As we continue the final round of group matches in Russia, both Group F and Group G feature possible scenarios where the number of yellow and red cards or the drawing of lots may have to be employed to separate teams on identical records at the end of their three games. This wouldn’t be the first time World Cups have employed strange ways of deciding which team have qualified. Here are some of the odder examples from history.

1) Drawing lots

Few people seem to remember that Fifa actually did draw lots to decide group places during Italia 90. The “Group of sleep” featured five draws among England, the Netherlands, Republic of Ireland and Egypt. Ireland and the Netherlands ended up tied for second and third place. In the 24-team format of the time both were due to progress, but Fifa had to make a draw to determine who would play where.

About 90 minutes after the final group games ended, Sepp Blatter put some slips of paper in some balls in some bowls, swished them around a bit, then drew that the Netherlands would go on to have a spitting competition with West Germany, and sent Ireland off to penalty shootout heroics against Romania. There’s even some footage of the draw still available on YouTube.

Sepp Blatter overseeing the drawing of lots during the 1990 World Cup finals.

2) Play-offs

You’d get no thanks for cramming in extra fixtures these days, but the 1954 and 1958 World Cups were set up so that teams tied for second and third place on points in the group stages faced a play-off to see who would get through. Thus in 1958 Wales and Northern Ireland reached the quarter-finals via a play-off and England were sent home after their play-off failure against a Soviet Union team they’d drawn with nine days earlier.

The 1954 set-up was even stranger, with four teams in a group but each team scheduled to play only two group games. On their way to winning the title West Germany beat Turkey, then lost 8-3 to much-fancied Hungary, setting them up for a play-off with ... well, Turkey again. West Germany went on to beat Hungary 3-2 in the final – the only champions to have played two different teams twice during the tournament.

3) Extra-time in group matches

Another unusual feature of the 1954 competition was that group matches had extra time. Brazil’s game against Yugoslavia and England’s game with Belgium featured an extra half-hour, to try to force a result. As it was, both still ended up as draws. Brazil and Yugoslavia stayed at 1-1, while a rapid exchange of goals in the early minutes of extra time left England and Belgium locked at 4-4.

4) Replays

A format that modern TV scheduling would struggle with was the replay, used in the early years of the World Cup to decide knockout matches that were tied after extra time. The idea of squad rest days was also a casualty under this regime.

Italy line up for the 1934 World Cup final – having played three games in four days the week before. Photograph: STAFF/AFP/Getty Images

On 31 May 1934 in Florence, Italy and Spain drew their quarter-final 1-1 after extra time in front of 35,000 spectators. They reconvened the very next day at the same venue, this time in front of 43,000 people, who watched Italy edge the game 1-0. The Italy squad then travelled to Milan, where their 3 June semi-final against Austria was their third match in four days. They triumphed 1-0 and went on to lift the Jules Rimet trophy in Rome on the 10th.

5) Goal average

Goal average is calculated by dividing the number of goals scored by the number of those conceded. This worked perfectly well as a system in football for many years across a whole league season. It proved less useful across the limited number of games in a World Cup group stage. After England kept three clean sheets across their group matches in the 1966 World Cup, it became obvious to Fifa that you could not divide the number of goals scored by zero. From 1970 goal difference was used instead.

England’s three clean sheets in the group stages condemned Fifa’s mathematically challenged goal average system to the history books. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

6) Blindfolded boys

The oddest World Cup tie-breaker of all didn’t come in the finals but in qualifying to reach the 1954 tournament. In Group Six, Spain and Turkey played each other twice after the Netherlands withdrew. They won one game each – Spain winning 4-1 in Madrid before slipping to a 1-0 defeat in Istanbul. Spain’s superior goal difference wasn’t considered a deciding factor, so they had a play-off in Rome. After that was inevitably drawn, a 14-year-old boy was blindfolded and then picked Turkey’s name in the draw. They went to the World Cup. And Spain, despite being 6-4 up on aggregate across the three matches, did not.