Now that the U.S. has played England to a draw in the World Cup, it's a good opportunity to use FIFA rules to calculate how many games there have to be in a World Cup.
1. The group stage
First, we have a group stage, where the 32 qualifying teams are placed in 8 groups 4, and in each group, the 4 teams play each other round-robin (i.e., each team plays each other team); each team gets points that way (e.g., 3 for a win, 1 for a draw), and the two teams with the highest number of points in each group advance to the knockout stage. (Because teams can be tied on points, this relies on a number of tiebreaker rules.)
