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Women’s World Cup 2015: How does it work?

By Stanford Crissey

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Explaining the Women’s World Cup, and how it works.

The World Cup is one of the most exciting events in sports, a worldwide clash of the best players in the world’s most-loved sport. Despite the love soccer receives all over the world, it has yet to reach such a stature in the U.S., so many who wish to view the Women’s World Cup may not know exactly how the tournament works, or maybe are fans of men’s soccer but are wondering how the Women’s World Cup differs. So we’re here to explain it to you.

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The Women’s World Cup this year takes place in Canada from June 6 to July 5. Despite the longtime popularity of the sport, this is actually just the seventh Women’s World Cup ever held. The most recent was the 2011 World Cup, which was won by Japan.

This year, for the first time, the tournament has expanded to 24 teams (up from 16 in 2011, but still fewer than the 32 that participate in the men’s World Cup).

First off, teams around the world are divided into confederations. The United States and the rest of North America are members of CONCACAF, Europe in UEFA, South America in CONMEBOL (some of the acronyms get pretty crazy), and so on. Each confederation has a certain number of slots to fill (Europe gets 8, Asia gets 5, etc.) as determined by their past success in world soccer. The teams then enter a qualification tournament to determine who earns each of those spots (with the exception of the host country, in this case Canada, who gets in automatically).

The World Cup begins with the group stage. There are six groups of four teams each, as put together by FIFA, and structured to prevent teams from the same part of the world playing one another. The groups play in the first round in a round robin style. Each team plays the other three teams in the group once, and the two teams with the most points in a group advance to the next round.

Three points are earned for a win, one for a tie, and zero for a loss. If two teams are tied, the team with the better goal differential, or has scored more goals, gets to move on.

In a slight twist from the men’s Cup, four third-place teams from the groups get to move on in addition to the top teams, since the Women’s World Cup includes 24 teams rather than 32. The four third-place teams out of six with the highest goal differential also get to move on to the knockout stage of the tournament.

When the group stage ends, the top two teams from each group move on, plus the four third-place teams. From then on, it becomes a normal tournament, with the top team in one group playing the second-place team from another in single-elimination play.

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