FIFA 2023 WWC qualifiers

Since the hosting candidates have now been decided, I figure it's time to move on to a new thread about deciding everyone else, right? =-) This will be a catch-all thread, as I'm sure that each specific qualification competition will get its own thread in time.

This qualification cycle will be interesting for two reasons: the WWC is expanded so there are 30 spots up for grabs this time around instead of 23, and the COVID-19 pandemic has basically taken an entire year out of the cycle, though that's a bigger issue for some confederations than for others. Hopefully FIFA decides on the slot distribution soon, since the confederations need to decide on their qualification formats soon - most will need huge overhauls.

Qualified so far: (2/32)
Hosts (2/2)
--Australia
--New Zealand
AFC (?/?)
--
CAF (?/?)
--
C'CAF (?/?)
--
C'BOL (?/?)
--
OFC (?/?)
--
UEFA (?/?)
--
Playoffs (?/?)
--

(Most posts incoming!)

 

In terms of how the slots are distributed, I think two of the biggest questions are exactly how many spots UEFA gets and whether OFC gets half a slot or a full slot.

In almost all of the 32-team MWCs, UEFA got 13 slots. WoSo is a bit more worldwide than BroSo is, but I'm personally still expecting UEFA to get 12 slots, although I guess I could see 11. UEFA got 8/23 slots in the past two WWCs (i.e. not including the hosts).

It was mentioned in the candidates thread that having a tournament co-hosted by AFC & OFC, it would in a way make sense to have an AFC-OFC playoff berth. That said, considering how many "minnows" will get into the tournament no matter what, I think it would absolutely fit to just give OFC a direct spot in addition to hosts NZL.

Either way, I really hope FIFA promotes more inter-confederation playoffs than before. It's usually just 2 teams, but I would love to see playoffs include 4-6 teams, so to get more cross-confederation play at the mid-low tier of nations.

Anyway, here are some suggested berth distributions stated from the other thread:

 

While there's uncertainty in the exact distribution, it looks like three of the six confederations will need to decide 5 or 6 total teams (last one of each going to playoffs). In all of those three confederations, they use two four-team groups followed by a four-team knockout bracket - which is an AWFUL format for picking 5 or 6 teams. The third-place knockout game is entirely pointless, and the group stages are also pretty pointless when only one team from each group gets eliminated in the group stage. Also, in two of those confederations, there's a huge gap between the top teams and the next tier.

IMO, each of those three confederations needs to adopt one of the two following formats:

And not to let C'BOL off the hook: having a "final group" of four teams is also pretty pointless if 3 qualify for the WWC directly and one goes to playoffs. I like their two five-team groups, so if they keep those, I think the A1vB1 final and A2vB3/B2vA3 qualification matches would make sense. They could also just make the final group 6 teams instead of 4. This could also be a great opportunity to experiment on their format... Do you have the lower 8 teams have play-in matches ahead of that 6-team round robin? Maybe actually do a full 10-team round robin? (Like the men do but with single round-robin and not a double round-robin.)

And then there's UEFA, whose format actually works pretty well and wouldn't need a reformat EXCEPT for the little fact that they're the ones who are REALLY hurt by losing a year from the calendar....

 

So, what about UEFA? If they had a full 2yrs for the WWC qualifying like the normally do, there would be no issue. However, with the EURO being pushed back a year, that severely limits the available time to hold their normal qualification, unless they decided to begin WWC qualification before the EURO begins and do some really weird type of overlap.

IMO, UEFA has two options: play their "normal" qualifying campaign, except make each group single round-robin instead of double (could work, but they you get into really sticky arguments of who gets to host matches) OR split their qualifying campaign in half so that the EURO decides a number of slots.

I personally much prefer the second option. There are 32 teams that attempted to qualify for the EURO but failed; that's a perfect number to set up a secondary competition that can run roughly concurrently with the EURO to pare the "best of the rest" field down. I would say the top 8 EURO teams directly qualify to the WWC, while the next 8 play some extra matches to reduce to 4, and those 4 play the 4 "best of the rest" to decide a "final 4". If UEFA gets 12 slots, all of those "final 4" get in; if UEFA gets 11 slots, those "final 4" play a couple more match to eliminate one of them. And if UEFA somehow gets 13 teams.... Well, the not-final-4 play to see who gets the extra!

That's a bit hard to put into words, so here's an attempt at a run-down at which teams are active when:
"R1" - BotR(32)
"R2" - BotR(16) + EURO(16)
"R3" - BotR(8) + EURO(8 elim. + 8 in KOs qualify for WWC)
"R4" - BotR(4) + EURO(4)
"R5" - winners(4) + losers(4) ; 3, 4, or 5 qualify depending on UEFA's slots

((Note: you could also combine the BotR path for R1+R2 if you just have eight 4-team groups where the winner advances, which would make it fairly parallel to the EURO; similarly, you could take the 8 team eliminated from the EURO and the 8 BotR teams at the time and have them play four 4-team groups. Point is, it's a fairly flexible format when you start with 32+16 and all you need to do is eliminate 1/2 or 3/4 of the teams at each step))

And one final note about UEFA: there is a MASSIVE points gap between UEFA's #14 (Austria, 1792) and UEFA's #15 (Russia, 1708). Depending on who gets eliminated from contention where, that could make those last 3-5 slots quite interesting to play for....

 

As an addition to this previous post, I've thought of a two more formats that could also work if 5 or 6 total teams is desired:

This format eliminates 6/12 teams directly from the group, which makes the group stage rather important, but it does the odd split between 2nd-place teams (which can be very much decided by chance/draw) and has the most strong-vs-minnow matches of the three formats... Still, it's probably the most straightforward.

Also really straightforward, but short and might get teams mad at the prevalence of the tiering (which isn't as influential in the tiered 12-team tournament from the earlier post).

 

While there are 32 teams in the WC, using that exact number as a cutoff while comparing the men vs the women is actually a fairly poor comparison, if only by circumstance: in the men's ranking, teams by confederation are fairly evenly distributed as you get past the top 20, but in the women's ranking, there are a string of 5 teams from UEFA in 28-32 with only one UEFA team from 33*-40. That is to say, looking at "top 32" exactly gives likely the most skewed comparison you can give.

Remember that in the men's ranking, UEFA+C'BOL make the entire top 10 and 18/20 of the top 20; on the women's side, the top 10 have consistently seen four different confeds, and the top 20 more often than not (at least historically) has 5 confeds when NZL gets in. Not only that, but it is a *World* Cup, there are going to be adjustments made to let "weaker" confederations be "overrepresented". (CAF in particular generally has shown to give some surprisingly good results in the past two WWCs, which might be unexpected based on their ranking, but not so surprising if you notice that the pattern of international play means points that maybe should be going to CAF aren't getting there.)

If we really want to see how UEFA compares men vs women...

Code:

Top...Men...Women
10.....6......5..
20....13.....12..
30....18.....19..
40....24.....22..
50....28.....27..

So they're pretty even, but in general the men have slightly more UEFA teams in any given "Top X" than the women do.

The one final consideration I'd want to make known is that, compared to the last two WWCs (23 non-host teams each), we're only adding 7 spots to the next WWC. Considering that FIFA is pretty adamant on not letting UEFA get half or more of representation anywhere, I think going from eight UEFA teams to twelve, i.e. giving UEFA four of the 7 new spots, is already a stretch as-is. No way 5/7 new spots go to UEFA. There might be more adjustments in UEFA's favor in the future, but it's not gonna happen for the 2023 cycle.

 

I think dividing teams into "good" and "bad" is too binary in general, and doesn't reflect where WoSo currently is. There's a fairly significant middle tier of teams - IMO two or three middle tiers, but I digress - that still have plenty of room to be tapped. I mean, if you only look at the "last eliminated" team from each confederation, yeah you get this:
AFC: Phillipines
CAF: Mali
C'CAF: Panama
C'BOL: Colombia**
OFC: Fiji
UEFA: Switzerland*
Sure, the only reliably "good" team in that list is Switzerland, but Colombia beat France back in 2015... Plus, here's a list of other teams that are as good or better than those last six:
AFC: North Korea****, maybe Vietnam
CAF: maybe Eq.Guinea* and Ghana***
C'CAF: Mexico***, maybe Costa Rica*
C'BOL: maybe Venezuela
OFC: maybe PNG
UEFA: Wales, Russia**, Poland, Ireland, Ukraine, Iceland, Austria
Those stars are number of previous WWC appearances. In other words, there are 8 countries that missed out on the 2019 WWC that had qualified before, 5 of which had qualified multiple times before. Thinking that we're definitely "adding at least five bad teams" is definitely a misguided take.

 

I think it's entirely relevant to consider the bigger picture, but that narrow framing isn't objectively wrong either.

That said...

This comment is just wrong. "Unequal distribution" was absolutely present in the MWC long before the 1991 WWC came around.

 

Not at all. I was bringing up the "overall continental representation" point in that paragraph for a more general argument about how the confeds get represented in the WCs. That's why I ended that paragraph discussing CAF in particular, to counter Lohman's complaint on that front.

The rest of the post is more specific as to why I think UEFA has gotten (and probably will continue to get) less rep at the WWC than at the MWC.

...as I directly pointed out just a few lines lower in that post. Both the top 10 and top 20 have one fewer women's UEFA team than men's UEFA team.

 

Not at all; words, mouth. I was just saying I acknowledge different driving philosophies even though I think mine is more reasonable.

That's what it sounded like. Granted, I read more into it than what was written to suggest 1991 exactly, but you made it sound like this "universality" was a comparatively new thing. It wasn't.

Even with that logic, that rather insufficient to explain the discrepancy. For one, that "relatively stable" thing isn't that reliable - your list already includes a very noticeable drop in UEFA representation from 12 to 9 (a VERY big drop in just 16-team tournaments) as well as a lesser drop from 15 to 13 in the 32-team era. So it's honestly easy enough to take slots away. Second, the number of times each tournament has expanded has provided enough opportunities to mitigate the differences in some of the manners you suggest. Lastly, it still doesn't change the fact that WoSo *is* more worldly than BroSo is. For example, at the time of the final 24-team MWC, 17 of the top 24 teams were from UEFA; for the final 24-team WWC, just 14 of the top 24 were from UEFA. (And you get similar comparison whether you look at the top 20, 25 or 30 at each time period.) The difference between the men's and women's representation at their respective WCs is largely justified without any sort of finagling arguments about "universality".

 

The one problem is that all three of those tournament happen basically within a year of each other... so there's not much else for C'BOL teams to regularly play for.

...on that note, it might actually be a good idea to spread a double-round-robin tournament with all 10 teams out over the course of 2yrs or so... We'd just need all 10 C'BOL federations to agree to fund the teams over that extended time period. (Or have C'BOL force them to do it from the top.)

 

You keep arguing minute details (esp. changing the exact reference point) while I keep saying "look at the big picture". I don't know how to get you to see the forest for the tress but we're clearly talking past each other and aren't going to be on the same page so I'm not going to give you any more of my time. Honestly I can't believe you spun out so much over my original comment about a small one or two spot difference.

 

You'll be waiting quite a while for an apology that's not coming, then. My whole point has been that the current setup is largely fair as-is, especially considering it's a WORLD Cup, and "fairness" can mean multiple things. I've presented plenty of evidence to show my points aren't nonsense and you haven't sufficiently countered them because you seek out details to run off into tangents.