Random the Book

Previously on this blog Matt highlighted how the randomness of the World Cup Draw was managed. I think that process is fair, the World Cup is arguably the biggest international spectacle, with high stakes – reputationally and financially – for everyone involved. So, if you’re setting up the matches, you would want to ensure that all those teams most likely to succeed have the clearest path to the last few rounds, where the biggest markets meet the most important games.

But what if you didn’t? What if you just randomly put teams into groups of four, and let them fight it out from there?

I am, unfortunately, not in charge of FIFA’s draws for competitions … but if you’d like an impression of how that could play out, work through this Truly Random World Cup Simulator of how that would look.

These are the kind of matches we could have had:

Errata:

• This was written with Claude and Perplexity LLMs, using a mathematically iffy adaptation of soccer teams’ ELO ratings to decide who would probably win each match.
• The ELO ratings are taken from eloratings.net – which uses the ELO system to rate international soccer teams against each other.
• There are many World Cup simulators online, from a brief search I like this one if you want something a little more appropriate, and prettier, than my effort.