lose it heavily so as to let South Africa get the bonus point. Referenced here - fourth paragraph.

[Hot Pepsi]

The 1956 Olympics was a bit of a mess because of withdrawals.
The US got put through to the quarterfinals, but as a result, a team of amateurs had to sail to the other side of the planet to play one blow-out match. I've mentioned that before, I sorta know a guy who was on that team, but he broke his leg in a match on the pre-Olympic tour and didn't get to play in the actual Olympics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associ...ummer_Olympics


The format for the 1980 Olympic hockey tournament - the "Miracle on Ice" - wasn't really stupid, but it was/is confusing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_ho...inter_Olympics

"The top two teams from each group play the top two teams from the other group once. Points from previous games against their own group carry over, excluding teams who failed to make the medal round."

If the US had lost to Finland in the last game, they wouldn't have medaled at all because they drew Sweden in the previous round and had a lower goal differential. Even the IIHF and IOC figured out that was too confusing for fans to follow.

[Southport Zeb]

I've just remembered the European Rugby Challenge Shield, the former third tier European rugby union competition. This involved two pools of four, with each team playing four matches against the four teams in the other pool and none against those in their own section. The highest ranked team in each pool then qualified to a playoff through which they could potentially qualify for the following seasons Challenge Cup (the second tier competition).

In 2016-17 the two pools turned out to be uneven in terms of strength, with Pool A side's winning 11 matches compared to 5 by Pool B sides. Four of the Pool B wins came against winless Belgians Dendermondse, meaning that three Pool A sides lost only once between them. The three teams with the most points in the competition as a whole were all in Pool A, with Russian side Krasny Yar and Italians Petrarca both ending up with 100% records; Petrarca were ultimately eliminated due to getting one less bonus point than the Russians. Meanwhile in Pool B, Mogliano were the winners, having won 2 and lost 2.

The playoffs saw the two Pool winners meet lower ranked sides who had been in that season's Challenge Cup. It was probably the right result that Krasny Yar managed to get past Timisoara, whilst Mogliano were destroyed by another Russian club, Ensisey-STM.

[Satchmo Distel]

2026 World Cup - groups of 3 with two going through. The last game could throw up results that put both through.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

2026 World Cup - groups of 3 with two going through. The last game could throw up results that put both through.

I think, and potentially even worse, they've now agreed on 12 groups of 4, but with 8 - count them, 8 - third placed teams all going through to a round of 32. Thereby negating almost any of the potential drama of teams scrambling to finish first or second in their group in the last round of matches, but also creating a farce where a whole fortnight of 72 games serves only to send 32 out of 48 teams through to what I expect will be called "the bracket".

[Antepli Ejderha]

Before Duckworth Lewis there were some bizarre rules and results in one day cricket.

[Hot Pepsi]

I think, and potentially even worse, they've now agreed on 12 groups of 4, but with 8 - count them, 8 - third placed teams all going through to a round of 32. Thereby negating almost any of the potential drama of teams scrambling to finish first or second in their group in the last round of matches, but also creating a farce where a whole fortnight of 72 games serves only to send 32 out of 48 teams through to what I expect will be called "the bracket".

That's really dumb.

[Wouter D]

Yes, and it's still significantly less dumb than having groups of three.

[Flynnie]

The 1999 Rugby World Cup had 20 teams (expanded from 16, almost certainly to ensure the USA’s participation) in five groups of four, which led to a knockout stage featuring 11 teams. Yeah, 11.

The five pool winners automatically advanced to the quarterfinals, which meant that two pool winners played each other in the quarters, Wales v Australia. Odd enough, but even more so as Wales were technically the tournament hosts (although they only hosted 9 out of the 41 matches). The draw was made well in advance, so with the predictability of rugby basically everybody knew Wales were gonna be out after the quarters so long as they* or Australia didn’t slip up, which they didn’t.

The runners up and the best third placed team — Argentina — played playoffs on the Wednesday between the last pool game and the quarterfinals. England-Fiji kicked off at 1pm — how ITV didn’t move this game I’ll never know —, Scotland-Samoa at 3.30 and Ireland-Argentina at 8.30 in front of a half-full Stade Félix Bollaert in Lens. Worth pointing out that Twickenham and especially Murrayfield weren’t close to sold out for their games either. The weird format did at least gain a little credibility through Ireland-Argentina being a thriller with an upset victory by the then-still-amateur Argentinians.

Nonetheless, each playoff team was still hampered for the quarterfinal and went down easily to their opponents, with all I believe fading badly in the final 20.

A word on the venues: four countries shared the hosting with Wales, using an insane 18 venues for 41 matches. Five separate French venues hosted games: Pool C being entirely focused in the South-West with games in Bordeaux, Béziers and Toulouse, with a random playoff in Lens and one quarterfinal in Stade de France.

The crowds were at least good, which is more than can be said for Scotland: even the hometown boys played in front of 9,000 at Murrayfield against Uruguay, and South Africa played minnows Spain and Uruguay in front of shockingly small crowds.

It was my first World Cup (I fell in love with the sport while the tournament was happening) so I’ll always have a fond memory for it. I even scored the Home Nations badges from 1999 on eBay a few weeks ago. But a well organised tournament it wasn’t.



*Wales did lose to Samoa again but they’d already clinched the group

[Hot Pepsi]

The US is set to host this in eight years. Will the US automatically qualify?

[ursus arctos]

Yes

[Hot Pepsi]

That could go badly

[Ray de Galles]

That was as much a case of an idea that must have felt reasonable to somebody until it came into contact with the real world. It were a crap tiebreaker in both concept and execution, but at least it was clear to everybody what they needed to do in the closing stages - Stokes burning up wickets because they weren't relevant, deliberately hitting the final ball on the ground to ensure at least a super over, NZ knowing they needed to score a run more - and there was no dispute who had won on the day.

Well, not on that point but there was a extra run England were erroneously awarded by the umpire to take the game to a tie in the first place.