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And I add: (327390.1)

And I add: (327390.1)

Dear Joe, why I can't see it?

I think there's a problem — in the Americas and Asia, half of the teams only have 7 weeks of games, but in Europe, two-thirds of the teams only have 11 weeks of games.
This should affect the world rankings.

I personally like this (322429.44).

Hi everyone,

I'd like to share an idea I’ve been thinking about and hear your thoughts on it.
Currently, the structure of continental tournaments works as follows:

Europe: 6 groups of 8 teams. The top 2 from each group advance to the second round (2 groups of 6), and the top 2 from each of those qualify for the semifinals.

Americas & Asia: 3 groups of 7. The top 4 advance to the second round (2 groups of 6), then the top 2 move on to the semifinals.

Africa: A single group of 8. The top 6 move to the second round; the top 4 then advance to the semifinals.

The problem I see is that, for teams that don’t qualify for the second stage, there’s basically nothing to play for anymore, just a bunch of random friendlies that often feel meaningless and are hard to organize with any real enthusiasm.
Inspired by the recent introduction of the losers’ group in the World Championship, I wanted to propose something similar for teams that are eliminated after the group stage in continental tournaments.

Here’s a rough outline of the idea:

Europe
Since 12 teams advance and 36 are eliminated after the group stage, we could create several new groups of 6 for weeks 9–13:
Group of third-placed teams: 3A, 3B, 3C, 3D, 3E, 3F
Group of fourth-placed teams: 4A, 4B, 4C, etc.
... and so on, all the way to seventh-placed teams.

Americas & Asia
Each continent has 3 groups of 7, so 3 teams are eliminated in each group (positions 5–7). We could combine them like this:
5th place group: 5A, 5B, 5C from Americas + 5A, 5B, 5C from Asia
6th place group, 7th place group, same logic

Africa
Only two teams are eliminated after the first round. For them, I thought it could be fun to do a best-of-5 mini-series:
Game 1 & 2 at the 7th seed’s home
Game 3 & 4 at the 8th seed’s home
Game 5 (if needed) again at the 7th seed

Other considerations
Ideally these games would be played with fixed enthusiasm, as is done in the World Championship Qualifier games, but I’m open to ideas and tweaks.

This is just a rough proposal, I’m aware there may be technical limitations, and I’m not saying it’s urgent or crucial, but I do think it would give smaller nations (which are the majority of NTs) something meaningful to play for in the post All-Star stretch, rather than just falling into friendly limbo.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!

From the schedule's point of view, the Americas and Asia still have room to expand to 24 teams.
So I later changed it to “nearly half.”

In my opinion, it would be better if Europe also had half of the teams with only 7 weeks of games.

By the way, I’m curious about what’s in (327390.1)

I think there's a problem — in the Americas and Asia, nearly half of the teams only have 7 weeks of games, but in Europe, two-thirds of the teams only have 11 weeks of games.
This should affect the world rankings.