Drink in the jeopardy of the World Cup playoffs, it’s the last we’ll get for a while | Jonathan Wilson

There is always a slightly odd rhythm to the World Cup. The final round of qualifying games is almost invariably more exciting than the early games at the tournament itself, and now with 32 teams making it through the group stage and into the knockout rounds, that is likely to be even more true for the 2026 edition. Those final qualifiers in November were thrilling and meaningful – Troy Parrott’s hat-trick! Scotland scoring two absurdly good goals in the same game! DR Congo beating Nigeria on penalties as bottles rained down from the stands! Honduras failing to score against Costa Rica! – and Tuesday will be too as 12 teams battle for the six remaining slots.

But for those not involved in World Cup playoffs, there is an unsatisfying phoniness to the friendlies they must play instead, with experimental line-ups and weary players going through glorified training exercises. While it’s never good to be letting in five goals, neither the USA nor Ghana should be too concerned about the defeats to Belgium or Austria.

After Tuesday comes a lull. Attention will turn back to league football and continental competition. On 11 June the World Cup will begin as Mexico face South Africa and South Korea face either Denmark or Czech Republic. And then … probably not very much. The 32-team format, eight groups of four, was perfect. Almost every game mattered. There was jeopardy but if a side slipped up, they had a chance at redemption. Expansion to 12 groups of four with the top two plus the eight third-place sides to qualify destroys that.

It’s not just that one win will almost certainly ensure a side progresses, or that there could be a spate of mutually convenient draws in the final round of games, or even that the first round is still eliminating 16 sides, but taking 72 games rather than 48 to do so, and eliminating weaker teams with less jeopardy. It’s what happens in the last 32.

At that point, on 28 June, when the team that finishes second out of Mexico, South Africa, South Korea and Sweden or Poland faces the side that finishes second out of Canada, Qatar, Switzerland and Italy or Bosnia and Herzegovina in Inglewood, California, there will suddenly be extreme jeopardy: a one-game, one-off shootout. And that means that the teams who make up the last 16 are less likely to be the “right” sides – ie, the ones playing best at that moment – than if the last 32 were still arranged in groups. A team playing badly could very plausibly scrape their way through the group with one win and two defeats, then in the knockouts hold out for a goalless draw and win on penalties. This new World Cup format increases the level of randomness at a crucial stage and means the quarter-finals have a relatively high possibility of featuring something quite a long way from the best eight sides in the competition.

Perhaps that has been considered. Perhaps Fifa has reasoned that drama matters more than quality – and the nexus between the two that creates the best tournament is complex. But there is very little sense with the modern Fifa that anything about the football is given much consideration at all. When expansion was first voted through by the Fifa Council in January 2017, the plan was for 16 groups of three with, according to Fifa’s own report, “no reduction in the overall number of rest days and a guaranteed maximum of seven matches for the teams reaching the final, while the current 32-day tournament duration is kept, so as not to increase the length of time for which clubs have to release their players”. A study had considered four different options taking into account “such factors as sporting balance, competition quality, impact on football development, infrastructure, projections on financial position and the consequences for event delivery” and concluded that 16 groups of three was the best.

Then, apparently on a whim, having seen how thrilling the four-team groups were in Qatar in 2022, the Fifa president Gianni Infantino changed his mind: 2026 would be arranged into 12 groups of four – even though that meant two-thirds of the best third-place teams going through: that is an entirely different dynamic to 2022, and not the same structure at all. It means more games and a longer and more tiring tournament. And it also means the jeopardy comes at the wrong moments: very little for 17 days, and then too much, all at once.

But that is for June. Tuesday offers another day of perfect drama. Can tiny Kosovo, who only played their first official international in 2014, beat Turkey to make it? Can DR Congo beat Jamaica to qualify for the first time since 1974 when they were called Zaire? Will Iraq be there for their first tournament since 1986, or will it be Bolivia, who haven’t qualified since 1994? Can Graham Potter inspire Sweden, or will Robert Lewandowski have one final World Cup with Poland? And can Denmark edge by Czech Republic to qualify for a tournament staged in a country whose president has recently threatened to invade its sovereign territory?

This is the World Cup in its purest form. What will follow threatens to be a lot of bloat and anticlimax, at least until the last 16.

• This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.