The drawing of lots.

It sounds fine for selecting the winner of a door prize or for deciding which guy in the apartment has to take out the garbage. But is that any way to decide something as important as a team’s elimination in the world’s most popular sports tournament?

By now, even casual fans of soccer are becoming accustomed to the rules for tiebreakers in the World Cup. If two teams have the same number of points after the three games of the group stage, the tiebreakers unfold like this:

1) Goal differential

2) Goals scored

3) Head-to-head result

The fourth and last tiebreaker is pure, dumb luck: the drawing of lots. No team has ever been eliminated from a World Cup this way, but it has happened in World Cup qualifying, and it decided the placement of two teams — the Netherlands and Ireland — after group play in the 1990 World Cup in Italy. (Slips of paper were placed in plastic balls, which were put in a bowl and drawn.)