Schedule Switzerland 1954

Ah, the Swiss World Cup. In many ways a favorite of mine. It was undoubtedly the highest scoring World Cup, the smallest European country to host the World Cup, probably the best official World Cup movie was made for it, and Austria’s best World Cup performance was achieved, although the nation was still not satisfied thanks to a shameful 6-1 thrashing at the hands of Germany in the semis. It was also the second World Cup in a row to produce a veritable stunner in the final. To this day there is a debate whether the Uruguay’s win over Brazil in 1950 or Germany’s win over Hungary in 1954 is the biggest upset in a World Cup decider (note, not final since there was no official final in 1950). Well, according to the Elo-rating it was the former, while the latter was until the 2010 final, the game with highest Elo points total. However, the most unique feature of the 1954 World Cup is probably the absolutely weird format, which we will look at now.

At first, it seems that FIFA came to their senses by arranging the 16 qualified teams into four groups of four, where the top 2 teams advanced to the next round, which was held as a knockout tournament. So far so good. The basics for a format which was used up until 1970 were there. The devil is in the details: first of all, the members of each group were separated into seeded and unseeded teams, where seeded teams only played unseeded ones. That Germany was not among the seeds is another head scratcher. Second, if games were tied extra time was played! Third, if teams were tied for first place, lots were drawn to determine the winner of the group, while a decider was scheduled between teams tied for second place. However, the least obvious but in a way most unfair feature was the fact that in the knockout phase one finalist was determined from the group winners, while other one came from the runner-ups. The seeding system is strange, alright, but the make-up of the play-off tree is insanity. Honestly, this may be one of the most overlooked facts when trying to explain the loss of the great Magyars in the final. After all, Hungary had to go through Brazil and Uruguay (to hard-fought and draining games), whereas Germany played Yugoslavia and Austria for relatively easy wins. Hungary may have accused the Germans of doping, but it may simply be the fact that the Germans were fresher, both mentally as physically.

The scheduling was actually quite reasonable, with all teams having at least two rest days between games. If you avoided the play-off, you got a full week off (Brazil and Yugoslavia)! While this may be a long time, the scheduling looked quite nice and regular otherwise. The only odd feature is that Lugano hosted one game only. I understand that one wanted to give Italian supporters a shorter travel, but have Lugano host at least one more game or leave it off the schedule. But then, this is surely the smallest oddity of this very, very strange World Cup.

For more information and background, I recommend the Switzerland 1954 Wikipedia page.