My mistake, I’d copied the wrong picks down for those two. I’ll edit my post to give the correct numbers.
@rho21 Thank you for confirming that. Also your post made me realize I had forgot to update a couple of numbers so thank you for the post, it was very helpful.
Thanks to both of you! I thought about updating things last night but couldn’t be bothered.
I’m enjoying it a lot so far.
1990 was my first live World Cup experience, and it’s interesting to contrast how much the game has changed now. Back then Italian Premiere league was king. The likes of AC Milan, Jeventus, Napoli. Defensive football was where it was at. Meanwhile you had the English Premiere league with its offensive fast football as a contrast.
Now in 2018, it seems like the English Premiere league type football is king. And also, I noticed none of the European teams are now pasty white dudes. The England team has more people of color than white people. There’s people of middle eastern and african descent on a lot of European teams now, and some of them bring that same flair into the European teams with them.
My only frustration so far is that I wish the CONCACAF teams and African teams were doing a bit better than they have been. Some are getting so close, but just can’t close the deal. Maybe by 2022 or 2026 we’ll see these regions with super strong teams that can win it all.
Actually, I have others wrong too, though apparently in a way that cancels out with the correct choices. I’ll double-check everything.
I wish that CONCACAF had seen greater growth as well. I think we are hampered by having smaller nations and I suspect that economic issues prevent soccer from having the infrastructure it needs to really flourish.
Or in Canada, just a lack of funding and obsession with Hockey hurts. Also Canada has seen some pretty strong growth in basketball rather than soccer.
I’m hoping that having three MLS teams in Canada will help grow the game and get some increased funding to build a better player pipeline.
I wonder if Canada will get to join in World Cup 2026 as one of the 3 host nations? They’d better not embarrass themselves if they do!
Canada would automatically qualify, and with 48 teams present, they should be far from the worst team.
Fingers crossed that you’re correct. :)
I’d like to think that by 2026, there will 48 fantastic teams ready for the World Cup. Call me an eternal optimist.
Well, okay, 47 fantastic teams and Saudi Arabia.
OK, all numbers recalculated. This only resulted in changes to pools 1 and 2, though it did swap two players around in pool 2.
@marquac: would you mind checking those new numbers to see if they match yours?
Agreed, this is an excellent development. It’s great to see diversity really making inroads in all high-level sport. However, it is a double-edged sword - a goodly number of those players of color are on European sides because they or their families had to flee from Africa or Latin America. The Lukaku piece that @Mr_Bismarck posted above is a fine example…he’s a Belgian because his parents had to flee the Congo.
I’m afraid we’ll continue to see lagging quality from those places until their situations are stable enough for players to stay home. And obviously the development of football stars isn’t the most important reason for stabilization of those countries, but I think it’s an indicator to keep an eye on.
Edit: Oh, and I meant to also mention that the women’s sides aren’t yet showing much of this same diversity. Almost every group looked very homogeneous last time around, at least to me. But I expect this will change as more developed nations give the women’s game better support, following the same trajectory as the men’s game.
I’m okay with the expansion, even though 48 is an awkward number to work with and the three-team groups FIFA wants to go with is not ideal. We’ve been at 32 teams for 20+ years and the sport’s more global now than it was in 1998. I’m hoping to see qualifiers organized in a way that guarantees each region within a continental confederation gets represented in the World Cup (e.g., having at least one team from the Caribbean, Eastern Africa, South Asia, etc.). If FIFA wants to grow the game further, that makes sense to me. I doubt most of them would be competitive, but that’s okay. Soccer’s low-scoring and more prone to upsets than other sports, so I could tolerate a few more blowouts if it means we get the odd game where DR Congo knocks out Italy.
The expansion just seems senseless to me, other than trying to generate more money. We already have the qualifiers to determine which teams make it to the big tournament. This just dilutes the whole thing. I think it’s great that good teams sometimes don’t make it due to bad qualifying efforts. Will make them more focused and likely to make it the next time around.
Yeah, it’s 100% about more money. I read the key motivator behind it was to give China and India a better chance at qualifying. Still, for me more World Cup matches is a good thing and the latter rounds should be largely unaffected. The main issue I have is that the group stages are going to be borderline irrelevant since 2/3 teams advance to the knockout round. My other fear is that this is going to encourage even more defensive play than we see now since a loss will basically eliminate a team during the group stage. I would rather only one team advance from each group to encourage playing for a win.
Ah that’s a shame. I was hoping we’d go from 48 to 16 in the group stage. So I guess this means they’re adding another knockout round? A Round of 32? That would be a terrible way of doing it. If you go from 48 to the Round of 16 as the first knockout stage, then it means 32 teams would get chopped in the group stage, which would be much more exciting.
Also, none of this is formalized yet, right? The only announcement I saw was about 48 teams, nothing about how the tournament would be arranged. Hopefully someone can talk sense into them in the next few years before this gets locked down.
Unfortunately, that format sounds formalized:
6 spots for CONCACAF. Wow. That is quite generous. I do like that Oceana will now get a guaranteed qualification spot.
Interesting. I hadn’t thought about the fact that you still need to only win 7 matches to win the World Cup, just like the current format. I do like that.
The relevant section from The Guardian article:
Those are great points from both sides. I like that the tournament can still be finished in a month since you’re only adding 16 matches this way. OTOH, that’s a great point about being one of the 16 countries that’s not playing the opening match in their groups.
Here’s the new allocations:
I’ll have to study that and think about that one. Asia allocations seems really f’ing high though. 8 teams? WTF? I love Asia, I’m originally from Asia, but come on, we suck at football. This is the area that’s not good enough to beat Saudi Arabia when they have 4.5 slots.
I would have thought it would be the Aussies, not the Swedes…