While the knockout stage of the World Cup is a straightforward setup (single elimination, extra time and penalties), the group stage can get awfully complicated when it comes to determining the teams that’ll move on. And often times, the three round-robin matches don’t give us a clear top two for each group.
That’s where tiebreakers come into play.
In the group stage, each team plays a match against their fellow groupmates with three points in the standings for a win, one for a draw and zero for a loss. That means the slightest statistical difference can be what sends a team to the knockout round and the other home disappointed. And trust me, the tiebreakers become weirder the deeper the process gets.
Let’s break down how it works.