(This is an idea first posted here in 2016)
1) With 64, twice the number of current teams will be involved. This seems obvious enough, but this is also the number one reason why it should be done. Every time these two tournaments are held, there are some prestigious teams that are left out just because there are not enough places for them. Doubling the number of participants would help more of these teams to qualify more often. This also means many more fans in many more countries would be included and would enjoy these tournaments. And when you include more teams, you generate increased interest across the whole country where that team is from. Ask any Polish or Scottish fans, for example, whether their interest is the same in a World Cup or Champions League group stage when they have a team present or when they don't.
2) The overall duration of the competitions would not be altered significantly. Just one more matchday would be needed in the World Cup (to accommodate an extra elimination round after the group stage), and two extra days in the Champions League, as compared to now. This would mean 8 matches instead of the current 7 in the World Cup, and 15 in the Champions League instead of 13. Given that the current Champions League quarter-finals are played over eight different days instead of the minimum four (four Tuesdays and four Wednesdays in February and March), the dates needed are already available on the international calendar. And also, let's remember that during four seasons at the turn of the century there was a SECOND 6-game group stage after the first, taking a total of 17 matches for the competition to be completed. This was later trimmed back to the current 13 games, but 15 over 9 months is feasible, and it is a very small sacrifice in order to double the number of teams participating. Besides, in the case of the World Cup, the 48-team enlargement now approved by FIFA also would need an 8-match schedule anyway, because of the new 32-team second round, so if you're going to block off an 8-game chunk of the international calendar for the World Cup, at least make that length of time count, and use it to its maximum effect. I think that using an extra week of the international calendar every FOUR years is not that big a sacrifice for the price of DOUBLE the nations to be included.
3) Worrying about "diluting the quality" is a non-issue. Anyone who watches football knows that you simply don't know how "good" the next match you watch is going to be, whatever the "quality" of the teams involved is, and you don't know either where the next thoroughly enjoying crowd-pleaser is going to come from. We've all seen a disappointing Real Madrid v Barcelona, an underwhelming Liverpool v Manchester United or a boring Italy v Germany. And we've also seen an entertaining Swansea v Crystal Palace, or an eventful Portugal v Hungary, games which maybe wouldn't be billed as "of the highest quality" before the fact. Having fewer matches does not mean they are going to be better games, and conversely, more matches do not mean they are all going to be worse. Every fan of each team is going to find their own games interesting, whatever the "quality" of the play, and then they will judge how interesting the rest of the matches are to them, according to their own time and inclination.
4) "Bloated" is the word you might have blurted out already. Yes, it would be difficult to watch every match in an enlarged World Cup like this (and I have watched EVERY World Cup match on TV since I was 10), but no-one is asking you to. As an everyday fan, do you watch every match in the current Champions League, or in your current domestic club competitions? No, and nobody will say you're a poor football fan if you don't. I know that it is a great experience being able to watch every single match of the World Cup, which is just about doable with the current number of games, but with double the number of matches to deal with, you can just concentrate on the ones you're interested in (or just actually able to watch), and then catch up with the remainder through recorded viewing or highlights packages... which is what you're doing now with the Champions league anyway, and with your local national leagues and cups. Not to mention the Olympic Games, where interest in specific sports varies a lot depending on where you come from, and therefore your watching experience.
5) 48 is not a good number to organise a knock-out competition. Reducing 48 to 32 relies on some third-placed teams from groups of four qualifying, and this has been shown already as being unfair to teams playing first. With groups of three teams and two going through, it would be even worse, with huge risks of collusion on the final match day [apparently this possibility has been abandoned now]. And, if you're going to have a round of 32, then just have a 64-team group stage with the top two in each group going through. At the 2022 World Cup FIFA president Gianni Infantino said that the 4-team, 2-go-through format could be very thrilling, and this time it was, but it will not be the same if half of the third-placed teams make it through. The 64-team format would give everyone more of what they enjoy from a football competition: being able to take part in it more often as a player or a fan, for a start, and also many more dramatic elimination matches. The enlarged World Cup would have an extra 16-game last-32 round, and the Champions League would also have an extra 16 two-legged last-32 round. In fact, this expansion would make the Champions League elimination rounds as big (in terms of number of clubs participating in them) as the old European Cup seasons until 1992. You would be able to recapture the magic of those 32-team competitions of pure home-and-away football, after the 64-team group stage.
6) The enlarged number of participants would mean that big teams miss out less often (remember England, the Netherlands, France, Milan or Chelsea in previous years), while mid-ranking nations and clubs would qualify more frequently, rather than just once every three or four tournaments, and lower-ranked teams would also be able to take part more often than until now. This would even improve the chances of new Cinderella stories like those of Iceland, Jamaica, Anorthosis or Ludogorets in recent times. Depending on who you support, you know how hard it is when you don't qualify, and you also know that it is not the same when you have to watch the competition from the outside. Inclusion endeavours are a big thing in today's society, and rightly so. Let's make it happen.
7) Stadia and organisation wouldn't be a problem in the Champions League: Europe already has a second competition running, the Europa League, which shows that the whole continent is able to run many mid-week matches across many countries simultaneously without problems. Now, imagine many of those games (like this season's Manchester United v Barcelona) being played in the Champions League instead of the Europa League. It just isn't the same, and don't the players and fans know it!
As for the World Cup, I think that too much is being made of the hosting problems. The enlarged 64-team World Cup would mean 127 football matches over 6 weeks. That's fewer than the number of matches being played, for example, in England's domestic top three divisions (136 games) over just four weekends. And over those four weekends there are many more football matches being played in lower divisions at the same time, and this happens all throughout the season, often twice a week, for nine months, while the rest of the footballing countries do the same, at the same time. That's thousands of football games every few days, and it works. So don't tell me that hosting 127 matches, never more than 6 a day, over less than a month and a half is too hard. I have never been involved in the organisation of a big sporting tournament, so I do reckon there will be difficulties to deal with regarding travelling fans, rooms to stay the night, fan zones, transport, policing and all that, but those shouldn't be insurmountable, especially when you see what the Olympic Games manage to cram in just two weeks over dozens of sports in and around a single city. The answer to this would be: for the first few newly-enlarged tournaments at least, choose dependable hosts with ready-made stadia and good tourism infrastructure already in place. The USA, Spain, England, Japan, Mexico, would all be able to do it, and if not, then co-host sensibly. I heard often that the 2002 Japan-South Korea World Cup was "like hosting two different World Cups at the same time". Well, then you're doing it wrong. Europe hosted it continent-wide for their own competition in 2021. But for a 64-team tournament, maybe Italy could host 4 of the 16 groups, Spain another 4, England 4 more and Portugal the remaining 4 (I'm just leaving Germany and France out of the example as the two most recent European World Cup hosts, but they could be included too). Then, each of those four host nations would get 4 round-of-32 matches, 2 round-of-16 games, 1 quarter final and then each of them either one semifinal, or the 3rd-place play-off, or the final. Sorted. Besides, this four-country hosting system could also apply to other parts of the world. And I'm sure there are many more solutions to this, including co-hosting between continents too (how about a Mediterranean World Cup across Spain, Italy, Greece, France, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, hosting two groups each, for example, or a CONCACAF-CONMEBOL effort all the way from Canada to Chile). Anyway, my point is that this problem, if it really is one, shouldn't be a deterrent.
Carbon footprint, I hear you say? Just stop moving teams around for every game. Spreading the 2021 Euros around the whole continent was a great idea, but UEFA mangled the execution badly by having teams jet to and fro all the time. For every group, find two stadia which are reasonably close to one another (Gijón and Oviedo, for example, at Spain '82, or Vienna and Budapest in continental terms) and play the whole group phase there only. Teams would be better rested from less travel, fans could plan a whole week-long stay for the duration of the group stages at least, then close un-needed venues gradually to converge on just four or five grounds for the latter stages.
And finally, to give you an example of how all this would look like, here's a list of a "virtual" group stage for each competition.
In the Champions League (Russian teams not included)
From the top 4 UEFA-ranked nations: 6 teams each (24 teams)
1 SPA Real Madrid
Obviously, this distribution can be tinkered with. For example, there could be more nations represented by at least one club and fewer nations with multiple clubs, but that's minutia to be decided later. Example of resulting groups:
Not bad, I think.
Now for an example of a 64-team World Cup. To start with, I believe that in international competition terms (or at the very least for World Cup purposes), football should be divided into just four regions: Europe, Africa, the Americas (North, Central, South and Caribbean) and Oceania/Asia. Each of those regions would have roughly the same number of teams (around 50-60), so qualification rounds would last more or less the same amount of time. Each region could have 14 guaranteed places (56 total), and the last 8 would come from inter-continental play-offs, which would be the fairest way to see which region deserves more. Another way would be to do it by the FIFA rankings, which would yield, as of October 2022, 32 places for Europe, 11 for Africa, 15 for the Americas and just 6 to OceAsia. I would be OK with that, but there should be more games between teams from different continents to refine the rankings.
Going by FIFA Rankings (Oct 2022):
Europe (32): 2 Belgium, 4 France, 5 England, 6 Italy, 7 Spain, 8 Netherlands, 9 Portugal, 10 Denmark, 11 Germany, 12 Croatia, 15 Switzerland, 19 Wales, 21 Serbia, 25 Sweden, 26 Poland, 27 Ukraine, 33 Russia, 34 Austria, 35 Czech Republic, 36 Hungary, 40 Scotland, 42 Norway, 45 Turkey, 49 Ireland, 52 Greece, 53 Romania, 55 Slovakia, 56 Finland, 58 Bosnia, 59 Northern Ireland, 62 Iceland, 63 Slovenia
Africa (11): 18 Senegal, 22 Morocco, 30 Tunisia, 32 Nigeria, 37 Algeria, 39 Egypt, 43 Cameroon, 46 Mali, 48 Ivory Coast, 54 Burkina Faso, 61 Ghana
Americas (15): 1 Brazil, 3 Argentina, 13 Mexico, 14 Uruguay, 16 USA, 17 Colombia, 23 Peru, 29 Chile, 31 Costa Rica, 41 Canada, 44 Ecuador, 47 Paraguay, 57 Venezuela 60 Panama, 64 Jamaica
OceAsia (6): 20 Iran, 24 Japan, 28 South Korea, 38 Australia, 50 Qatar, 51 Saudi Arabia
And finally, to give you an example of how all this would look like, here's a list of a "virtual" group stage for each competition.
In the Champions League (Russian teams not included)
From the top 4 UEFA-ranked nations: 6 teams each (24 teams)
1 SPA Real Madrid
2 SPA FC Barcelona
3 SPA Atlético Madrid
4 SPA Sevilla
5 SPA Valencia
6 SPA Villarreal
7 ENG Manchester United
8 ENG Arsenal
9 ENG Chelsea
10 ENG Liverpool
11 ENG Manchester City
12 ENG Tottenham
13 GER Bayern Munich
14 GER Borussia Dortmund
15 GER Bayer Leverkusen
16 GER Leipzig
17 GER Wolfsburg
18 GER Frankfurt
19 ITA AC Milan
20 ITA Juventus
21 ITA Lazio
22 ITA Roma
23 ITA Napoli
24 ITA Inter
Nations ranked 5 and 6: 5 teams each (10 teams)
25 POR FC Porto
26 POR Benfica
27 POR Sporting Lisbon
28 POR Braga
29 POR Guimaraes
30 FRA Lyon
31 FRA Marseille
32 FRA Paris Saint-Germain
33 FRA Monaco
34 FRA Lille
Nations ranked 7 and 8: 4 teams each (8 teams)
35 NET Ajax
36 NET PSV
37 NET Feyenoord
38 NET Twente
39 BEL Club Brugge
40 BEL Union SG
41 BEL Anderlecht
42 BEL Antwerp
Nations ranked 9 and 10: 3 teams each (6 teams)
43 AUT RB Salzburg
44 NET Sturm Graz
45 NET Austria Vienna
46 SCO Celtic
47 SCO Rangers
48 SCO Hearts
Nations ranked 11 and 12: 2 teams each (4 teams)
49 UKR Shakhtar
50 UKR Dynamo Kyiv
51 TUR Galatasaray
52 TUR Fenerbahçe
Rest of nations: 12 places to play for in preliminary rounds, from which these teams could qualify:
53 DEN Midtjylland
54 CYP APOEL
55 SER Partizan Belgrade
56 CZE Sparta Prague
57 CRO Dinamo Zagreb
58 SWI FC Zürich
59 GRE Olympiacos
60 ISR Maccabi Tel-Aviv
61 NOR Rosenborg
62 SWE Malmö FF
63 BUL Ludogorets
64 ROM Steaua Bucharest
Obviously, this distribution can be tinkered with. For example, there could be more nations represented by at least one club and fewer nations with multiple clubs, but that's minutia to be decided later. Example of resulting groups:
01 Bayern - Sevilla - APOEL - Shakhtar
02 Man City - Valencia - Austria Vienna - Rangers
03 Liverpool - Villarreal - Sturm Graz - Dynamo Kyiv
04 Chelsea - Salzburg - Hearts - Galatasaray
05 Real Madrid - Tottenham - Antwerp - Malmö
06 PSG - Leverkusen - Anderlecht - Fenerbahçe
07 Man United - Leipzig - Union SG - Midtjylland
08 Barcelona - Wolfsburg - Celtic - Steaua
09 Juventus - Frankfurt - Brugge - Partizan
10 Dortmund - Lazio - Twente - Sparta Prague
11 Inter - Sporting - Feyenoord - Dinamo Zagreb
12 Roma - Braga - PSV - Zürich
13 Atlético - Napoli - Lille - Olympiacos
14 Porto - Lyon - Ajax - Maccabi Tel-Aviv
15 Milan - Benfica - Marseille - Rosenborg
16 Arsenal - Guimaraes - Monaco - Ludogorets
Now for an example of a 64-team World Cup. To start with, I believe that in international competition terms (or at the very least for World Cup purposes), football should be divided into just four regions: Europe, Africa, the Americas (North, Central, South and Caribbean) and Oceania/Asia. Each of those regions would have roughly the same number of teams (around 50-60), so qualification rounds would last more or less the same amount of time. Each region could have 14 guaranteed places (56 total), and the last 8 would come from inter-continental play-offs, which would be the fairest way to see which region deserves more. Another way would be to do it by the FIFA rankings, which would yield, as of October 2022, 32 places for Europe, 11 for Africa, 15 for the Americas and just 6 to OceAsia. I would be OK with that, but there should be more games between teams from different continents to refine the rankings.
Going by FIFA Rankings (Oct 2022):
Europe (32): 2 Belgium, 4 France, 5 England, 6 Italy, 7 Spain, 8 Netherlands, 9 Portugal, 10 Denmark, 11 Germany, 12 Croatia, 15 Switzerland, 19 Wales, 21 Serbia, 25 Sweden, 26 Poland, 27 Ukraine, 33 Russia, 34 Austria, 35 Czech Republic, 36 Hungary, 40 Scotland, 42 Norway, 45 Turkey, 49 Ireland, 52 Greece, 53 Romania, 55 Slovakia, 56 Finland, 58 Bosnia, 59 Northern Ireland, 62 Iceland, 63 Slovenia
Africa (11): 18 Senegal, 22 Morocco, 30 Tunisia, 32 Nigeria, 37 Algeria, 39 Egypt, 43 Cameroon, 46 Mali, 48 Ivory Coast, 54 Burkina Faso, 61 Ghana
Americas (15): 1 Brazil, 3 Argentina, 13 Mexico, 14 Uruguay, 16 USA, 17 Colombia, 23 Peru, 29 Chile, 31 Costa Rica, 41 Canada, 44 Ecuador, 47 Paraguay, 57 Venezuela 60 Panama, 64 Jamaica
OceAsia (6): 20 Iran, 24 Japan, 28 South Korea, 38 Australia, 50 Qatar, 51 Saudi Arabia
Notably out this time: South Africa (67), Bulgaria (72), China (79), New Zealand (105).
Again, the distribution could be debated, depending on how many places you want to leave open for inter-confederation play-offs, but here's how the groups could look like:
Again, the distribution could be debated, depending on how many places you want to leave open for inter-confederation play-offs, but here's how the groups could look like:
1 Brazil - 27 Ukraine - 34 Austria - 50 Qatar
2 Belgium - 17 Colombia - 35 Czech Republic - 51 Saudi Arabia
3 Argentina - 19 Wales - 36 Hungary - 37 Algeria
4 France - 20 Iran - 49 Ireland - 64 Jamaica
5 England - 22 Morocco - 38 Australia - 52 Greece
6 Italy - 23 Peru - 39 Egypt - 53 Romania
7 Spain - 24 Japan - 40 Scotland - 54 Burkina Faso
8 Netherlands - 28 South Korea - 41 Canada - 55 Slovakia
9 Portugal - 18 Senegal - 42 Norway - 57 Venezuela
10 Denmark - 29 Chile - 43 Cameroon - 56 Finland
11 Germany - 30 Tunisia - 44 Ecuador - 58 Bosnia
12 Croatia - 21 Costa Rica - 45 Turkey - 61 Ghana
13 Mexico - 21 Serbia - 46 Mali - 59 Northern Ireland
14 Uruguay - 25 Sweden - 47 Paraguay - 63 Slovenia
15 Switzerland - 32 Nigeria - 33 Russia - 60 Panama
16 USA - 26 Poland - 48 Ivory Coast - 62 Iceland
If anyone has any comments, you can leave them in the section below. If any new talking points come up, I will add them to the post. Thanks for reading.
If anyone has any comments, you can leave them in the section below. If any new talking points come up, I will add them to the post. Thanks for reading.
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