We are quickly approaching one of the world’s most anticipated events, the FIFA world cup where the world’s best Football teams battle it out for the top spot! You may be thinking, ‘this is a Eurovision website, what does football have to do with Eurovision?’ well, you are right, but we are celebrating the FIFA World Cup in the only way we know how – with Eurovision!
For the duration of the actual World Cup, some of the best Eurovision artists old and new will be battling it out in a series of matches that mirror the World Cup itself. By the end, we will know the first winner of our Eurovision World Cup!
So how does it work?
On each competition day of the World Cup, all of the matches for that day will be posted here on Eurovision Union. For a full 24 hours, a poll will be open for each match and it will be up to you to pick which of the representative songs will win the match.
Who is competing?
A total of 32 countries are competing, much like the real World Cup. We looked at the World Cup draw, and the nations within that draw who compete (or have competed) at Eurovision are automatically in the competition. This includes Morocco, who have competed at Eurovision just once!
For each non-Eurovision country in the official World Cup draw, we have substituted a competing Eurovision nation. As there is a total of 32 countries, unfortunately we couldn’t feature all of the Eurovision nations, but the selection was made in a random fashion.
The competing nations were placed into Groups, with the actual World Cup competitors placed in their respective Groups, with the remaining nations allocated to a Group. You can see the complete draw below:
How were the songs selected?
Every competing nation is represented by a Eurovision song. For each nation that has won Eurovision, a winning song was chosen as the representative song. If that nation has more than one winning entry, it was at the organiser’s discretion as to which of the winning songs would compete. If the competing nation was yet to win Eurovision, their best placing song was chosen.
Throughout the competition, the nations will be represented by the same song. Here are the competing entries (Click on the image to make it larger):
What is the Schedule?
The schedule of the competition will run completely parallel to the World Cup. The matches are identical to those in the World Cup, with the only difference being that the substituted countries will take the place of the non-Eurovision countries.
There are five stages:
- The Group Stage – Each nation competes against the other nations in their respective group
- Final 16 – The top two of each group remain, and they compete against other nations from other groups (a total of 8 matches)
- The Quarterfinals – The winners from the Final 16 will compete against one another (a total of 4 matches)
- The Semi-finals – The winners from the quarterfinals will compete against one another (a total of 2 matches)
- The Finals – this includes two matches, the third place decider between the two losing nations from the previous round, and the Grand Final which is between the two winners of the previous round
How are the winners decided?
In the posts for each match, a poll will be used to decide who will be the winner of that match. After the Group stage, the nation with the most wins will be classified as 1, and the nation with the second most wins will be classified as 2. These are the two nations who will continue in the competition.
In the case of a tie, a twitter poll will be used. This applies to individual matches, as well as if there is a tie in the Group stage where the two top countries are not clear.
Enjoy, and may the best song win!