First, a round up of my predictions for who would be eliminated in the group stages, as someone doubted the utility of the diagrams. My prediction was that “Finland, Russia, Ukraine and North Macedonia to be amongst the 8, with some of the remaining 4 coming from Wales, Turkey, Hungary, Portugal and the Czech Republic”, so that’s 5/8 correct, including Turkey, who more respected pundits had as alleged dark horses.
Yes, I make the diagrams because they look pretty and making them brings me great joy but the “outlying teams are eliminated first” theory has now held up over several tournaments.
With the removal of 8 teams, what does the diagram look like now?
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The club teams with the most players represented are Chelsea and Manchester City with 14 followed by Bayern Munich with 13. After the first round both Chelsea and Bayern have lost 1 player. No Manchester City players were eliminated.
Juventus are the club closest to the centre, with Spain, just about, being the national team closest to the centre.
The communities view is interesting.
Although there are 16 teams left in, there are only 13 communities, with Germany + France, Spain + England, Austria + Switzerland forming multi-team communities.
As for predictions, from the layout of the network diagram, things do not look good for Wales, Austria, Czech Republic, Croatia and Ukraine. England vs Germany, France vs Switzerland and, to a lesser extent, Belgium vs Portugal are too close to call, working only from the network diagram.
As a football fan, I am looking forward to those last two matches a lot.
fulltimesportsfan 