From Last Word on Soccer, by Joe Hojnacki
One of new FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s pet projects has been the expansion of the World Cup Finals. It started off as a modest growth to 40 teams to get a little more money into FIFA’s already stuffed coffers. It has since expanded to a 48 team World Cup with some half baked ideas on how to rework the competition in ways fans don’t exactly want.
Gianni Infantino is Overthinking the 48 Team World Cup
I am perfectly okay with an expansion to 48 nations duking it out for global soccer supremacy. I understand Infantino’s motivations. More nations playing means more eyeballs watching means more money flowing. It also grows the game in smaller nations who rarely, if ever, get to play on the global stage. Making money and growing the game are perfectly reasonable motivations for FIFA’s president to have.
Infantino’s Ideas
The trouble is Infantino is trying way too hard to get this whole plan to stick. His ideas for an overhaul of the competition format have been overly radical and completely unnecessary. His first brain child was a 32 team, one game play in round for the right to play in the actual group stage. There would be 16 play in games with 16 winners joining 16 seeded teams in the formal group stage. The other half of those nations would see their World Cup hopes and dreams fade away after 90 minutes of action.
This met with understandable opposition. Travelling thousands of miles to country stuffed with tourists, journalists, and soccer personnel is an expensive endeavor. Heading all that way for one game would hardly be worth it for the players involved, let alone 16 sets of national team fans who only get to watch their team play in one game before heading home defeated. Not too many people were on board with this, thankfully.
His newest scheme is to feature a tournament with 16 groups of three teams each, thus cutting the group stage down to two games each. The top two would move on to a Round of 32 and the tournament would proceed as normal from there.
Somehow, he came up with a plan worse than his first one and got his underlings to go along with it. Two games is only barely better than one on travel costs. Instead of one intense winner take all games, you get two pretty watered down affairs since two-thirds of the teams move along anyway.
Both these ideas would add 16 games to the World Cup schedule. More games equals more money, so that’s all well and good. But, isn’t there a way to get more games and more money without dramatic changes to the basic format the World Cup has used for decades?
Less Radical Ideas
Why yes, there are ways to expand the World Cup without altering the structure we have come to know and love throughout the tournament’s history. Infantino wants 48 nations heading to the 2026 World Cup. How can we get 48 teams in while still maintaining a four team per group structure? That’s easy. Divide the nations up into 12 groups of four. Take the top two in each, as we have since 1994, to the knockout rounds. The 12 best group winners (based on points, goal difference, goals for…) get an automatic bye into the round of 16. The rest play in a round of 24 for the right to face those teams.
This method adds more games than both of Infantino’s plans. the group stage alone gets 24 new games for fans to watch and the knockout rounds get eight more, bringing the total to 32 new games, twice the number of Infantino’s more radical solutions.
One of the concerns would be adding to the length of the event. However, this proposal would only extend the competition by about a week. more games could be played in a day to keep things from getting too long. Two groups could play games in a day. Four games in a day would have the group stage over and done with in just 18 days, just three days longer than the 2014 group stage took. The extra knockout round could get done in three days with an off day for rest before the round of 16. Surely one extra week wouldn’t cripple the FIFA calendar.
A 48 team World Cup is likely to happen, but it doesn’t have to make things so complicated. If Infantino wants to add an extra 16 nations to his World Cup, he is more than welcome to. Remember, more nations, more games, more money, growth of the game and all that. But he does need to stop trying too hard to make it work. He needs to keep things simple and everything will be just fine.
