8th December, 2025

📈 Expand, ♣️ Draw, 🤔 Imagine

---

Is bigger always better?

In the last week the draws for both the men’s 2026 FIFA World Cup and men’s 2027 Rugby World Cup were completed. So … a perfect opportunity for an unscheduled Monday Morning Evening Quarterback Top Three. It’s been too long!

---

📈 Expand

One of the things both of these tournaments have in common is they have expanded to include more teams than ever before.

In 2026 co-hosts USA, Canada and Mexico will welcome football teams from 48 countries, up from 32 last time.¹ That change has certainly worked out well for the All Whites (currently ranked 86th), as for the first time that allowed for a direct qualification route for teams in our Oceania confederation.² In the end we were drawn in a pool headlined by Belgium (ranked 8th), and also containing Iran (ranked 20th) and Egypt (ranked 34th).³

Meanwhile, 24 teams will travel to Australia in 2027 for the Rugby World Cup, compared to the 20 that competed in France in 2023.

In both cases increasing the number of teams has massively complicated the format for the tournament.

The old sizes were much tidier:

• FIFA: 32 teams split nicely into eight pools of four teams. The top two teams from each pool qualified for a round-of-16 knockout bracket, with pool winners facing second-place teams.

• RWC: 20 teams split nicely into four pools of five teams. Again, the top two teams from each pool advanced to quarter-final knock-out games, with pool winners facing second-place teams.

The new sizes are a bit of a cluster, with an extra knock-out round added:

• FIFA: 48 teams means the number of pools increases to 12, with some (but not all) third-placed teams from pools qualifying for the new round-of-32 knock-out bracket.

• RWC: 24 teams means the pools have been reconfigured, with six pools of four teams. Again, most (but not all) third-placed teams will advance to round-of-16 knock-out games.

I would argue that this makes more sense in football where draws are more common. For example, in their previous appearance at the men’s World Cup in South Africa in 2010 the All Whites had draws in all three pool matches, but finished third in their pool on count back.

But for rugby, this makes no sense at all. With only four teams in each pool there will be multiple teams who have lost two and won only one of their pool matches playing in the knock-out round. And some pool winners will be playing much weaker opponents than others.

All of this means that the luck of the draw matters much more than maybe it has in the past…

---

♣️ Draw

FIFA is frequently, and quite rightly, criticised for corruption and sycophancy, but I have to give them credit for the innovations they added to their draw to accommodate the expansion.

As in previous years, the qualifying teams were split into four pots, based on current rankings, to ensure top ranks teams were not placed in the same pool.⁴ These were then drawn at random by a group of superstars from other sports: Shaquille O’Neal, Tom Brady, Aaron Judge and Wayne Gretzky.

However, there were additional constraints:

To ensure competitive balance, two separate pathways to the semi-finals have been established when developing the match schedule. In order to have a balanced distribution of the teams, the four highest-ranked teams in the FIFA/Coca-Cola Men’s Ranking, when drawn, will have the following constraints: the highest-ranked team (Spain) and the second highest-ranked team (Argentina) will be randomly drawn into opposite pathways, and the same principle will apply to the third (France) and fourth (England) highest-ranked teams. This will ensure that, should they win their groups, the two highest-ranked teams will not meet before the final.

Sensible! If everything goes according to rankings then the semi-finals will be 1 vs 4 and 2 vs 3, exactly as it should be.

On top of that there were rules that mixed the teams from different parts of the world, ensuring that no group would have more than one team from each smaller confederation, or two of the sixteen teams from UEFA (which is by far the largest confederation, at least in terms of number of qualifying spots).⁵

Again, all common sense. Even Rio Ferdinand was able to get his head around it!

But seemingly beyond the powers-that-be at World Rugby, who decided instead to just YOLO their draw and hope for the best. Here’s how that worked out for us/them (or, perhaps more accurately, worked out very nicely for England)…

• The second-seed All Blacks were drawn in the same pool as Australia, a team we play at least twice every year.

• If we win that game, we will likely face top-seed South Africa in the quarter-final.

• If we win that game, we will likely face our traditional nemesis France (who are fifth seed) in the semi-final.⁶

• Meanwhile England and Ireland, were both placed in pools where the second-ranked teams were also from the Six Nations, and Japan and Samoa are drawn together for the fourth tournament in a row, meaning those games are also repeats of regular annual fixtures.

• None of the extra four teams added through the expansion are likely to challenge any of the higher ranked teams - their only goal will be to avoid cricket score defeats.

All of that assumes that things play out according to seedings. Is that reasonable?

Upsets in football happen all the time. Reference Saudi Arabia beating eventual winners Argentina in the opening match of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Upsets in rugby are rare, and in World Cups perhaps even more so.

Here is a history:

• 1991: Samoa def. Wales

• 1999: Samoa def. Wales (again!)

• 2007: Argentina def. France & Ireland (and made their first semi-final); and Fiji def. Wales

• 2011: Tonga def. France - a match I was lucky enough to see live in Wellington

• 2015: Japan def. South Africa (arguably the greatest upset of all time)

• 2019: Japan def. Ireland & Scotland

• 2023: Fiji def. Australia; then Portugal def. Fiji

tl;dr: Not many.

You might notice there are entire World Cups where there were no notable upsets.

So, what we’re really looking out for are the matches where two relatively evenly matched top-ranked teams play each other. How many of those do we have to look forward to in 2027?

In the pools we’ve ended up with the only match that fits that criteria is the opening game: New Zealand vs Australia, which even then is 2 vs 7 in the seedings.

To allow us to make predictions I’ll assume the All Blacks win that, and there are no other upsets. In that case the round-of-16 matches would be:

• New Zealand vs 3rd place TBC

• South Africa vs 3rd place TBC

• Fiji vs Wales - poor ol’ Wales!

• France vs Scotland

• Australia vs Japan

• England vs Italy

• Argentina vs 3rd place TBC

• Ireland vs 3rd place TBC

With the possible exception of Fiji vs Wales, none of those jump off the page! If the All Blacks and Springboks end up playing Tonga, Spain or Uruguay (which is very possible) then those games will likely be embarrassing blowouts.

Roll forward to the quarter-finals, and we get the following teams playing each other (with current rankings in brackets):

• South Africa (1) vs New Zealand (2)

• France (5) vs Fiji (8)

• England (3) vs Australia (7)

• Ireland (4) vs Argentina (6)

Those finally all look like great games, that might be worth watching.

This is the awkward truth for World Rugby. There are just not that many teams who are competitive, and the gap between them and everybody else remains significant.⁷ While the tournament is expanded from 48 to 52 matches, there are possibly only nine that will be properly interesting. That ratio is too low!

---

🤔 Imagine

This could have been managed much better. Humour me for a second…

Imagine if these two constraints - inspired by the FIFA rules - were applied instead:

• The top four seeds are given separate pathways to the semi-finals; and

• The top two ranked teams in each pool cannot include multiple teams from either the Rugby Championship or Six Nations.

Or, if we want to be really innovative, imagine if rather than expanding the tournament we shrank it back down to the original 16 team format that was used at World Cups between 1987 and 1995.

If we re-run the draw, using these additional constraints and with teams selected at random in exactly the same order, the resulting pools would be:⁸

• Pool A: England, Australia, Wales, USA

• Pool B: South Africa, France, Japan, Uruguay

• Pool C: Ireland, Argentina, Scotland, Spain

• Pool D: New Zealand, Fiji, Italy, Georgia

That already looks much better. Every pool contains at least one match of genuine interest and Pool C especially looks very competitive with one of Ireland, Argentina or Scotland to miss the quarter-finals. If you include Australia vs Wales then I count at least six too-close-to-call pool matches.

Then, assuming things go according to rankings, we’d get these excellent quarter-final matches as soon as we get to the knock-out stage:

• England vs France

• South Africa vs Australia

• Ireland vs Fiji

• New Zealand vs Argentina

Perhaps a chance for Ireland to finally progress beyond a quarter-final?

All four of those games would be worth watching.

I appreciate that these events are organised this way to maximise broadcast and match-day revenue. But, when the product that results is just increased slop I’m not sure that’s a win. While my hypothetical tournament would be slimmed down to just 32 matches, at least 13 of those would be competitive.

Maybe that’s the metric we should actually be trying to optimise for?

---

PS last call: the “Only Turkeys Pay For Classifieds” How To Be Wrong Black Friday Deal expires at the end of this week or when the final t-shirts are sold, whichever comes first. Don’t miss out!

---

---

Top Three is sponsored by Triage: First Aid for your inbox

1. Well… 47 of the teams will be “welcome”, not sure about Iran at this point.

2. The qualification this time came via victories over Tahiti, Vanuatu, and Samoa, followed by knock-out victories over Fiji and New Caledonia. That was a notably easier route than previous inter-Confederation playoffs which saw us first having to beat Australia (until they defected to the Asian confederation in 2013) and then a lower ranked team from South America, such as Mexico in 2014 (we lost 9-3 on aggregate home-and-away), Peru in 2018 (we lost 2-0 on aggregate home-and-away) and Costa Rica in 2022 (we lost 1-0 in a one-off match hosted in Qatar during the Covid pandemic).

Interestingly, New Caledonia are themselves still alive in the qualification, now facing an inter-confederation play-off tournament in March next year. To make it through they will need to beat Jamaica and then Democratic Republic of Congo.

3. Fun fact: New Zealand is the lowest ranked football nation which did qualify for the 2026 FIFA World Cup (although there is still a possibility this will change once the final qualifiers are added). Meanwhile, Belgium (ranked 21st) is the highest ranked rugby nation which didn’t qualify for the 2027 Rugby World Cup.

4. This was complicated a little by the fact there were three host countries this time, who were each given top spot in their respective pools, but with 12 pools there was more wriggle room.

5. Because there are still some play-off games to be completed closer to the tournament these rules were applied to all of the teams still in consideration for those spots

6. France were not helped by recent results - including three defeats in New Zealand earlier this year, and also a loss to England by a single point in the Six Nations, which bumped them down to fifth seed.

The fact the draw was done two years prior to the event hurt them more than others.

7. If you swap Fiji for Wales these are the exact same teams I anticipated would complete the quarter-finals of the 2011 Rugby World Cup when I wrote an equivalent post 17 years ago! 👴

8. This hypothetical draw assumes the following pots of teams, listed in order they were drawn in the actual draw last week:

• Pot 1: England, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand

• Pot 2: Australia, France, Argentina, Fiji

• Pot 3: Wales, Japan, Scotland, Italy

• Pot 4: USA, Uruguay, Spain, Georgia

Ireland is drawn second from Pot 1, but placed in Pool C so as to ensure the separate pathways to semi-finals for the top two ranked teams; Australia is assumed to be drawn first from Pot 2 as hosts; the second constraint to mix Rugby Championship and Six Nations teams isn’t required as the draw does that naturally.