Just over a week before the tournament begins, so we might as well get the discussions and predictions going. Welcome to Euro 2016!
Tournament Format
To accommodate the expansion from a 16 team finals tournament to 24 teams, the format will be changed from that used in 2012 with the addition of two extra groups in the group stage, and an extra round in the knockout stages. The six groups (A to F) would still contain four teams each, with the top two from each group still going through to the knockout stage. In the new format however, the four best third-ranked sides would also progress, leaving 16 teams going into the new round of 16 knockout stage, ahead of the usual quarter-finals, semi-finals and final, and only 8 teams going out at the group stage. The format is exactly the one which was applied to the 1986, 1990 and 1994 FIFA World Cups, with the exception of the absence of a third-place play-off.
This format generates a total of 51 games, compared with 31 games for the previous 16-team tournament, to be played over a period of 31 days. UEFA's general secretary Gianni Infantino previously described the format as "not ideal" due to the need for third-ranked teams in the group stage advancing, leading to a difficulty in preventing situations where teams might be able to know in advance what results they need to progress out of the group, lending to a lack of suspense for fans, or even the prospect of mutually beneficial collusion between teams.
Groups
A list of all fixtures and kick off can be found here on ESPN. All match times are shown as Eastern Time (ET), so be mindful.
Bracket Predictor
Okay, so we've done this bracket challenge for a few different events here on MH and we did one for the previous Euros and it was quite a bit of fun to see how close our predictions come to the tournament itself.The winner of the Bracket Challenge will receive a special badge. Click [HERE] to complete your predictions, then post a link to your predictions here, like this:My Bracket Predictions.
Member Predictions
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