Originally Posted by Tyler Durden

Don't like this idea. Purely because of the elimination process involved, which is one of the reasons when the World Cup was boosted to 24, it very quickly followed with another increase to 32. There is no simple and nice way to cut 24 teams down to the eight required for the knock out stage. The only one I can think of, and I wish they'd choose, would be to have four groups of six.

Even that has it's downside attached to it since, although it'd mean a simple cut to eight with the two top teams in each group going through, it would result in five group games for each team which, after the first two in each group would result in a lot of meaningless games!

The choice they went for in the World Cup when they did this was to have six groups of four. Have the top two though to make 12 and then let four best placed third teams go through (so you could finish third in a group of four and still make the second round and possibly even win it!!).

The more mediocrity that is allowed into these tournaments, then the more useless meaningless footie we have to get through to get to the good stuff at these tournaments.