Re: The FIFA World Cup Thread (Spoilers Welcome)
That's why I don't want things messed with. The World Cup seems to be at a pretty good state. The only real change that needs to be made is how teams are distributed into Pots for the Draw.
(Sorry in advance for the long post)
Agreed. As we discussed before, I believe that if expansion is a must then FIFA should go with 36 teams. Then, they could go with 6 groups of 6 teams. The top two in each group advance plus the four best third place teams.
Advantages:
- Less likelihood of a true group of death, assuming that FIFA properly pots teams (probably not a fair assumption)
- The best teams should advance to the Knockout Stages, as 5 games/group gives teams room to slip up in any one particular game, yet still manage a top 2-3 spot to advance.
- The final game of group stage play would see each team in the group play, and at the same time
Disadvantages:
- 48 extra group stage games. Currently, the group stage lasts 15 days. To fit the extra games into 15 days (and assuming the hosts play alone on Day 1), that would require 6-7 games/day...not going to happen. Realistically, you could have ~4 games/day for the first four rounds of group play. That would take 19 days. Then you could do two groups/day (i.e. 6 games) on the final 3 days to wrap it up in 22 days, or an extra week. Compared with 8 groups of 5 teams (in the hypothetical 40 team WC), there would still be an extra 10 games in this scenario, but probably wouldn't add any extra time to the Cup.
Assuming that the reason for expansion would be to ensure teams from every confederation get at least a spot, then I would assume that the OFC's 0.5 would get bumped up to 1 full spot. I would also bump each of the remaining half spots up to full spots. That would result in the following:
Host - 1 spot
AFC - 5 spots
CAF - 5 spots
CONCACAF - 4 spots
CONMEBOL - 5 spots
OFC - 1 spot
UEFA - 13 spots
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Total - 34 spots
That would leave 2 extra spots to be spread throughout the confederations. I don't see OFC getting any more than 1 spot, so they are out of the running. CONMEBOL looks pretty set at 5 spots as well (no need to send more than half the countries in a confederation). There is no way that UEFA doesn't benefit from expansion, so they get 1 of the extra spots. Then what to do about the 1 extra spot and AFC, CAF, and CONCACAF? My guess would be that Africa would get the extra spot, so we'd have something like this:
Host - 1 spot
AFC - 5 spots
CAF - 6 spots
CONCACAF - 4 spots
CONMEBOL- 5 spots
OFC - 1 spot
UEFA - 14 spots
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Total - 36 spots
Another option would be to have the CAF at 5 spots, and give the extra spot back to the defending champion.
Now that we have our 36 teams, how should we go about seeding and the draw? There are a lot of different options, but I would go with something where everyone gets seeded 1-35. Then you have six pots. Teams #1-5 (host would get Group A) are in Pot 1, #6-11 in Pot #2, #12-17 in Pot #3, #18-23 in Pot #4, #24-29 in Pot #5, and #30-35 in Pot #6. Then I would have a rule where no more than 3 teams from UEFA could be in any one group, and no more than 1 team from confederations that have 5 or fewer spots. Obviously, there are other options that work better than this, but I like this option better than the current way the draw is done.
