Francisco Leong/A.F.P. — Getty Images, Franck Fife/A.F.P. — Getty Images

The first two weeks of a major soccer tournament can be two of the best weeks of a fan’s year. (Wives of those fans, like mine, not so much, but I digress.) Two games a day are a great way to spend an evening, or a lunch hour, or an early morning — depending where you or the games happen to be.

If the teams aren’t to your liking, or the games aren’t exciting, or you have to go to the dentist, no problem — there’ll be two more tomorrow. And two more the day after that.

Once the tournament advances to its later stages, the games get better, but fewer and farther in between. By the time the final is set, the lack of a daily soccer fix has become noticeable, and you start to wonder how much you’d give for another look at Ukraine, or the Czechs, or even Greece. You’d even give the Dutch one last look, if only to find out how the sum of so many good parts could be so much less than it could have been. Heck, you’d even watch a meaningless third-place game.

Except that there isn’t one.

The European Championships did away with the third-place match after the 1980 tournament, but the consolation game endures in other major events like the World Cup, the African Cup of Nations and Copa Amèrica. (The Concacaf Gold Cup used to hold one, but dropped it after 2003.)

While the game might better be described as the Disappointment Derby — at least the Olympics’ bronze-medal game has a tangible prize for the winner — in many cases it has a history of being a high-scoring, wide-open affair. With the pressure off, a team or a manager can take the chances that might have been unavailable, or unwise, only days before. It can be an opportunity to give some bench players a run, or to salute a Cinderella team after its clock has struck midnight.

Some players use it to pad their scoring totals — the goal Thomas Müller scored in the third-place game in South Africa, an entertaining 3-2 win over Uruguay gave him the Golden Boot as the tournament’s top scorer — and everyone wins when both teams are attacking.

Müller probably would have played in this year’s game, had there been one. And it might have been a good one, with Germany’s talented team trying to salvage its honor and Portugal trying to go home with a major scalp, or at least help Cristiano Ronaldo grab an individual honor the way Müller did in South Africa two years ago.

Europe’s top clubs are happy to be rid of the game, which they no doubt viewed as an extra chance for one of their players to pull or strain or tear something. And maybe some of the players wouldn’t like hanging around a few extra days, but the semifinal losers can always cobble together 22 who wouldn’t mind. Start with the ones who never got on the field. They probably need a soccer fix, too.

And who does it hurt really?

Corner kick: Would you watch a third-place game between Portugal and Germany on Saturday? Do you miss the games in tournaments where they’ve been eliminated, or were organizers right to do away with them?

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