Oliver Johnson

Well, on a very basic level, it comes down to whether things are a power of two or not.

Because once you get into the knockout stages, if you're going to end up with two teams in the final, you need to have four teams in the semifinal, eight teams in the quarterfinals and so on.

Yes.

And so the challenge with that is if you start off with a number of teams, that's a nice power of two.

The last time we had a World Cup, there were 32 teams.

It's all worked very nicely.

Yes.

Now we have 48 teams.

48 is not a power of two.

And so things get more complicated.

Why is it so hard?

So the idea is that there are 12 groups.

The two top teams go through, so that makes 24.

And so then we need to fill eight more places in the draw.

And so the way that we'll do that is we need to find the eight best teams of the 12 third place teams.

Well, there's a whole series of tiebreakers that are lined up.

So they'll then look at goals scored.

If they still can't split teams, they will go to the number of yellow cards and red cards.

Then they'll go to FIFA rankings.

Well, we could do.