WC Play Off Format - Going forward

[Caco]

Okay the draw has been made and as expected, FIFA held Ireland down while Blatter and Platini gang raped us. Spilt milk and all, we could have got them in an open draw anyway. Life goes on.

Blatter came out afterwards and admitted that the way it was handled was wrong and it should have been announced originally and that FIFA will learn lessons for future tournaments.

So basically, we are always going to have this completely biased system which is always going to favour this current crop of top teams, as the ranking system is geared towards rewarding teams in tournaments,ie. the scoring system is higher for games in the WC, Euro Champs and Confederations cup. In a few years New Zealand will be higher rated than teams like Ireland, Scotland, Bosnia, etc.

The old system gave each group in Europe two places. So why not go back to that? Obviously there is more countries, but why not have a preliminary qualification stage for the lower ranked teams in Europe. The likes of Faroe Islands, Georgia, Andorra, etc. At least these teams are playing against teams at their level and they get a reasonable chance of making the qualifiers proper.

 

[cwy21]

First the problem is Europe gets 13 places. So that makes the two spots per group difficult.

Europe doesn't need to do preliminary rounds. The reason other confederations do it because they need to get 50 nations down to three or four spots.

You can't do 12 groups of four and one group of five because only playing six games for qualification would not help the big nations.

The seeding the playoffs was ridiculous but I don't see a way around the playoffs in UEFA.

 

[Caco]

You have preliminaries for the lesser teams, no disrespect meant to those teams. You reduce the amount of teams playing for qualification. Europe gets 13 places, have seven groups with top two going through, worst second place doesn't make it, or two worst play off for final place.

UEFA has 53 teams, and arguably at least 20 in the top 32 in the world. This current system is going to kill the game in some countries. It took nations like Ireland, Norway, Israel, etc. a long time to get to the level they are at. This system will kill the game in these countries.

I personally paid a lot of money to travel and support my country away from home, not to mention the over priced tickets for Dublin games. If FIFA are going to keep on tipping the balance in the favour of the bigger names I'm not going to waste my money and I won't be the only one.

FIFA's promise "For the game. For the world".

Don't make me laugh!