Variable Participant Number World Cup Qualification

[ShAdOwGaMeR]

I'm working on a project that aims to change the format of all national competitions, among other things. However, I've encountered a problem. Qualifying for the World Cup, for example, for Africa involves 56 or 57 nations (depending on the host country of the World Cup). Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to create two different sets of rules for these two cases. Background for two sets of rules is that with 56 nations, the bottom 16 nations go into a preliminary qualification round, and with 57 nations, the bottom 18 nations do so.
Does anyone have a suggestion on how I can implement this?

 

[Wolf_pd]

What is your preliminary qualification? Knockout or groups? Groups can handle less teams without much hassle. Knockout (cup style) as well, but they seem to be more tricky to implement.

[ShAdOwGaMeR]

Hi,

the preliminary qualfication is a knockout (seeded round) so If the Host Nation is from africa there are 56 Teams in that competition where the bottom 16 Teams are sorted by World Ranking and getting a seeding beginning from 0 to 15. And then Team 0 playing against 15 and the 8 winner of These Games are going to the Stage 1 (groups)

With 18 Teams there are 9 Games with the Same procedure.

[themodelcitizen]

I think you can add different stages that will each only run if there are a certain amount of teams, which should be achievable with "ignore teams" set to the world cup host?

[ShAdOwGaMeR]

At the moment I use the "Oualified Teams" (for 56 nations - picture 1, for 57 nations - picture 2). Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to do this with the different levels, which only take place when a certain number of teams is reached.

[rusty217]

It's certainly possible to use varying team numbers.

I think here the easiest way to do it would be to first scrap the second rules set. Don't think that will work and it'd be easier to just have it all in one, remove the Number of Qualified Teams so that it's variable. Get the host and assign them seeding 0. Change the other instructions to just get teams from Africa sorted by world ranking with incremental seedings starting from 0. Then if you have an African host you'll have two teams with seeding 0 and 1 team each with seedings from 1-55. If you don't have an African host then you'll have 1 team each with seedings from 0-56.

Then you create two Stage 0s. One with number of teams set to 17 and one set to 18. Set them both to get teams from seedings 39-56. It will find either 17 or 18 teams depending on if there's an African host or not and will choose which variation of Stage 0 to use depending on how many teams it finds. Set the 18 team variation up as you normally would. And set the 17 team variation up to have 16 teams play matches and 1 team (the highest seeded one) to get a bye to the next stage. The main difficulty here is setting up the bye, it's not something I've done before so can't really help there, I'm reasonably sure it is possible however though. Probably just going to take a lot of trial and error to make sure the bye works correctly.

Then setup Stage 1 as normal, it should end up with the same number of teams regardless of which Stage 0 was used (as long as the bye is configured correctly) so it'll just progress as normal from there.

But yeah, changing the format to groups would certainly make it a lot easier to have varying team numbers. That's how I did all my WC qualifiers.

[ShAdOwGaMeR]

Thank you all for the help I'll give it a try and otherwise I'll probably change the format to groups for the first round.

[Wolf_pd]

9 hours ago, rusty217 said:

It's certainly possible to use varying team numbers.

I think here the easiest way to do it would be to first scrap the second rules set. Don't think that will work and it'd be easier to just have it all in one, remove the Number of Qualified Teams so that it's variable. Get the host and assign them seeding 0. Change the other instructions to just get teams from Africa sorted by world ranking with incremental seedings starting from 0. Then if you have an African host you'll have two teams with seeding 0 and 1 team each with seedings from 1-55. If you don't have an African host then you'll have 1 team each with seedings from 0-56.

Then you create two Stage 0s. One with number of teams set to 17 and one set to 18. Set them both to get teams from seedings 39-56. It will find either 17 or 18 teams depending on if there's an African host or not and will choose which variation of Stage 0 to use depending on how many teams it finds. Set the 18 team variation up as you normally would. And set the 17 team variation up to have 16 teams play matches and 1 team (the highest seeded one) to get a bye to the next stage. The main difficulty here is setting up the bye, it's not something I've done before so can't really help there, I'm reasonably sure it is possible however though. Probably just going to take a lot of trial and error to make sure the bye works correctly.

Then setup Stage 1 as normal, it should end up with the same number of teams regardless of which Stage 0 was used (as long as the bye is configured correctly) so it'll just progress as normal from there.

But yeah, changing the format to groups would certainly make it a lot easier to have varying team numbers. That's how I did all my WC qualifiers.

I ended up my WC version with just loading in the first X needed teams, which meant in Africa that a team like Somalia would drop out on occassion which is somewhat realistic, albeit accidentally realistic.