I know it is not the perfect analogy. Never said it was. Just know he is an Arsenal fan and was wondering how he would reply in response to that hypothetical tournament. The overall point is I want to see the best teams in the best tournament. And Expansion along with intercontinental playoffs are the way to go in my book. Not the rearranging of Confederations.
If they're designed carefully and used in moderation, yes. But if you have too many of such playoffs, they will probably have a counter-productive effect. When WC spots are decided on the basis of a 2-legged playoff the results are going to be far more random than what occurs during a 10, 12 or 18-match group stage. Given that fact, I would be careful about having too many of these playoffs. At first it may seem like a brilliant and fair idea to throw all 2nd-place teams from the UEFA qualifying groups into a big I-C playoff, but who are they going to play against? One of those teams could be Germany while another could be Bosnia. Someone is gonna get screwed and that "someone" may have performed better over the previous 2.5 years of qualifying than the team that draws Bosnia!
In a perfect world, I think this would make a lot of sense. Take North Africa from Morocco over to Egypt (and perhaps a bit of the East coast) from CAF; Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan from UEFA, and the Arabian peninsula, Iran, and Pakistan and the remaining Stans from the AFC. You'd have a confed that was geographically fairly compact, with strong cultural links (being almost all majority Muslim countries of various flavors), and with an interesting and not completely unbalanced competitive mix. You'd also immediately make travel less horrific for Asian qualifiers (although breaking Asia into two confederations (South and East) would still probably make sense). And you'd thin out the overladen African and Asian confeds, not to mention UEFA. Of course, this would mean some countries voluntarily leaving the UEFA gravy train, so it's not going to happen in the real world.
Regardless of anything else, Kazakhstan should be kicked out of UEFA and move back to the AFC. Only 4% of their land area is in Europe, and they border China. I assume less than half their major clubs and half their population lives in the European section.
Almost every country attempts World Cup qualifying. If the UEFA CL had to guess how many and include every club that's better than the champions from the worst countries like San Marino and Gibraltar, there would be way too many clubs. Every club in UEFA that's in the top level in its country starts the season with a chance to make the CL just like almost every country (occasionally there are FIFA suspensions) has a chance at qualifying for the World Cup. In both cases qualifying isn't equally difficult for everybody, but everybody has a chance. By "chance" I know that it may not be a realistic chance.
Why should they ? They belong into Uefa, regardless of where they are. Confeds aren't a geographical issue. Never were. if most of its associated members are part of any given portion of land or continent, it's just a coincidence. Kazakhstan is just one of those who happen to be in a diferent continent on regards to everybody else in their Confed, but they aren't the only ones around the world, whom share the same common feature.
I might not be opposed to that except for the fact that a lot of the biggest clubs are based in the European portion of the country.
I'm just wondering, do you agree that the USA is at least one of the best 32 teams? Beat Portugal in 2002, topped a group ahead of England in 2010, advanced ahead of Portugal in 2014, do you think the USA deserves to be at the World Cup?
I don't think USA would do well at a hypothetical World Cup that started in June 2016, but I don't see how you can say they didn't belong at the World Cups they qualified for when they're one of eight countries to reach the Round of 16 at the last two World Cups.
Yes. To me, they must be somewhere between the 15 to 40 best teams of the world. To have them at the WC, is absolutely reasonable, to do so. But, despite whatever I may feel about them, it is also a proven fact that they have it very easy on them, each time the USA must play for one of the WC spots given to Concacaf. Lots of a comparable level teams, from other Confeds, have it lots harder for them, to make it there, and that's basicly because as a Confed Concacaf sucks, where there aren't more than 5 teams really worthy of getting a spot, while for other Confeds, the number of teams actually competing for every available spot is lots bigger than that. Being from Concacrap (currently 3,5 WC spots), almost guarantee's the USA, a WC spot.
To be fair to CONCACAF they aren't the only confederation where teams from around the 15-40 mark have it pretty easy to qualify.
Yes, they are. CAF (Africa) has lots of teams, of about the same level, where only a few of them make it (even some of their top teams, don't always make it throug) . AFC (Asia) and OFC (Oceania), don't even have at least one top 40 team, so they don't count. Uefa (Europe), there are lots of teams in that same level, where lots of them simply can't make it, because they always must confront teams of about their same level or even better than them, which beats them out. And Conmebol (South America), well back here, its a great struggle even for the very best confronted to the very worst, which makes it all a completely diferent reality, and every point is disputed heavily.
I know other people have suggested this before, but what do you think of a World qualifying situation? I think this would be good for two reasons. 1) Better teams make the World Cup. Teams like Paraguay won't be punished simply because they are in a small confederation. There won't be the feeling that teams missed out because they were in a stronger region, and if a smaller team does make the World Cup people would have felt they deserved it. 2) Teams can get experience against bigger teams. Many people support giving more spots to the weak regions so they can get experience against the stronger teams, but if qualification is done like this, teams will get experience without actually decreasing the level at the competition proper.
To me, it's pretty simple : First phase of qualifiers done at Confed level (in a similar way as it is actually being done), where we get about 16-20 teams from each of the bigger Confeds (in terms of amount of members in them), where the only exceptions would be Conmebol, whom get 7-8 teams, and OFC whom would get about 3-4 teams. Second phase of qualifiers, groups made up of the teams from the previous phase, with no consideration to where teams come from, and seeds or pots sorted out strictly by their rankings, where only the best from each group (could be 2 or 3 best teams in each group, depending on the amount of groups and amount of teams in each of them), get their tickets to the WC. We can leave a couple of spots, to be decided in a direct playoff confrontation, between those who finished closer from diferent groups. If at the end, if all of those whom win and make it through happen to be from the same Confed, well good for them (reward for being the best). If any Confed doesn't get at least one ticket to the WC, well try again next time,......
Some countries might not be able to afford to travel around the world for qualifiers, and it would also make more travel for the players. Imagine this for an American playing for a Premier League club like Geoff Cameron: Leave Stoke City to meet national team in USA Fly to China because USA is away for the first of two qualifiers that time with the qualifiers being international Fly to USA for a home qualifier Fly back to England, all in under two weeks Rickdog's proposal of qualifiers starting within the confederation and then becoming international would be okay with me. If the defending champion goes back to qualifying automatically, there would be 30 spots available in qualifying, which works better than 31. There could be 15 international groups of 4 with the top two in each group qualifying. Each confederation would be allocated a certain amount of spots in the international 60. In the current FIFA Rankings, UEFA has 31 of the top 60 and OFC has 0. I would limit UEFA to half of the total spots, which is 30, so UEFA could have 30, OFC could have 1, and the other confederations could have however many teams they currently have in the Top 60. That's if I had to decide allocations today. A downside would be that countries would play more of their qualifiers many time zones away. I wouldn't like if USA played a qualifier at 5:00 A.M. USA Eastern because it was in Asia.
Obviously such a "world qualifying" format would not have USA play a home match in Columbus and an away match in Hong Kong within 4 days. It can be designed so that the amount of travel is somewhat controlled. For e.g. if you have groups of 6 then you'd have two teams from each of 3 different confederations (the confederations/regions would have to make more geographical sense too so that Iran and Japan aren't considered the same region). Lets call them confed 'A', 'B' and 'C'. Then for each int'l break each NT would play 2 qualifying matches. So a NT from confed 'A' would either: - play 2 home games OR - play 2 away games against teams from the same region (ie. either confed 'B' or confed 'C'), OR - play 1 home and 1 away game against the other team from confed 'A'. Just as an example... (I haven't thought about it too much, but this would seem feasible since we would know exactly how many countries reach the second phase of qualifying from each region of the world (using Rickdog's idea)). Second phase could be 10 groups of six with top 3 in each group qualifying for the WC (or 15 groups of six with top 2 qualifying) along with the host and defending champion.
How about something like this. Hosts 1 Holders 1 Leaving 30 teams to qualify 10 groups of 6 with teams from UEFA 20 CAF 10 AFC 10 CONCACAF 10 CONMEBOL 8 OFC 2 Top 3 in each group qualify. Maybe use confederation championships as a pre qualifying tournament.
I'd prefer 14 groups of 6 teams each. Where the 2 best teams from each of them get WC tickets (28 teams), together with a playoff between the 6 best thirds, for the last 3 tickets (this adds a bit of uncertainty to the whole process, for everyone the same) . If there are more than one host (only the main host gets automatic qualification, while the co-hosts must participate in the regular qualifier process in their respectful Confederation, to get theirs). Best 3 placed teams from the past WC, all 3 get automatic spots for the 2nd phase of qualifiers. I'd sort 2nd phase of WC qualifiers (for 84 teams) : Best 3 from recent past WC : 3 UEFA : 24 CAF : 16 AFC : 15 CONCACAF : 15 CONMEBOL : 8 OFC : 3
But if Asia or Oceania had in your eyes a legitimate top 15-40 team, they would have a very easy time no? For the record, I think you could make that claim for Australia, S Korea and Japan at various points, and they've always gone through when the claim was very strong. Re: Africa. There really aren't that many top teams. What they do have is a lot of depth at the level of the bottom of the CONCACAF hex or 3rd place teams in the 3x4 from the prior qualifying round. At the absolute most, you can toss Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and 2 other teams into that mix at any point in time. So it is a bit more difficult to qualify out of Africa than CONCACAF. The biggest problem with the African qualifiers is that they are inherently bad at identifying the top X teams. Rather than havinga 10x4 where only the top teams advance for a home/away matchup determined luck of the draw, more stages might cut things to 6x4, then to 6x2 where the top 2 in each group go through and the third place teams have a playoff for the final spot. This is a much better way of taking the top 5 teams, but the number of matches doesn't fit well into their schedule and the travel/organization costs would be a bit much too.
On regards to Asia and Oceania, if hypothetically, they had a top 40 team that would be true, but as they don't, it simply doesn't matter. For one thing or the other, for every spot they get for the WC, it will mean that a worse team (specifically from that zone) will qualify, where a better team (from a diferent zone) couldn't, basicly based on the distribution of spots done at FIFA, but yes, their overall depth is really poor. At least their qualifier process, isn't as bad as their depth, and somehow almost always their best teams, do finish at the final stage of their qualifiers, so whom make it through, usually are the ones who most deserves it, from those zones. Now, on regards to Africa that's true, their qualifier system is really bad. I've never understood, why they play so few match dates in them (they decide all their spots in only, at most, 12 match dates, which is even less match dates than those for Uefa). Given their size and amount of members, they should take it almost to the full extent of the cycle (have no less than 18 match dates for the whole process). By doing so, it really seems as if they really don't care that much for the WC, and instead, they prefer to play more games at their Confed level in other tournaments of less value.