Display MoreI hate this formula, absolutely BORING....phase after phase after another phase. This does not attract fans.
It should be just like Soccer World Cup and the youth tournaments, with Round of 16. This makes it very exciting even if you have a Brazil vs Korea game.
And teams carrying points from the previous rounds makes it even worst, the teams ranked in #3 and #4 already starts the 2nd rounds with basically no "chances" in qualifying once they already have less points. And once the the Top ranked 2 teams in each pools win their first and second game in 2nd round they are already qualified for round #3, and they play the 2 remaining games with their bench. That is what happened with Brazil and USA (women`s). And this bring us back to the "fixing" games, another example Brazil vs D.Republic, Brazil choose to play with their starters and play to win, but in this case other teams especially in the men`s side could easily use their bench, and with that China would have been eliminated. ( If this happened or happens with the men`s of course teams like Brazil,Italy,Bulgaria would rest players)
Absolutely no sense format.
I watched almost every knock out game from the U18 because when it is a knock out game it is always interesting. But the U20 was boring because they have only the semis as a knock out game.
I`m not a soccer fan, but in the World Cup it is easy to watch when you turn the TV and you have a bunch of knock out games, but if you would turn the tv and they were playing group stages, phases rounds would not be so interesting.
at the least they should use the formula from 2002 with the quaterfinals.
I agree with this word by word. Current formula is garbage.