Bracketology 2011: World Club Soccer’s Best Impression Of The NCAA Basketball Tournament

With the 68-team NCAA men's basketball tournament bracket being released on Selection Sunday, a question came up among some of us at SB Nation Soccer: How would a 68-team bracket of world soccer clubs look? What stadiums around the world would host the matches? Who would be the top seeds? Which teams would end up on the bubble, and who would end up on the smiling and crying side of the bubble? What juicy match-ups would the world have to look forward to? And most of all, how would everyone fill out their brackets, and what upsets would they pick?

It all started with the basic rules set forth by the NCAA selection committee. There is a Final Four site, Wembley Stadium in London. There are four regional sites spread out around the world at Estadio Santiago Bernabeu in Madrid, Spain; Estadio do Maracana in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; International Stadium in Yokohama, Japan; and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. There are also eight sub-regional sites that will host the first two rounds.

Just as the NCAA tournament is conducted, there are 31 automatic bids and 37 at-large bids. The automatic bids were dolled out with four going to CONCACAF, Africa and Asia, five spots to South America and the remaining 14 automatic bids going to the champions of the top 14 rated European leagues by the UEFA league coefficient.

With the 37 at-large bids, there were many stone cold locks. Some selections, like Manchester United and Real Madrid, were very obvious, but the easy selections continued all the way down to teams like FC Porto, Villarreal and Bayer Leverkusen, who would all be considered by anyone as among the top 68 teams in the world.

Several other clubs came in as locks as well, but the last eight spots presented a challenge. The final eight at-large teams that made up our bracket were Trabzonspor, Olympiacos, Dynamo Kiev, Spartak Moscow, Santos, Hapoel Tel Aviv, Braga, and Fulham. The first four out were Bolton, Pumas UNAM, Hannover, and Sparta Prague. In the cases of Sparta Prague and Pumas, we felt that their leagues were not strong enough to justify an at-large bid, though both are in fantastic form at the moment.

With the field of 68 teams decided upon, setting the s-curve was next. We ranked all of the teams 1-68 and snaked back and forth four at a time in an effort to best balance the four regions. That s-curve had to be adjusted at times for a variety of reasons. For instance, Dortmund could not play in their home stadium, every effort was made to keep lower seeds from playing a few miles from home against higher seeds, and clubs from the same country were kept away from playing whenever possible.

The final four at-large teams and final four automatic qualifiers were paired up for the play-in matches and the bracket was set up to go, although the seeding is admittedly subjective and based on no particular methodology other than the judgment of the selection committee.