You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: Understanding Arsène Wenger's World Cup Idea

I've not read the Tom Wigmore article before but in general I am in agreement with those proposals. Trying to have a dedicated time for international football would be beneficial to domestic leagues and to the international game.

That's actually the issue. I actually find his suggestion to be very good, but it is being taken somewhere else.

For example, England's recent World Cup qualifying group saw them play 4 of their 10 matches against San Marino and Andorra. These are nations of approximately 30,000 and 70,000 people going up against a country with a population of nearly 50million! It's amateur players vs some of the top professionals in the world. The aggregate score for these 4 games was 24 - 0 to England.

I actually agree with that. I even covered it in a previous post

I disagree that a single country couldn't host it

It is once you take a look at the full scale of it. Qualifiers Have many more countries than in the Euros. It is not just stadiums and capacity. You have to take into consideration the thousands of people who will travel per country, bearing in mind those stadiums would serve as neutral ground therefore the 40K capacity stadium also means 40K people to be hosted in a city. And that's just one match. In Europe for example, there are 55 European teams, even if we talk about 20K people coming per team, that's a total of 1.08 million people (excluding the host country fans). And that's the lowest estimate.

Also, like, I said. Many supporters will be deprived of seeing their team playing at home. FAs, ministries, and governments have developed stadiums for these games. Local advertisements and revenues are reasons why governments would build a stadium.

As for the rest, I am trying to go through everything as thoroughly as possible rather. When I started I was expecting a quick run down, but it proved to be much more complicated than just one or two points. You would be surprised by how many developing countries/countries not that good at football currently would benefit from this in the long run. Arab/African players increasing presence in top teams started from similar exposure to that a World Cup every 2 years could provide.

Simply put, it opens up possibilities, some might be bad, but some might be good as well. My point in this series is to look at the whole picture subjectively.