For the first time a pre-tournament qualification match took place to decide Asia's second representative but other than that all competitors took part by invitation.

The four top teams in each of the pools went forward to contest the World Cup title.

The four teams in each of these groups are reseeded to decide who plays who at this stage of the tournament.

[note 2] Although not strictly speaking a knock-out as – in theory – a team losing a game on Day 1 could still qualify dependent on results on Day 2, in practice this was a complex tournament that is best understood by means of the following graphics.

Note that this should not be taken to imply that the draw for any round of games was predetermined – each successive round was drawn using seedings and rankings based on previous matches: Teams knocked out in the Cup quarter-finals Teams defeated in the first round of pool matches Teams defeated in the first round of the ranking matches for 9–16 Teams were ranked according to the following criteria: This resulted in the following ranking: