We’ll start by looking at Asia.
AFC
Autobid Notes
Cups are relatively sparse in Asia.
The following countries do not run a cup competition, and the league champion was granted the autobid: Afghanistan, Bhutan, Brunei, Laos, Malaysia, the Maldives, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Timor-Leste.
Also for Timor-Leste and the Maldives, the 2023 league table was used as 2024 results seem to not be reported or perhaps the league was not run. For Brunei, Laos, Malaysia, and Singapore1, a league season was run in 2023 then delayed to switch the calendar for 2024-25, so 2023 results were used. Myanmar also has this calendar switch, but they did run a cup in 2024.
The following countries do not run a full cup competition, and the league uses a playoff system. The playoff champion was thus awarded the autobid in Guam, Indonesia, Yemen.
We should also note that Yemen is a divided nation and despite Sana’a being in rebel hands, the league system and the reported champion appear to be based there. The Yemeni champion thus needs to be considered a threat to not show up to the event, as getting into and out of Yemen is very much non-trivial. An automatic boot to the First Four as a 16 seed is headed their way.
In Bahrain, there are multiple cup events. The King’s Cup was granted premier cup status and its winner given the autobid. The situation is similar in Kuwait, where the Emir Cup winner is given the autobid.
Nepal not only does not run a cup, but they have two leagues which both claim first-division status. The Nepal Super League playoff champion was granted the autobid but this is very much not an obvious decision and could very well be wrong. If it is and it would make sense to replace this team, I doubt it would change the seeding much.
Not only does North Korea not run a cup competition (that we know about), but their league system reports very little data to the outside world and appears to have been paused (or at least stopped allowing outside reports) at the two-thirds point in the season. Nonetheless, the champion with the best data available was selected. Because of the paucity of data, this team will be heading for the First Four as a 16 seed.
The Cup in Oman was won by Dhofar. However, Oman has relegated them from the top division for failing to obtain a license (they would have survived on quality of play), so I am comfortable saying that they would not get an AFC license either and thus are not qualifying for this event. Oman Cup Finalist Al-Nahda is given the autobid.
The Pakistan Football Association is a bit of a mess, and they have not really organized much in the way of competition in several years, and it’s not clear that there are any surviving football clubs. However, there was a 2024 tournament involving teams representing various governmental departments, which was won by the Water and Power Development Authority. This team has been granted the autobid but will be sent to the First Four as a 16 seed for a clear lack of quality.
Due to the ongoing conflicts in Palestine, there is no competition in 2024. The winners of the 2023 West Bank Cup have been given the autobid.
Sri Lanka is a unique country that seems to have not run a league in 2024. But it did run a cup, so the autobid is easy. Nonetheless, between Sri Lanka’s already low rankings in AFC and FIFA, and the fact that there’s no league data to work with, we’ve found our last “First Four” 16 seed.
General Notes
While AFC doesn’t have quite as many autobids as CAF, it still has enough to where it ended up making sense to in practice cap the number of clubs per country at 3 rather than 4.
Hosting
AFC will not allow countries to host multiple events.
Minimum capacities: 70000 for the Final Four, 50000 for regionals, 40000 for other events
Additionally, AFC would almost certainly want to balance between West and East as much as possible to minimize travel — certainly 2 “West” sites and 2 “East” sites for regionals. I did as much as I was willing to do without running into what I felt were situations I did not want to be in in terms of implicit endorsements (and I’m not thrilled about a lot of my Western choices as is).
First Four: Singapore National Stadium, Singapore (Capacity: 55000)
Pod Sites:
Seoul Olympic Stadium, Seoul, South Korea (Capacity: 69950)
Kaohsiung National Stadium, Kaohsiung, Taiwan (Capacity: 55000)
Shanghai Stadium, Shanghai, China (Capacity: 72000)
My Dinh National Stadium, Hanoi, Vietnam (Capacity: 40192)
Rajamangala National Stadium, Bangkok, Thailand (Capacity: 49722)
Dasharath Rangasala, Kathmandu, Nepal (Capacity: 41000)
Zayed Sports City Stadium, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
(Capacity: 43206)Jabir al-Ahmad International Stadium, Kuwait City, Kuwait
(Capacity: 60000)
Regionals:
Lusail Stadium, Lusial, Qatar (Capacity: 88966)
Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, New Delhi, India (Capacity: 60000)
Bukit Jalil National Stadium, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (Capacity: 90000)
Stadium Australia, Sydney, Australia (Capacity: 82500)
Final Four: Japan National Stadium, Tokyo, Japan (Capacity: 80200)
The Bracket:
Don’t forget: 8 more AFC teams are coming in the WILD bracket!
CONMEBOL/OFC/WILD
Arguably, this is really 3 brackets in one. Each has its own rules. It’s just that they all come together.
The bracket’s connections — the CONMEBOL Final, the OFC/WILD Clash, and the SuperSix Qualifying match, will all take place at the Estadio do Maracana, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Capacity: 73193).2
The CONMEBOL and OFC “First Four” are really just two matches each, and could probably stand to be called “Preliminaries”3.
But really we should look at each bracket’s rules and comments separately, then put up the bracket.
CONMEBOL
Autobid Notes
Bolivia is the only nation in CONMEBOL that doesn’t run a cup format. However, it runs the Apertura-Clausura system common in Latin America, and then a Grand Final between those champions. The Grand Final winner was awarded the autobid.
Peru technically has what they call a “cup”. However, despite the name, it’s probably better described as a 4th division league system that culminates in a playoff for promotion ot the 3rd division. As such, we’re going to ignore this. The autobid for Peru is going to its league champion.
General Notes
Since CONMEBOL is only 2 regions, and the cap is 6, the regionality rules are a bit different, but will operate on the same principal. If the top team for a country is in one regional, the next team has to go to the other. Then the third team is free to go to either. Then the fourth team has to be opposite the third team. And so on.
With such a large percentage of the bracket potentially being from the same conference, early matchups are inevitable. Indeed, we end up featuring a matchup of clubs from Argentina in the first round. Oh well.
Also, the First Four in a full bracket is normally ‘last four in’ and ‘worst four teams’. Ironically, we’re able to use a similar principle this time around. I ended up with ‘last two in’ and ‘worst two teams’… sort of. I actually think the second worst team in the tournament is the last team in. Or maybe it’s the opponent of the worst team. I could go either way. But in any case, it does mean that both Preliminary matchups end up being in the 16-seed slot, so ultimately I decided to call it a 16 v. 17 matchup line.
The 13 through 15 seeds are largely forced by the regionality rules and I find no functional difference in quality between any of these seed lines.
Hosting:
The capacity minimum for the Regionals and the Final/Clash rounds is 70000. For all other events, it is 40000. A country hosting a Regional can’t also host the Final/Clash and vice versa.
Preliminaries: Estadio Defensores del Chaco, Asunción, Paraguay
(Capacity: 42354)
Pod Sites:
Estadio Atanasio Girardot, Medellín, Colombia (Capacity: 44863)
Arena Corinthians, São Paulo, Brazil (Capacity: 47252)
Estadio Nacional Julio Martínez Prádanos, Santiago, Chile
(Capacity: 48665)Estadio Campeón del Siglo, Montevideo, Uruguay (Capacity: 40005)
Regionals:
Estadio Monumental “U”, Lima, Peru (Capacity: 80093)
Estadio Más Monumental, Buenos Aires, Argentina (Capacity: 84567)
OFC
Autobid Notes
Due to a lack of a cup, league champions were given autobids in the Cook Islands4, (Western) Samoa, the Solomon Islands, and Tonga.
American Samoa runs a cup, but they don’t schedule matches for it. Rather, the league plays, and in league games the cup can get transferred boxing-style. It’s quite silly, and I would not want to give an autobid to the cup winner here. It doesn’t matter, though, as Pago Youth ended up holding both league and cup titles at the end of the most recent season.
Fiji has both ‘district’ teams and ‘club’ teams. My first instinct here was to say that the club teams would be the ones to use here. However, it turns out that the district teams are the ones that can qualify for the OFC Champions League… so sure, the Interdistrict Championship will be acknowledged as the legitimate cup. Its winner will be given the autobid. (This is not the district league itself, though, and indeed the cup winners only came 2nd in the league.)
New Caledonia does not run a cup, and due to unrest in the country, the league was suspended shortly after the halfway point in the season. For fairness in terms of looking at a balanced schedule of results, we accept the first-half champion for the autobid.
Papua New Guinea’s competitions do not include the future breakway area of Bougainville.
Vanuatu doesn’t have a cup, and its league system is complex. The country consists of several islands so travel can be difficult. Each province5 runs a local league. The winners of those leagues play in a Vanuatu Champions League, which itself culminates in a playoff. The playoff champion was granted the autobid.
General Notes
OFC is nearly exclusively a confederation of amateur sides. Certainly, the top league in the confederation — the New Zealand National League — can be called semi-pro at best. However, there are exactly two professional sides in OFC: Wellington Phoenix and Auckland FC. Both of these teams are from New Zealand but play in the Australian A-League. Auckland FC is actually debuting this season… nonetheless, their professional status and existing clearly in a better league than anything OFC has to offer indicates they should get a top seed. After all, if OFC wants a chance at seeing better opposition, they really need these teams going at it6. As such, with the 4-club per country cap, and their cup winners getting the autobid, New Zealand ends up in a position where they will effectively always hit their cap. Their two professional sides and their cup winners make three. The fourth side would either be the league regular season champion or the league playoff champion. Someone’s going to end up screwed no matter how you slice it. But with only 18 teams and 11 autobids, you can’t really justify raising the cap either.
An assessment of league quality can in part be seen by considering ‘how much data can I find about them’. The harder I had to work to find info, the worst their league was going to be considered. For the preliminary matches, the worst two league champions were thrown into the 16 seed line, and then the “last two in” (both at-large bids) were slotted on the same line, which turned out to be the 10 seed.
Hosting:
Any restrictions here are hard, as there just aren’t many stadiums that are at all capable of handling events. OFC will settle for a univeral minimum of 10000 seats, with the Final Four/Regional being a minimum of 30000.7
Preliminaries: Pacific Games Stadium, Honiara, Solomon Islands
(Capacity: 10000)
Pod Sites:
Sky Stadium, Wellington, New Zealand (Capacity: 34500)
HFC Bank Stadium, Suva, Fiji (Capacity: 15000)
Regional Championship: Eden Park, Auckland, New Zealand
(Capacity: 50000)
WILD
The WILD bracket is 16 teams, a bit of an expansion of the CAF and AFC brackets who have very few at-large bids to go around. I required no more than 1 team per country in this bracket. Also, I did not use this bracket to start granting 4th selections to countries — the overall cap for both CAF and AFC, including this extension, still ended up at 3. Most of the teams in this bracket are league champions who got a bit shafted by a weak cup winner and their league being just shy of good enough.
Hosting:
Since this is a mix of AFC and CAF teams, it doesn’t really make sense to play games in either spot — it would disadvantage the other. With the winner of this bracket heading to Brazil, I ultimately decided to just play every game in the United States. I picked three sites close together, and in moderately sized stadiums, as I don’t expect crowds to be particularly large. So we’re not just in the United States, but exclusively in Texas.
Pod Sites:
Toyota Stadium, Frisco (Capacity: 21193)
Q2 Stadium, Austin (Capacity: 20500)
Regional Championship: Shell Energy Stadium, Houston (Capacity: 22000)
The Brackets:
Two Lima sides find themselves in the pod with reigning Champions League winner Botafogo. If they can somehow get out of that pod, they’re headed home and will look very dangerous despite their low seed. Right below that we get the oddity of Huracán drawing Estuidantes de La Plata in the first round. I could have attempted to enforce avoiding it, but things were starting to get complicated enough.
Final Thoughts
And that’s a wrap on this one! No, I don’t have the ability to simulate this. Too many of these bottom-end clubs just flat-out lack the data and it would 100% be being pulled out of my butt. So that’ll be all until the next project.
The Singapore league has a pair of interesting guests which in other circumstances could be relevant. DPMM Brunei is a Brunei club playing in their league, and is probably a superior club to any team in Brunei’s league. Albirex Niigata Singapore is a Singapore-based reserve squad of Japanese side Albirex Niigata, and this club actually won the Singapore league in 2023. However, the Singapore league just isn’t good enough to be throwing down at-large bids, so only Singapore Cup winners Lion City Sailors are going to be represented in the bracket. Hence why this is a footnote rather than in the main part of the post.
Placing these matches here means that Brazil won’t be allowed to host a CONMEBOL regional finals, but a different Brazilian city can (and will) host a pod.
I guess I could have done the same for UEFA, but there were four matches there, just split across two brackets. Here, it’s two different confederations with two matches each.
The Cook Islands also don’t really have much of a league. A single island — Rarotonga — has a small, 6 team league. For lack of a better option, the Rarotonga champion is given the autobid. You might think that this means I would boot them to the bottom seed, but actually, Samoa and Tonga have just as much trouble with data and consistency.
There are six provinces, and also the cities of Luganville and Port Vila run their own leagues, for a total of eight leagues. Each province consists of one or more islands, and every island belongs to only one provnice.
Legitimately, the issue that the A-League clubs aren’t eligible for actual OFC play because technically they play in an AFC league is mindboggling. I get that OFC doesn’t want them to be a steamroller through their own Champions League, but what it means is that you unnecessarily place an amateur squad in the Club World Cup… to get steamrollered. This was true in the 7-team version, and it’s still going to be true in the 32-team version. The OFC Champions League needs a redesign.
Even this seriously stretches the options. I used nearly every stadium available by this metric. Unless I missed one (always possible), all the ones I didn’t use are in New Zealand, and I already have 2 events there.