Welcome to another series on Hypo FM.
Our main series is the Draft World Cup, where players represent the country they play in. This one is effectively the opposite.
In this series, we have set up a tournament between the major cities of Europe, where only players born in (or just outside) that city can represent the side. This means there'll be some unusual sides, where world-class stars have to mix it with amateur-level players.
In this episode we'll explain how it works, then go through which teams have qualified.
The format
A straight single-leg knock-out between 64 teams. Each team's squad consists of 30 players, selected by me. The draw is unseeded - think of it like a domestic cup.
Qualifying
Teams were split according to rough geographic areas (for some of the bigger nations they had a qualifying group all to themselves). The population of the area, and its "football pedigree" determined how many spaces were available.
There was also a wildcard event, where smaller places with one major star (e.g. Funchal, the birthplace of Cristiano Ronaldo) battled it out for a qualifying spot - which was won by Zadar, which features Croatian stars Modric, Subasic and Vrsaljko.
The sixteen teams that finished one spot away from qualification in each qualifying group had another chance to make it, as there was a knock-out tournament to give one final space. This was won by Liverpool.
Here are the qualifiers in full - listed in order of how they finished:
England: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield
France: Paris, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille
Germany: Berlin, Stuttgart, Cologne, Dusseldorf
Italy: Rome, Turin, Naples, Genoa
Iberian Peninsula: Madrid, Bilbao, Valencia, Lisbon, Sevilla, Gaia
Celtic Nations: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin
Benelux: Antwerp, The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Charleroi, Brussels
Former Yugoslavia: Zagreb, Nis, Split
Baltic Nations: Vilnius
Scandinavia: Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Bergen
Caucasus: Tbilisi
Alps: Vienna, Zurich, Ljubljana, Graz
Central Europe: Prague, Budapest, Brno, Krakow, Bratislava, Warsaw
South East Europe: Athens, Bucharest, Istanbul, Sofia, Bursa
North East Europe: St Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Kyiv, Novosibirsk
Micro Nations: Andorra la Vella
Wildcard: Zadar
Runner-up: Liverpool
So hopefully that's enough to be going on with! This is a quick seven-part series, with each future update giving the outcome of a round of the tournament. This means the next one is the round-of-64, so a lot to get through there!
Our main series is the Draft World Cup, where players represent the country they play in. This one is effectively the opposite.
In this series, we have set up a tournament between the major cities of Europe, where only players born in (or just outside) that city can represent the side. This means there'll be some unusual sides, where world-class stars have to mix it with amateur-level players.
In this episode we'll explain how it works, then go through which teams have qualified.
The format
A straight single-leg knock-out between 64 teams. Each team's squad consists of 30 players, selected by me. The draw is unseeded - think of it like a domestic cup.
Qualifying
Teams were split according to rough geographic areas (for some of the bigger nations they had a qualifying group all to themselves). The population of the area, and its "football pedigree" determined how many spaces were available.
There was also a wildcard event, where smaller places with one major star (e.g. Funchal, the birthplace of Cristiano Ronaldo) battled it out for a qualifying spot - which was won by Zadar, which features Croatian stars Modric, Subasic and Vrsaljko.
The sixteen teams that finished one spot away from qualification in each qualifying group had another chance to make it, as there was a knock-out tournament to give one final space. This was won by Liverpool.
Here are the qualifiers in full - listed in order of how they finished:
England: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield
France: Paris, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille
Germany: Berlin, Stuttgart, Cologne, Dusseldorf
Italy: Rome, Turin, Naples, Genoa
Iberian Peninsula: Madrid, Bilbao, Valencia, Lisbon, Sevilla, Gaia
Celtic Nations: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin
Benelux: Antwerp, The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Charleroi, Brussels
Former Yugoslavia: Zagreb, Nis, Split
Baltic Nations: Vilnius
Scandinavia: Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Bergen
Caucasus: Tbilisi
Alps: Vienna, Zurich, Ljubljana, Graz
Central Europe: Prague, Budapest, Brno, Krakow, Bratislava, Warsaw
South East Europe: Athens, Bucharest, Istanbul, Sofia, Bursa
North East Europe: St Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Kyiv, Novosibirsk
Micro Nations: Andorra la Vella
Wildcard: Zadar
Runner-up: Liverpool
So hopefully that's enough to be going on with! This is a quick seven-part series, with each future update giving the outcome of a round of the tournament. This means the next one is the round-of-64, so a lot to get through there!