Normally, a single-elimination tournament bracket will look like the image above. The usual method of visualising a tournament is a clear way of tracing the winners of each round. However, having come across the idea of deteriorating parallel in the book, Visual Explanation by Edward Tufte, I think there may be another way to represent the single-elimination tournament.
Before moving on to the viz itself, we will need to understand what is the deteriorating parallel. It is something similar to an icicle chart, but not quite the same.
Using this concept, I reimagined World Cup 2022 final 16 in the viz below with the rounds in the vertical axis and the ranks of the teams in the horizontal axis:
Seeing that it may be a bit plain, I added a colour code for the matches. The same colour means the 2 teams played against each other. In this way, the matches can be shown too.
All in all, the concept of deteriorating parallel is something that I think can be further established and explored. Going through Tutfe's third book on visuals, I have realised that the later books are less discussed by the data viz community. Perhaps, it may be time to revisit the books.