theres gonna be a ton of missed off usa fans regardless.... you know how impossible those tickets will be to get? Buying TST for every team in Africa is the way to go to try and get USA tickets. 9 or 10 Africa teams will qualify so the odds of the USA drawing one of them is about as good as it gets.
There do seem to be many people who think everything is all okay now. How can it be right to need to play 72 games before we get down to the last 32 teams? 108 matches is bonkers for so many reasons. the fact they even thought 16 groups 3 three was anything but total madness is beyond me and the fact they dressed it up as it had been so successful in Qatar/ They won't know it but they started groups of four in 1954. Three teams qualifying from a 4 team group is always rubbish and what do the players and fans do for 4 days whist they wait to see whether they stay or leave. Still as long as FIFA make billions and that imbecile Infantino appeases enough countries to vote for him then it must be to the benefit of football. I always said he would turn out worse than Blatter and that is no mean feat.
A 48-team group phase with a 32-team knockout phase is awful. It should be a 24-team knockout phase. The 8 best group winners would advance to the round of 16, and the remaining first and second placed teams in each group would play a preliminary knockout.
No that is far too sensible and how on earth woudl FIFA get to their £9Bn budget figure. They've got to live on something.
They could put them as a central team, which includes Dallas and Atlanta - two major airline hubs. Easy to get to from anywhere in the US. But yeah, those tix will be tough to get anyway.
I dont understand why people are complaining about more games in a sporting event that happens once every 4 years. You'd think they weren't soccer fans.
Because more in this case means less. The quality will be diluted. If it was entirely down to a bigger tournament then let your hair down and have 100 teams. The special aspect of this competition will be lost. When Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Iceland, panama etc. qualified it was the biggest thing for them. If this happened every competition then it really means so much less.
Agreed 16 three team groups is the worst, most clueless, ill thought idea since Blatter thought of enlarging the goals or having a 39th game in the Premier in another part of the Universe or indeed having a World Cup in Qatar.
I certainly understand the competitive argument for a more exclusive event, but then from another standpoint, I look at a sport like rugby. Rugby, being extremely generous, has maybe a tenth of the worldwide popularity as soccer. Their World Cup has 20 teams. The third tier and (sometimes even second tier) teams in the Rugby World Cup routinely lose by 40 or 50 or 60 points in some cases, and yet the Rugby World Cup is actually planned to expand to 24 soon. Is the worst team in a 48-team World Cup a worse footballing outfit than the worst team in a 24-team Rugby World Cup is in its respective code? Somehow I doubt it. Looking at things that way, I have a hard time faulting FIFA for the expansion. The expansion is happening because there is a market and the competitive quality for it. FIFA's job is to grow the game, and an expanded World Cup will do that (and also make them more money). Why would they choose not to take the step which benefits both them as an organization and football at large? If they didn't think the viewers would want more of their product, they wouldn't be offering more of it.
Yes, the policy goal was to give more countries a more realistic opportunity to qualify and this expansion has done that. Now the final competition format has been improved I am generally satisfied. The current AFC U20 Asian Cup - where only the semifinalists qualify for the U20WC - illustrates how limited an opportunity to qualify for the senior WC most Asian countries had prior to this expansion.
People were saying that expanding the Euros would water things down too much and basically all the same negative arguments being made in this thread. Meanwhile in reality expansion has been good for the sport in my mind, brought in new teams, new storylines and subplots, and old teams that did not qualify for a long time. The sky did not fall for the Euro Chicken Littles and I do not think it will fall for the World Cup ones either.
I actually don't buy the "diluted quality" argument. Maybe 20 years ago, but not anymore. The added teams from UEFA, CAF, Conmebol will actually increase the quality. While even the worst added teams from AFC and concacaf won't really be any worse than a Qatar or Costa Rica. Look at a team like Morocco that just made the semi finals. That's a team that EASILY could not even have qualified for the WC under the 32 team format, had they gotten the wrong draw, or even a little bad luck. 48 teams is fine. Football is changing.
Yeah but, I'm sorry, rugby WC also shouldn't be 20 teams. Its not just the blowouts; there are lots of meaningless matches in a rugby WC. Even 16 teams is a stretch but that number would be palatable since 12 or 14 teams are awkward numbers to work with.
Its not like we can watch the extra matches. The time frame of the WC will (roughly) still be the same - around 31-32 days. There are only so many hours in a month. My job isn't gonna take a time out, my dog isn't going to stop needing walks, dinner isn't gonna cook itself and the kitchen isn't going to clean itself for a month. Can't send the dog to get my groceries and do the laundry either. IOW, there's only time to watch max 4 games per day anyway (for most people, probably less). The main difference is that with this expansion and new format, those 4 matches will have less importance (until the round of 16).
You can watch extended highlights onDemand on your phone and be entertained by it though. More games means more chances to see something special even if it is not live.
Yes it would be ideal if the tournament was drawn out over a longer period. But I still think this is worth it. Just choose which matches you want to watch live. What you want to PVR, and which you want to watch highlights.
After pondering about this a bit more the World Cup opening ceremonies could be in Canada if we are trying to avoid bad sun while simultaneously correlating with European time zones for TV Networks. Mexico would be pretty hot. That said, Mexico has played many day time games in Qualifiers and World Cups past so maybe it would not be out of the ordinary to have the Opening ceremonies there and play the match. There have been rumors of the opener being there and the Mexican federation might encourage it cause it will be a heated fortress atmosphere. But opposing fans and media at the match might hate it.
For better or worse. But that's always been the case, and not just with futbol. Every generation believes their ideas are better than those from the past.
I don't have the TV figures to back up my impression, but the expansion drained the life out of the group stage - partly because of the weaker teams getting in, partly because these are matchups that you can already see in qualifiers & Nations League, but mostly because of the 3rd-placers advancing to the next round. Having so many de facto host countries at least helped the atmosphere around Euro 2020/1, but I still had the sensation of "wake me up when the knockout round begins". Mind you, the one advantage of the WC expansion is the novelty of the potential matchups: most of you aren't getting out of bed for Curaçao-Cabo Verde, but you're never going to see that game anywhere else FIFA already confirmed that the WC finals calendar will expand - they'll cut the pre-tournament player release by a week to keep the overall window the same. Here, the watered-down group stage actually helps a bit: stronger teams with less prep time have more room to recover if they stumble out the gate, unlike in 2002, for example. Yup: Lista las fechas de las eliminatorias al mundial de 2026 👀📍Venezuela debuta el 23sep vs Colombia en Barranquilla.CONMEBOL pasará de tener 4 cupos directos a tener 6 + repechaje. pic.twitter.com/VrWqTMdHTB— Peseteiro (@jpeseteiroDT) March 15, 2023 Kinda surprised that the teams that had the rougher final stretch didn't demand a draw to set a new fixture list... but it suits Peru, so I'm good
The Group stage might take a little bit of a hit here and there but having an extra round of do-or-die futbol at the round of 32 negates it with more excitement and drama and possible upsets.