Amid the controversies around FIFA's corruption and support of dictatorial regimes worldwide, the organization also seems intent on bugging the hell out of football fans. A good example of this is the idea being championed by former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger, which would see the World Cup take place every two years instead of every four.
It's kind of surprising that nobody, at least in the sources I read, has anything good to say about this plan. The theme seems to be that the existing World Cup format, with its 32 teams (expanding to 48 in 2026), is already bloated, so doing it twice as often would be terrible. It would also crowd the regional championships out of the calendar, particularly the European championships, which are typically held on the non-World Cup even-numbered years. Also, I don't know how many pundits have raised this, but the players are already exhausted by the existing schedule, and shoe-horning another global tournament into the capital won't help with that.
Yet FIFA seems to still be exploring this idea, despite it getting about as much support (or maybe less) as the European Super League. This is fairly good proof that they don't care about what fans want, so in the interest of offering bad ideas, let me make a suggestion on a changed format to the two-year World Cup.
The first point is that it would be lighter-touch, to keep from wearing the players out and bankrupting host countries, so we'd cut it back down to 24 teams. The second is that it would be even more global than the existing tournament, so instead of complicated allocations that inevitably favor Europe, each confederation would be represented by a four-team group, arrived at by whatever qualifying format that individual confederation prefers.
Obviously this would dramatically reduce the number of European teams participating, and probably limit it to four of the biggest five teams (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain). That said, each of those teams except for England has won one of the last four tournaments, so you can argue we're just cutting the chaff out. Also, remember that this is a thought experiment piling bad ideas on top of more bad ideas.
Most of the other confederations would have similar numbers of teams participating, but the big winner would be Oceania, which currently gets up to one place but only if its qualifying team wins a playoff against another confederation. Giving Oceania four spots would guarantee participation for New Zealand, of course, and potentially convince Australia to return from Asia, where it's been competing since after 2006.
The groups would play out as normal, each team playing each other team in its group once, and the top team from each confederation would move to the second round, consisting of two groups of three teams, with the top team progressing to the final. There would not be seeding, so Europe and South America could potentially meet in this round, otherwise they'd still dominate the final... though it must be said that having a regular Europe v South America final would already be an improvement over the last four World Cups, as a South American team reached the final just once (Argentina in 2014) and the semi-finals just twice (Uruguay in 2010, Brazil and Argentina in 2014).
And there you have it: my facetious suggestion for a format that would support a two-year World Cup schedule, while also making it more equitable among each confederation. You'd get classic matches between the biggest teams of all regions every two years, which is surely what FIFA really wants, and the tournament would be easier to fit into a single country, meaning it wouldn't require host nations to bankrupt themselves (and therefore wouldn't be limited to taking place in dictatorships or across multiple countries).
As I've said, this is more of a joke than anything else, but it gets to a competitive imbalance that's been evident in the global game for the last decade and a half, namely that Europe has sucked all the competitive air out of the room. As mentioned, the last four winners have been among the traditionally strongest teams in Europe (and if England continues its progress from the last World Cup and Euros, is in with a decent chance of winning in Qatar 2022); at the same time, because Europe got 14 spots last time, even though as many European teams went out in the first round as Asian teams, there were still 10 European teams in the knockout rounds.
It's pretty clear that European teams are the strongest overall, since the club system across UEFA is the best-funded and most organized, meaning that even its relatively mediocre teams, like Sweden or Poland, benefit from players being in the best leagues and honing their skills against the best players in the world. And these best players in the world get lured to Europe, thereby weakening their home leagues, most notably in South America. It's notable that two of the semifinalists in 2018, Belgium and Croatia, weren't in the top five of Europe and still proved stronger than almost everyone else in the world.
I generally like the format of the World Cup as it is, and because my first World Cup was 1998, which was the first to field 32 teams, I also don't mind that number of participants. That said, while the format favors the strongest regions, it would be nice to see the other regions narrow the gap with Europe, but it's unlikely to happen as things stand. My suggested format isn't really workable, but at least opens the possibility of non-European winners, and makes the tournament an actual "world" cup, rather than a showcase for the big five European leagues with everyone else making up the numbers.
No comments:
Post a Comment