The World Cup starts tomorrow, in South Africa.
Are we bothered?
Well, yes, of course we are; we expect to watch a large number of games. But truth be told we have never been so indifferent about a major football tournament for sometime.
The reasons for that are many.
Firstly, football is in a bit of a rut right now: never has the crop of decent, genuinely brilliant star players been so small as it currently is.
Secondly, international football is now played at a much lower standard than the highest echelons of club football: the latter stages of the Champions League are where you will see the best football in the world played, not at the World Cup.
Thirdly, as Chelsea supporters, all we want is as many of our players – who have already had a long season – out of the tournament and with their feet up on the nearest beach as quickly as possible.
Perhaps most importantly though is the fact that at 32 teams, there are 16 too many taking part. A 24-team World Cup was bad enough, but 32 makes the participation of too many poor teams too easy.
Honduras? New Zealand? What exactly are they bringing to the World Cup party? Quality football it certainly isn’t.
The 32 teams in South Africa will – as the next few days go by – be proclaimed as the cream of world football, the 32 best teams in the world. Rubbish. They are in fact the 20 or so best teams plus another 16 who have qualified via a gerrymandered qualification system that ultimately harms world football.
It could be very different.
Here’s how.
Right now, the vacant places at the World Cup are divvied up amongst the continental football federations: Europe gets X number of places, Africa Y, North America Z, etc. Qualification is then played out at continental level. This means that second-rate European and South American teams miss out on the World Cup even though they would (probably) annihilate the Oceania, Central American, Asian and – some – African qualifiers.
It also means that third rate African countries like Tanzania – who will probably never, ever qualify for the World Cup – have to stump up $2.5 million to play a prestige (but ultimately meaningless) friendly against Brazil (yes, Brazil charge countries a huge fee before agreeing to play them in friendly matches).
Now, imagine if Brazil had to play Tanzania in a World Cup qualifier. Imagine the impact on Tanzanian football, on African football. Imagine Spain having to travel to play away matches in North Korea, or England in New Zealand? Germany in Mauritius?
All perfectly feasible with jet airlines: most international players are Europe-based these days, and have to travel vast distances to play for their countries anyway.
It will never happen of course. Global qualifying would rob the continental federations of their power (or much of it).
But it should.
Besides the huge impact it would have on those nations who would get drawn with big footballing names, it would also ensure that (by and large) only the world’s best teams get to play at the World Cup finals.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
“New Zealand? What exactly are they bringing to the World Cup party? Quality football it certainly isn’t. ”
And Italy, Germany, Netherlands, England are the ones bringing quality? I think the underdogs like new Zealand and North Korea have done a lot to shake things up, and have brought more excitement to South Africa than you had bargained for!
Apropos, if anyone is interested in goings on in SA from the perspective of Dutch and Polish residents of Johannesburg, keep an eye on the blog of Jeroen van Marle (who of course set up Bucharest In Your Pocket back in 1999) http://injoburg.wordpress.com, or follow on him on twitter at @injoburg.
Nah. I think you’re wrong on a few things here.
1. I think there are just as many genuine star players at the moment as ever. Messi could well be spoken of in the same breath as Pele and Maradona in years to come, and there are many other star players out there who will be at this WC (to name a few: Xavi, Villa, Casillas, Julio Cesar, C. Ronaldo, Rooney, Schweinsteiger, Eto’o, Robben, Kaka – sadly Drogba and Essien from your lot will miss through injury)
2. This is true, in a sense. the latter stages of the CL involves very expensively assembled squads of world class players. But I still prefer the world cup, mostly because I can truly enjoy the football and not build my entertainment around hoping for teams (like Chelsea for example) to lose. The WC is more about enjoying the game, rather than rivalries and petty hatred (though this is possibly a personal reaction)
3. As a non-Chelsea fan (and a non big club fan) the WC allows me to appreciate talented players for their talent rather than dislike them for their contribution to the success of that big club. (Though this doesn’t apply to John Terry who I seem able to manage to dislike on a club AND national level)
As for your revised qualification system, again, it would work if you just wanted to see the best 24 (or whatever) national teams in the world compete. That’s not what i want, any more than I would want the CL to be contested between 8 teams each from England Spain Germany and Italy. Indeed I preferred the old European Cup when there was only the champions from each country.
There does indeed seem to be something of a Chelsea curse in the South African air. Essien is still injured from the African Cup of Nations. If national associations paid their horribly inflated wages while they were injured it would not be so bad, but they do not.
Anyway, I’m with Argentina. Or rather, I’m with Diego.
I definitely prefer my club to my country but completely disagree that we should try to turn all tournaments into elite best of the bests. Any miserable old codger worth his salt preferred the European Cup, Cup Winners Cup and UEFA to the current self-perpetuating, money driven debacle. I want to see crap countries. It’s especially exciting when one of them does better than expected. Where would the World Cup be without the Roger Millas of this world?
Agree to a point. But I also argue that the romance has gone anyway, and that 24 hour sports channels and the internet are to blame.
The element of surprise has gone. As recently as 1990 we could be pleasantly surprised by a Roger Milla-type. Now we simply already know that there are no Roger Millas around. In 1990 who knew Cameroon were any good?
Today we know the strengths and weaknesses of just about every team. We even know that North Korea are a dour side with a very good defence whose two best players play in Japan and the Russian second division.
Agree, it’s becoming very hard to discover a star player in a final tournament.
Since 2002 I started to pick 1 or 2 teams whom I believed they would perform better than expected. Also I tried to name a star player from each team. My picks were as follows:
- in 2002 I picked Croatia (star player Igor Biscan) and Poland (star player Radoslav Kaluzny); Croatia beat Italy 2-1 but lost to Ecuador and failed to qualify, still a performance. Poland did not matter in the competition
- in Euro 2004 I picked Sweden (star player Markus Allback); they played the best football of the entire competition, culminating with the goal against Italy (Ibrahimovic) and 4 strikes against the post in the quarter-final against Holland, however Markus Allback only played for 25 minutes or so in the tournament
- in 2006 I picked Mexico (no star player) and Switzerland (star player Marco Streller); both of them qualified from the groups, Mexico lost against Argentina aet while Switzerland lost against Ukraine in penalties and became the only national team in the world to have ever exited a final tournament without conceding
Marco Streller failed to impress.
- In 2008 I picked Romania (star player Dorin Goian); the team did impress in the first 2 games against France and Italy but failed to obtain qualification from its group in the last game against Holland. Dorin Goian was rather mediocre, being constantly overrun by Luca Toni from Italy and in the next game against Holland.
- This year I have no picks; would have chosen Chile but I don’t like the selection; would have also chosen Paraguay but the incident with Salvador Cabanas from a few months ago made me to look for another team. Maybe Holland but I don’t choose big teams…
Nowadays crap countries don’t matter that much at the World Cup unfortunately…
Crap clubs like Steaua or Urziceni may happen to be worth a penny in the Champions League.
International football should go back to the system before World Cup 1994.
In 1994 all teams that qualified from the groups were of a real quality. I remember that even Switzerland lived its best year in 1994 with players like Chapuisat, Turkylmaz, Sforza, Zuberbuhler, Alain Sutter etc…
From there on, the quality of national team football began to fall with more and more games being played in the internal competitions and European cups.
Indeed, the result was the 2001/2002 season of the European Champions League which I believe was the strongest in history but in terms of national team football the quality began to fall and culminating with the German national team reaching the final of Euro 2008, probably the worse national team in history to have ever reached a final…
I’m with Diego too!
Initially I went with Chile, I liked their team and I thought they would reach quarter-finals, however Marcelo Bielsa prooved me wrong and his selection did not include Claudio Maldonado, Jaime Valdes and David Pizzaro in his squad.
Their midfield was very strong with Matias Fernandez, Jorge Valdivia, Valdes and Maldonado but now…
Their attack was also promising with Humberto Suazo and Alexis Sanchez from Udinese but I think Suazo will miss at least 1 game.
That’s the problem with small teams – they may have a very good first 11 but they have more or less nothing on the bench.
Also a chance for Holland this year, Bert van Maarvijk is a quality trainer.