Somehow they manage to travel now. Your idea would mean a lower likelihood of the best teams getting through as teams in weaker areas would be given an advantage.
but only through to the second round where its open and there would be no advantage. Just in my scenario, the south west of Europe is very strong, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland all in the top 15 ranked team in Europe, If one of these fell below this then they would play the wee countries and prob hammer all of them to get into the second round and the wee countries wouldn't have a chance
I still don't see what would be the point of such a system. I don't think you've thought this idea through much at all. [personal attack deleted by moderator]
Little crude but most confederations have multi tier qualification bar Uefa and south america, the Concaf qualification is a multi tier qualification, maybe they should just have a open group with all the small nations in your qualification, Mexico vs Turks and Caicos Islands in the first group match!
FAs like San Marino make a significant part of their income from the TV rights for games against teams like Germany - much more than they would gain from cutting the cost for travel. And for FAs like Germany the travel costs are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Nice!! Thanks to this thread I found my new favourite Greenlandian team: KUGSAK 45 The glorious champions The boisterous ultras The hopeful prospects
The San Marino team may be better off playing team's closer to their own standard. maybe there players and fans would like to not lose every game? the second round of Qualification would be open draw and not regionalised so the top 15 ranked team & the 17 qualifiers from the first round would have long distances to travel as normal, like Portugal to Russia or Ireland to Israel etc. But the biggest 32 nations in Europe would make every game competitive and travel costs would not be a issue. As i said if you think this is stupid, why does concacaf have four rounds in qualifying and not a open group system like Uefa or South America? Andora & San Marino are ranked worse than any Concacaf nations. some of the other Uefa nations like Austria, Scotland, Israel and ranked lower than Panama, Canada, El Salvador etc.
A lot of it has to do with the size of the confederation and the number of teams that can qualify from it. UEFA gets so many qualification spots that they can have 8 or 9 groups with 6-7 teams or so on. Concacaf has 40 member states but only 3.5 spots up for grabs, so what are they going to do, 2 groups of 20 teams with the top teams qualifying directly and the runners up going into the playoffs? Ditto CAF which has 56 teams but only 5 qualifying spots so it would basically be 5 groups of 11 teams... that's why they need the multi tiered qualification systems. UEFA doesn't really need to do that on the other hand, and only really has a handful of "minnows" tbh, and even they come up with the odd upset or two, too...
European teams are ranked lower because they have to play against tougher opposition. Plus that only works if you use the bullshit fifa rankings.
Yes, Glennaldo said a handful, so picking out one from that handful doesn't prove anything. But since there are only around 5-6 European teams who are unable to make results against much bigger teams, there isn't much point in shaving these 6 teams down to 3 before setting up final qualifying groups. And besides, since there is only one minnow per group, they don't really destroy anything in the qualifying process. Yes, most teams have two easy games, but the results are rarely ridiculous. And I think the minnows enjoy the opportunity to play against teams like England, Germany or Spain even if they know it means a heavy loss. As a Sammarinese amateur, I would much rather have an opportunity to play against Klose, Xavi, Ribery, Gerrard et al rather than having a (still small) chance of beating a team like Andorra or Liechtenstein once in a while. Overall, I just don't think I understand the need for inventing a multi-tiered qualifying system for Europe when the current one seems to work quite well for all parties involved.
Ok even having the bottom 16 ranked teams play it out so that all the groups have even numbers. cos at the moment some groups have five teams and other six, if there were. Why should San Marino get the opportunity to Play Germany or Spain and not my local ametuer team? Make them earn their glamour tie!
Not necessarily, the FIFA rankings has a Confederation weighting in the formula. If you beat a 100th place team from Europe this earns more points than beating a 100th place team from Africa or CONCACAF. So European teams are actually a little overrated in the FIFA rankings.
It would be interesting to compare how balanced or unbalanced UEFA groups are compared to groups of 6 in other confederations, but the CONCACAF Hexagonal is the only World Cup 2014 group in a confederation other than UEFA with exactly 6 teams. Africa used to have qualifying groups of 6. In qualifying for World Cup 2006, the five African groups each qualified one team to the World Cup and the standard deviation of the point totals in the groups were: Group 1: 7.15 Group 2: 4.28 Group 3: 6.72 Group 4: 6.18 Group 5: 5.76 The mean of the five standard deviations is 6.02. Now here's the standard deviations for the eight UEFA groups in qualifying for World Cup 2010 that had 6 teams (I excluded Group 9 which had 5 teams) along with the last place team in the group: Group 1: 7.20 (Malta) Group 2: 7.06 (Moldova) Group 3: 7.19 (San Marino) Group 4: 8.69 (Liechtenstein) Group 5: 8.50 (Armenia) Group 6: 9.25 (Andorra) Group 7: 6.07 (Faroe Islands) Group 8: 6.82 (Georgia) The mean of the eight standard deviation is 7.60, which is 26.2% higher than the 6.02 for Africa. I'm fine with UEFA's format but the fact that five out of eight UEFA groups had a higher standard deviation than any African group could be used to argue that UEFA shouldn't have every country in the same group stage. San Marino had the worst goal differential, so if I did the standard deviation of each group's goal differentials I would expect Group 3 to have a higher value relative to the other groups than it did for standard deviation of points.
In CONCACAF, the bottom ranked teams play off against each other. As I said earlier, Greenland already plays in the Pan American confederation in (team) handball.
The weightings are largely based on games between the top teams who qualify for tournaments, everything else is extrapolated down. Mid-ranked European teams never play mid-ranked teams from other confederations in competitive games, so ranking them is guesswork.
Thats basically what i would like in Uefa and I would welcome Greenland, but i think some sort of Regionalization in this early round to reduce traveling distance's. as Greenland to Israel is a very long distance, even Iceland or Faroes Islands to Cyprus is very long too. Andora to Kazakhstan is a long journey etc. Not many away fans, sometimes none.
If you can't afford to travel to ther countries then you shouldn't be playing international football.
Gibraltar was recently (and for the second time) awarded provisional membership by FIFA. The original award was given in either 2006 or 2007, but full membership was shut down after Spain threatened to boycott any tournament Gibraltar entered. The next vote for full membership will take place this March. Kosovo is also going through the process.
Miami hasn't had an MLS team since the 2001 season. The Fort Lauderdale Strikers of the lower division NASL play in the Fusion's old stadium. The extensive travelling is because the US and Canada are geographically large countries.
Understandably, the uneven conference system would normally seem stupid to europeans but it makes sense in North America, A division 2 & 3 (NASL & USL PRO) joining and having a western and eastern league makes most sense to me, have a playoff for national div2 winners maybe but reduce traveling for regular season would make more sense.
Just gotta get another 20 clubs each and they can have a western and eastern leagues with national playoff. so that might be whithin my lifetime if we are lucky.