The American Championship does not fit in the format

While the Qatari World Cup is underway, the International Football Federation (FIFA) is trying to solve the problem associated with the next world championship, which will be hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico in 2026. It will feature not 32 teams, as in the current tournament, but 48, and FIFA has not yet approved its format, only presenting three main options. But each has very noticeable flaws. One puts the teams in unequal conditions at the group stage, the other two either condense the already tough schedule of the championship to the limit, or minimize the pause in the off-season.

Famed former coach Arsène Wenger, who has been head of FIFA’s Global Development Committee, the reform body since 2019, spoke to reporters about his team’s progress on what seems to be one of the most pressing and challenging FIFA questions. It is already connected with the future World Cup. In 2026, it will be jointly hosted by three countries – the United States, Canada and Mexico. But the main feature of the tournament will not be in this, but in the fact that 48 teams will take part in it – 16 more than in the Qatari championship.

The FIFA Council approved the radical expansion of the composition of the World Cup participants back in January 2017, seeing in it – following the president of the head football structure Gianni Infantino – two pluses.

The federation assumes that the increase in the number of tickets to the championship, which actually simplifies the selection, for many national associations and countries will serve as an incentive to develop football more actively and invest in it more actively.

And FIFA is confident that it will lead to a 20% increase in the already colossal income from the World Cup. According to the results of the previous championship, which was held in Russia, they amounted to $ 5.5 billion. And if the first thesis is a hypothesis that needs to be tested by time, then the second already sounds quite convincing, given recent experience. In 2016, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) for the first time allowed 24 teams instead of 16 into its main tournament for national teams – the European Championship, and revenues from it immediately jumped up by about a third.

But, expanding the world championship, FIFA, as it turned out, drove itself into a trap. It lies in the fact that for a competition with 48 teams it is insanely difficult to come up with a good format that has a minimum of flaws. Rather, it seems that it is simply impossible to invent it.

Arsene Wenger, talking about how work is progressing in this direction, which should be completed in 2023 with the approval of the new title system by the FIFA Council, admitted that his group still does not have a priority option, and three are under consideration.

One involves the distribution of 48 teams in the preliminary stage into 16 groups of three each. The two best will advance to the starting play-off round, which will be not the 1/8 finals, as it is now, but the 1/16 finals. In other words, the play-off stage is extended over a round.

The second option is 12 groups of four teams. In this case, the right to play in the play-offs will be awarded to the two strongest teams from the quartet plus eight more third-place finishers, whose performance in the group stage will be higher than the others. The cup stage with this option will also open 1/16 finals.

Finally, in the third option, the participants are divided into two pools of 24 teams. Inside both, something like their own tournament is being played, according to the formula identical to the modern European Championship. First, matches in six groups, followed by the 1/8 finals of the play-offs for those who took first and second places in the quartet and four more teams that ended up in third positions. Pool winners face each other in the final.

But all of these options contain significant flaws. Even after the World Cup in Russia, a trend for various organizations working in football – such as the International Association of Professional Footballers (FIFPro) or the Association of European Clubs (ECA) – turned calls for FIFA and UEFA to soften the calendar of the season, which, at least in even years, set aside for the top international tournaments, becomes a hell of a test for the players of the leading clubs.

Because of the World Cup or continental championships, after tense, almost no pauses in club competitions – domestic and European competitions – they also lose their summer vacation.

According to the same FIFPro, this leads to a deterioration in the shape of the stars, and also dramatically increases the level of injuries.

With the World Cup in Qatar moved to the end of the year, to the middle of the season, the story is a bit special, but it also confirms the version about the risks regarding the overload of players with matches. In any case, in terms of the scale of personnel losses suffered by the national teams due to injuries to football players, he has apparently already set a record.

At the same time, by implementing either of the two options, FIFA will face the need to either tighten the championship schedule, which is already packed to the limit, or “push” its terms so widely that the players will not have not only a vacation, but even a symbolic period for preparation for the tournament, and most likely, to do both. Otherwise, it is unthinkable to imagine how to ensure the holding of 72 matches in the group stage instead of the current 48, plus an “extended” play-off.

The pitfall of the option with 16 groups is not so much in the schedule of the tournament, but in the specifics of the competition within a group of three teams. By definition, it cannot be completely honest. With this formula, one team will finish the tournament before the competitors.

And it is quite likely that before the final meeting, the two teams entering it will have before their eyes the result, unhooking the third, and bringing them to the play-offs in tandem. Practice shows that a formal agreement is not required to achieve it – a mutual understanding of the nuances of the alignment is enough. Actually, in order to avoid embarrassment like the legendary “friendship match” at the 1982 World Cup, in which the German national team and the Austrian team, which happily lost to it with a score that suited both neighbors – 0: 1, unhooked the Algerians, FIFA and other football structures in in the end, they decided to play the matches of the last rounds in a group of four teams at the same time.

Alexey Dospekhov