SJJ...no, the Confedaeration Cup is crap, for more reasons than I care to talk about here. My point is that once you get beyond 32 teams, you start to get "dross", as Gordon puts it; matches that have no possible bearing on who is going to win the tournament, and which no neutral fan is going to pay good money to see. I don't know if you have ever been to a World Cup (I've been to the last three), but host countries always have to give away tickets in order to fill up stadiums for the non-glamour matches. The Koreans and Japanese had to give away tickets for almost half the first round matches in order to make the stadiums look reasonably full. The simple fact is that for many World Cup matches there simply isn't enough demand to sell 35,000+ tickets, someting that would only get worse if the proportion of non-glamour matches was increased.
G'day One and All, After hearing today that the South American confederation is considering changing it qualifying structure for 2010, to two groups of five with the top three progressing into a six team mini league then the fifth placed side, the one that would normally play Australia would be found out sooner, therefore the suggestion of a mini league between all of the half place teams begins to become a real possibility. Australia plays home and away against Asia first two games meanwhile north and South America have their home and away fixtures. Then we have the Americas in Asia/ Australia following the fifa Saturday and Tuesday format, followed by Asia and Australia in south/north America, or the other way round, personally I would prefer Australia to play away in south America first, your hardest fixture first, then you know what you have to do next to qualify. Group of four half place teams, home and away, top two go direct to South Africa, which I have a feeling it will be a very special event, when Nelson Mandala, hands over the trophy to Brazil once again.
But you are someone who is only concerened with the top-8 teams. Your original posting quoted statistics about the finalists, semi-finalists, and a bit of quarterfinalists. (That's why I posted the bit about the Confederations Cup, which IS a top-8 tournament.) You may not care about every team, but there are followers of every team that does make it, and you can even root for your continent if your own team isn't in a certain game. Another thing, if the WC doesn't have these teams in there, how are they ever going to play some top teams? They would never get scheduled as friendlies. (Would people ever talk about Cameroon if not for their Cup run? You probably wouldn't have wanted them there in the first play.) OK, so EVERY match may not be so glamorous. Not every country would be able to fill a 3.5M ticket allotment (which would increase to about 5.0M+ in a 40-team tournament). What's really so bad about that? Do you need EVERY seat filled in EVERY game to call it a success?
IMHO, the simple answer is money. FIFA and its members are also a business, and by expanding the product, they create more customers and marketing opportunities for the world's greatest tournament. Tickets are not the only source of revenue. Although tickets are one of the largest producers of cash for FIFA, they are only a one-time supply of funding. Marketing, licensing, broadcast and sponsorship agreements, with an expanded playing pool of countries, presents FIFA and its members with the gift of a growing cash source that keeps on giving.
Re: A Look Back at France '98 WC 98 was memorable one too. Esp, French performance was great. Although, Guivarach was scoreless and Dugarry had only one single goal, Frech achievement was miracle. Most memorable game was against Italy and Brazil.
Re: A Look Back at France '98 32 teams is perfect. Each continent gets several teams, and the level of competition is still pretty high; only a few of the teams in 2002 were pretty bad. Also, the 8 groups, 16 teams in the knockout phase, that is the perfect setup. Any expansion makes it complicated and requires byes or groups with different numbers of teams advancing, which makes the draw way too important. You could have a 40 team World Cup with 8 groups of 5, but then all teams couldn't play on the final day, and you would have more meaningless games (if only 2 teams advanced). Bottom line, keep it the way it is.
Re: A Look Back at France '98 Wrong, wrong, wrong. I won't open up the crappy position of Oceania wrt this statement, other than to point out that it's rather stupid to generalise in this way, in order to support a factually incorrect & weak argument. Post something that's not blatantly incorrect, then I might accept your position as credible !!!
Re: A Look Back at France '98 The "all teams not playing on the final day" is a deal-breaker for you? The original idea was to expand the WC to 48 teams; I tried to take the middle ground and scale it to 40. I did note that one team would have to sit on the final matchday, but hoped that everyone wasn't so up-tight to not consider it. (And you would still have four teams playing at the same time, unlike the old days where the two teams would know the standings of ALL other teams in their group.) And the new head-to-head tie-breaker format will cut down on the goal-gorging to try to sway the GD tie-breaker. If you have three teams advance from a group, it would make more matches meaningful: the top teams would play for the second-round bye, and no-one is really eliminated if they lose their first two games.