BOSTON, Massachusetts, July 3 : The expanded 48-team World Cup has made giant-killings significantly more likely, according to experts, but the longer and more demanding tournament still favours the traditional heavyweight sides best equipped to sustain their level through five knockout rounds.FIFA expanded the tournament from 32 to 48 teams, adding more than 10 days to the schedule. A newly created round of 32 means teams must now survive an extra knockout match to lift the trophy, while eight third-placed finishers from the group stage advanced, creating more potential pathways for lower-ranked sides.“We have an additional knockout match where the stronger teams will have a chance of one in three, one in four, one in five to proceed. This is the additional risk you get for the serious contenders to be kicked out,” Achim Zeileis, Professor of Statistics at Universitaet Innsbruck, told Reuters. “So it’s reduced to 80 per cent or 75 per cent of the probability they had without this additional problem.”Zeileis, part of an international team of researchers using machine-learning models to simulate every possible World Cup match, said the revised group stage also introduces new uncertainty.