[Lucky_Will]

There are three big tournaments in my world.

The World Cup, whose real life counterpart is currently ongoing, and the UEBA European Championship (aka the Euros) happen every four years.

I plan to follow the same pattern as the real world tournaments. These tournaments begin on 1 December and run through the month.

The Champions League runs annually, beginning the second week in July. I’ll go into the structure and schedule in more detail below.

The Euros

The Euros are the first international tournament I’ll have, with the 2012 Euros co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland. This is up against a limitation of the game, in that OOTP only allows you to select a host city for a tournament (more on this in my next post). Starting with 2012, the Euros will be as follows:

2012 - Ukraine & Poland
2016 - France
2020 - Various European cities*
2024 - Germany
2028 - TBD

* TBD whether I'll do the tournament in 2020 or mirror real-world events and push it to '21. In this world, the Euros are a winter tournament, so it would be relatively unaffected by the pandemic... Something I'll work my way towards as we go.

The tournament is comprised of a group stage of 6 groups of 4 teams each, followed by a knockout stage. The group stage consists of a 6-game round robin. The higher seeded team gets two series at home, one away. The group winners and runners up qualify for the round of 16.

The group winners and runners up automatically qualify for the knockout stage, and the top four third place teams qualify as wildcards. The knockout stage is a best-of-three series and a single-game final.
This year’s groups are:

Group A: FRA, WLS, NIR, ALB
Group B: ENG, AUT, POL, SLO
Group C: POR, ESP, UKR, SUI
Group D: GER, BEL, SRB, GRE
Group E: ITA, IRL, SWE, CRO
Group F: NED, SCO, DEN, ROM

Host cities:

1. Stadion Narodowy, Warsaw, Poland
2. Stadion Wroclaw, Wroclaw, Poland
3. Stadion Gdansk, Gdansk, Poland
4. Stadion Miejski, Poznan, Poland
5. Olympic Stadium (Dynamo Kyiv), Kyiv, Ukraine
6. Donbass Arena (Shaktar Donetsk), Donetsk, Ukraine
7. Metalist Stadium, Kharkiv, Ukraine
8. Arena Lviv, Lviv, Ukraine

World Cup

The next World Cup will be in 2014, hosted in Brazil. Future tournaments will be hosted as follows:

2014 - Brazil
2018 - Russia
2022 - Qatar
2026 - USA, Canada, Mexico
2030 - TBD

The tournament is comprised of a group stage of 8 groups of 4 teams each, followed by a knockout stage. The group stage consists of a 6-game round robin. The higher seeded team gets two series at home, one away. The group winners and runners up qualify for the round of 16.

The group winners and runners up qualify for the knockout stage, The knockout stage is a best-of-three series and a single-game final.

Host cities in Brazil are:

1. Maracana, Rio de Janeiro
2. Estadio Nacional, Brasilia
3. Arena Corinthians, Sao Paulo
4. Castelao, Fortaleza
5. Estadio Mineirao, Belo Horizonte
6. Fonte Nova, Salvador
7. Estadio Beira-Rio, Porto Alegre
8. Arena Pernambuco, Recife
9. Arena Pantanal, Cuiaba
10. Arena da Amazonia, Manaus
11. Arena das Dunas, Natal
12. Arena da Baixada, Curitiba

Champions League

The Champions League runs annually and starts in mid-July. I gave the league allocations in a previous post, but as a review:

• ENG 4
• GER 4
• ESP 4
• ITA 4
• FRA 3
• POR 2
• RUS 1
• NED 1
• BEL 1
• AUT 1
• SCO 1
• EUR 6 (3 per sub-league)

The previous year’s Champions League winner qualifies no matter where they finish domestically, they’ll take one spot from their home league if applicable.

The tournament is comprised of a group stage of 8 groups of 4 teams each, followed by a knockout stage. The group stage consists of a 6-game round robin. The higher seeded team gets two series at home, one away. The group winners and runners up qualify for the round of 16.

Seeding for the group stage is a function of previous season’s winning percentage, run differential, and league-specific multipliers that seed the more prominent leagues higher.

Group stage games start in mid-July and occur every other week on Tuesday and Wednesday. The weekly schedule during the Champions League season can be seen in one of my attachments at the end of this post.

The group winners and runners up qualify for the knockout stage, The knockout stage is a best-of-three series and a single-game final. The knockout round starts the first weekend in November.

This year’s Champions League is based on the real 2012 Champions League, not my design, so it looks slightly different than how 2013 and beyond will.

Group A

Bayern Munich (GER)
Manchester City (ENG)
Napoli (ITA)
Villarreal (ESP)

Group B

Inter (ITA)
CSKA Moscow (RUS)
Trabzonspor (TUR, EUR)
Lille (FRA)

Group C

Benfica (POR)
Basel (EUR)
Manchester United (ENG)
Galati Otelul (ROM, EUR)

Group D

Real Madrid (ESP)
Lyon (FRA)
Ajax (NED)
Dinamo Zagreb (CRO, EUR)

Group E

Chelsea (ENG)
Bayer Leverkusen (GER)
Valencia (ESP)
Genk (BEL)

Group F

Arsenal (ENG)
Marseille (FRA)
Olympiacos (GRE, EUR)
Dortmund (GER)

Group G

APOEL (CYP, EUR)
Zenit (RUS)
Porto (POR)
Donetsk (UKR, EUR)

Group H

Barcelona (ESP)
Milan (ITA)
Viktoria Plzen (CZE, EUR)
BATE Borisov (BLR, EUR)

The 2012 Champions League final will be in Munich (Baseball Arena Munchen, Bayern Munich).

National Cup Tournaments

The Big Five Leagues also have domestic national cups, which I’ve mentioned previously. They all start on 1 March. Preliminary rounds are best-of-three series, the final is a single game. In most leagues, higher ranked teams get a bye in the first round or two. Nothing really comes out of these cup tournaments, they just exist for fun and sort of replace Spring Training.

That’s the tournament landscape for my setup. Before starting on Cup Season, my next post will get into some nitpicks and drawbacks from my playthrough tests.