LogFAQs > #904840087

I'd feel more sympathy if he hadn't been anti-England at every given opportunity for the entire tournament for apparently no reason whatsoever.

The reason you can't do it that way is for every team it helps like it would have helped Belgium here, it punishes teams who did their jobs too. How would it be fair on a 'lesser' team to take care of business and top a group over a higher ranked team to then be punished by a bigger team opting to swap into their side of the bracket whilst the team coming second gets to go on the now easier side?

I'm also not sure how you would juggle the logistics either. It's set up that way to avoid same group teams meeting each other. If the 1 seed swaps placement they now match against a group winner instead of a second place. So that 1 seed also has to swap now to avoid them being punished for winning their group but what if they don't want to swap and prefer that side of the bracket?

The fairer way would be to do it like a CL draw and do a fresh draw for the next round but then you run into logistics issues regarding number of rest days between matches. Like maybe you could split the draw somehow to be fairer into 4 1st who played Day 1/2, 4 1st who played Day 3/4 and then do the same for the 2nd place teams. And then since there is rest days after that you would be less restricted for the next round and anybody could meet anybody. You'd have to draw in advance for future rounds due to travelling though.