Stardom recently announced plans to expand the 5-Star Grand Prix this year from 20 to 26 participants. If the newly expanded tournament keeps the same structure of the old tournament, with two groups in a round robin and the winners facing in the final, the total number of matches would increase from 91 to 157, a 73% increase. That would either compress match time and dilute the quality of the tournament or spread out the tournament for so long that it infringes on the rest of the Stardom calendar. However, with how big the roster has become it would be difficult to justify leaving some key roster members out to keep the tournament at 20 participants. To solve this, I propose the following changes to the tournament format:

Increase the field from 20 to 28 participants. This is two more than proposed and should be enough to accommodate all the main players on the roster without overly bloating the field.

Split the field into 4 groups of 7. Each group would follow the same round robin format of previous tournaments. The matches would be spread across 7 days, with each wrestler having 6 matches and 1 bye to account for the odd number of participants. Multiplying across 4 groups and that’s 12 matches per day over 7 days, or if the groups are split 6 matches per day over 14 days. Either way, it works out to 84 matches total.

The winners of each group advance to the semifinals, where they are randomly drawn into two matchups. The winners then advance to the tournament final. Adding on these 3 playoff matches brings the total to 87, just 4 less than the previous format.

This system would allow more participation and a similar round robin style without diluting match quality or bloating the tournament’s runtime. I think this is a way to get the best of both worlds in tournament expansion.