Will Qatar play qualifying matches in its conference for 2022? Yes, I know they get an automatic bid, but will they play qualifiers anyway for the sake of providing competition to the other teams in their conference?
No. Russia did not play in UEFA Qualifications for this World Cup.
No, the host doesn’t play in the qualifications. That can cause a few problems, as the host team will not play a competitive match for a good long while, depending on regional competitions. The European sides have the Euro Championship to qualify for and play in, but after that it’s a two year gap before the next World Cup. Two years worth of friendlies isn’t the same, really.
OK, next question: how will this shake out with regards to the USA, Canada and Mexico being awarded a pan-North American bid for 2026? Will one get the automatic qualification and the other two have to battle it out in qualifying?
It will be a 48 team field so I’m betting they all automatically qualify.
The assumption is that they all will automatically qualify. CONCACAF gets something like 6 spots minimum (plus possibly two more in the last-ditch qualifying tournament that has been added to the end of the process), so it’s not that big a deal.
In 1994, the US had to spend the prior two years playing all sorts of friendlies to try and make up for not having to qualify. One can argue that it actually made them MORE prepared than the typical CONCACAF qualifying tournament does.
Yeah a lot of UEFA WCQ is a joke. What does Germany gain by heading to Gibraltar or San Marino to stick a zillion goals past them? Nothing. In the entire qualification process they’ll probably only have 2 or 4 games against worthy opponents.
It very much depends, Ask Italy and the Netherlands if they think it is a joke. The toughness of some of the European groups meant that both missed out along with such decent second tier teams like Turkey, Czech republic, Norway, Ukraine etc. If all of those were included rather that such as Iran, Australia, Costa Rica, Panama, Saudi Arabia etc. then The World cup would throw up even more surprises at the group stages.
Costa Rica was a PK shootout away from The semifinals in 2014. 
That is always going to happen in some cases, football is a sport more likely than others to throw up weird results. I would suggest though that if that first list of teams I gave was regularly replaced with the European non-qualifiers, they would be far more likely to replicate what such as Costa Rica did in reaching the quarters.
A tournament that has Saudi Arabia and Panama but not Italy or Holland doesn’t feel right to me. I think Europe should have more places and the other federations less until such time as their very best teams show they deserve it.
Concacaf, OFC, AFC and CAF combined have 13 places allocated and have produced a grand total of 2 semi-finalists, UEFA have 14 places allocated and have produced 56 semi-finalists (or better).
Why is the semi-finals your metric rather than, say, making it out of the group stage? Going back to 1990, CONCACAF has advanced 57% of their teams out of the group stage, more than expected than if their teams were completely average wrt the field. AFC - 25%. CAF - 26%. UEFA - 62%. I’d be totally fine with taking one spot from each of AFC and CAF and giving it to UEFA, but I think 3.5 spots for CONCACAF is perfect for a 32 team tournament.
There’s the FIFA Confederations Cup, which is held a year before the World Cup by the following year’s World Cup hosts and which functions as a kind of test run. The 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup featured Russia, as the hosts, Germany, Australia, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal and Cameroon, and was won by Germany.
Why choose either of them? Any of them would totally arbitrary. Why start at 1990?
My reasoning for using semi final places is because it is less likely to reach the semi-final by pure luck than it is to get out of the group.
I think we agree more than we disagree. I took those confederations together to give a comparable number of teams to UEFA. I’d be more that happy to introduce a performance metric (whether that is last 16, 8 or 4) and reward the confederations that do best with additional places and take places away from those that under-perform. That could well work out at the moment to mean more places for Europe and CONCACAF and less for the others, in the future that could easily reverse (and should if the performances warrant it).
Of course that is all moot given Infantino’s stupid idea of increasing the tournament to 48 teams, but then more teams = more bribes for him. Who cares if it damages the quality of the tournament?
I used the group because I think if you’re asking who belongs you should compare to the average rather than the elite. You’re right that it’s arbitrary though. I used 1990 because I didn’t feel like going back farther. Should have stopped at 1998 though since that’s when it expanded to 32.
Aren’t the number of slots jiggered tournament to tournament based on confederation quality? I thought that CONCACAF used to have 3 vs 3.5 and OFC with 1 vs 0.5.
Agree that going to 48 is a bad choice. I think 32 is a perfect medium between quality, number of games, and geographic diversity.
I think that given FIFA corrupt practices, the places are probably distributed as much by past “generosity” and “loyalty” than by true merit.
Perhaps in the new age of FIFA openness and transparency we can look forward to fairness in the awarding of places and hosting rights…:dubious:
…:rolleyes:
…no, sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight face either!
The math works out pretty well with 32 teams; half go to the knockout stage, and 16 is a power of 2. Have they announced how the 48 team tournament will be structured? The best I can come up with is 8 groups of 6 teams each, with the top 2 advancing.
It’s 16 groups of 3 teams each, with the top 2 advancing to a 32-team knockout. So teams play one fewer group stage game, but there’s one more knockout round. It’s not a great format at all, as far as I can see. One problem is that with an odd number of teams in each group, you can’t schedule all the teams in a group to play their last game at the same time. The two teams playing a group’s final game will already know the exact results of the third team in their group.
16x3, bottom team of each eliminated, then standard single elimination for remaining 32
This is an excellent point. But since its the last place team out there is far less room for cheating.
I don’t know. I just stumbled on a video the other day that was about World Cup controversies, and one of them was the game that prompted the rule that the final group games take place at the same time. In short, there was a situation where both teams in the final game would advance if the score stayed as it was, but if either team gave up a goal, they’d be out. Obviously there wasn’t much attacking after that.
Could there be a similar pitfall in this new format? Suppose A beats B, B beats C, and C is beating A in the final group game (all by the same score). Who’s going to attack, and what’s the tiebreaker if all the teams finish with the same record, goal differential, etc?