The Question: Is the World Cup too big?
Compared to the Euros, Fifa's global cash-cow keeps big teams apart and encourages negative football - it's time to make it a 16-team tournament again
I wasn't quite as down on this World Cup as most people seem to have been, but these things are relative. I'd place it high above 2002 and just above 2006, but behind every other tournament in my lifetime, and I don't think that's just down to the weariness of age. For once, in fact, I seem largely to agree with what Sean Ingle says in this piece.
What it lacked was a truly great game, a match of ebbs and flows between giants that would burn itself into the pantheon. It wasn't just that here was nothing as good as Italy 3-2 Brazil from 1982, there was nothing even in the class of Brazil 1-1 Netherlands, Netherlands 2-1 Argentina or England 2-2 Argentina from 1998, which at the time I thought was a poor tournament. It's hard even to isolate one great game: Germany's victories over England and Argentina were impressive, but too comfortable to be thrilling; Spain's semi-final victory over Germany was engaging, but was never going to set pulses racing; and while there was excitement in Ghana's victory over USA and intrigue in their defeat to Uruguay, the quality wasn't high.
It is not just, though, about excitement and quality; there must also be consequence, which is why the third-and-fourth place game between Uruguay and Germany doesn't really count. A truly great game should be between two teams that stand a realistic chance of winning the tournament. There is interest in shocks, of course, and a World Cup would be incomplete without them, but they rely on a higher power playing some way below their best; the really epic contests lie in a meeting of two of the game's heavyweights playing somewhere near potential. I suspect we'll look back on this era and think what a shame it was that Brazil, Copa America champions, never met Spain, the European champions, at either the Confederations Cup or the World Cup.
Crunching the numbers
It is an irony of Fifa's money-making splurge that it tends to keep the big teams apart (unlike, say, the Champions League, which at times seems to have the same big teams playing each other on an endless treadmill). It also seems to encourage negative football. Goals per game ratios aren't everything, but it is notable that the knockout stages of the last World Cup – once the likes of Algeria, Honduras and Switzerland, who essentially played for draws from the start, had been eliminated – yielded 2.6 goals per game as opposed to 2.27 for the whole tournament. Since Saudi Arabia's 8-0 embarrassment at the hands of Germany in 2002, minnows seem intent first and foremost on avoiding humiliation. (That said, England also dragged the average down in the group stage).
Quantifying such things is difficult, and the Fifa world rankings are far from perfect, but let's say the top 10 sides in those rankings – which are after all, the nearest we have to an objective measure - have a realistic chance of winning the World Cup. Heading into this World Cup, those 10 sides were Brazil, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Argentina, England, France and Croatia. Of a total of 63 matches (I'm excluding the third-place play-off) seven featured a clash between two of those teams: 11%. In 2006, the figure was nine of 63 (and one of those was a dead-rubber group match between Argentina and the Netherlands after both had already qualified): 14%.
Compare that to the Euros. Going into Euro 2008, the top 10 in the world was: Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Germany, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Portugal and the Netherlands. Even though the first two, for obvious reasons, weren't involved, eight of 31 games featured a meeting of two of the top 10 sides in the word: 26%. That's why the Euros, with 16 teams, usually feels like a higher quality tournament than the 32-team World Cup (and one of the many reasons expanding the Euros to 24 teams is such a bad idea).
What about past World Cups? Let's go back to 1994, the last 24-team tournament. The world rankings were only a year old then and, frankly, look a little odd, but let's go with them. The top 10 was: Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Argentina, Nigeria, Switzerland, Spain and Romania. Eight of 51 games in the USA featured two sides from that list: 16%. Or, let's go back to 1986, the first tournament to feature a last 16 knock-out round. There were no world rankings, but a guess at the best 10 sides in the world – based on seedings, qualifying and results in the continental competitions - would be: Brazil, Italy, France, West Germany, Spain, Poland, England, Argentina, USSR and Denmark. In Mexico 12 of the 51 games involved two of a putative top 10: 24%. Even if you revise that downwards to take into account that my top 10 is picked with the benefit of knowing what those sides went on to do at the tournament, it's still double the proportion in the most recent World Cup.
Now of course part of the fun of the World Cup for the viewer is the exoticism, seeing countries we didn't know much about, and expanding the tournament was always going to dilute the quality. From Fifa's point of view, part of the remit of the World Cup is encouraging the game's development all over the globe, putting on a festival in which every region is represented. A balance is necessary, but the lack of classic games in recent tournaments seems to indicate it's gone too far.
Where there's a will there's a way
There is a way to go back to a more manageable 16-team tournament, and a way of doing it that would get 16 competitive teams that would be still fair to all regions and still stimulate growth in the less traditional football strongholds. I'm not naive enough to believe it could ever happen, but imagine this ...
Amalgamate the north and south American confederations to form one confederation of 50 teams. Amalgamate Asia and Oceania to create a confederation of 62 members. At present Uefa has 53 and the Confederation of African football 55, so you would have four confederations of roughly equal size (if you're wondering why that totals 220 when Fifa has only 208 members, it's because Reunion, Zanzibar (CAF), French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Martin, Sint-Maarten (Concacaf), Kiribati, Micronesia, Niue, Palau and Tuvalu (OFC) are not full Fifa members).
Select a host, who qualifies as of right. Then have regional pre-qualifying to get down to 60 teams for the final stage of qualifying. Based on a rough doubling of the allocation at the moment, that would be comprised of 26 from Europe, 14 from the Americas, 10 from Africa, 10 from Asia/Oceania. Draw them in 15 groups of four, who play each other home and away, with only the top side qualifying for the finals. Perhaps you'd end up with 15 European finalists, perhaps only a handful; but the beauty is it would be decided on the pitch rather than on merit. African and Asian teams wouldn't just get the chance to play the game's grandees, they get to host them.
Imagine a group featuring, for instance, England, Chile, Japan and Ghana. Imagine Spain going to Yaounde to play a qualifier. Imagine what it would mean for, say, New Zealand to play a qualifier in the Maracana. Qualifiers would in themselves become interesting, meaningful competition, rather than the familiar schlep around Tallinn, Andorra and Warsaw. And which develops the game more in, say, Togo - their team stuttering through three defeats in Germany or, say, Germany, Mexico and Australia coming to play in Lome?
Minnows would still have the chance to qualify, but they'd have really to earn the right. Similarly giants would miss out, as Argentina, say, missed out on 1970. The qualifiers would have real edge. And at the end of it, you'd have 15 teams battle-hardened by proper competition ready for a manageable three-week tournament in which the quality wouldn't be diluted. But then Fifa wouldn't make its billions, so instead we're condemned to an exhausting leviathan in which we have to hunt ever harder for football greatness. Bigger isn't better.
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