With the end of the 2022 Women’s Volleyball World Championships, FIVB also started the 2026 Women’s Volleyball World Championships four years later. In order to allow more countries to participate in the competitions and expand the influence of volleyball, FIVB decided to expand the World Championships (both men’s volleyball and women’s volleyball teams are the same) from 24 teams to 32 teams from 2026, with eight more national teams participating.
In addition to increasing the number of teams, FIVB has also made some modifications to the competition system since the next World Championships, and continues to enhance the intensity of the competition!
The 32 teams participating in the next competition will be divided into 8 groups in the group stage. Four teams in each group will compete in a single round, and the team that finally ranks the top two in the group will be promoted, which means that 16 teams will be eliminated directly in one group stage alone. After the group stage, the teams that have advanced to the top 16 will directly enter the knockout stage, playing the quarter-finals, the semi-finals, and the final stage. If the team has been playing from the beginning to the end of the final stage, it will only experience seven games at most. Although the number of participating teams has increased, the number of games is shrinking, and once the group stage is finished, it will enter the knockout stage, and the fault tolerance rate for participating teams will also become extremely low. In this way, the number of games will be reduced.
This change is not very friendly for China Women’s Volleyball Team. This year’s World Women’s Volleyball Team has two stages: after the group stage, it will enter the quarter-finals by the advantage of points. However, from the next World Championship onwards, before entering the quarter-finals, it is necessary to play an eighth-finals, which greatly reduces the team’s fault tolerance rate. Most importantly, starting from the next World Championships, China Women’s Volleyball Team must go through three knockout matches and one final to win the World Championships. In these four matches, if you lose one of them, you will not win the championship directly. Under such a competition system, it is really difficult to win if you don’t have absolute strength. Therefore, it is imperative that China women’s volleyball team should strive to improve their own strength and have enough competitiveness when they win the next World Championships!
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