football thread No11

[Takhisis]

First round of CONMEBOL qualifiers. The qualification tournament has ten teams playing in a double round-robin format. The first six qualify for the expanded world cup directly and the 7th team will enter an intercontinental play-off.

All of this is due to UEFA's mania for not giving up WC spots and instead just inflating the tournament so that again you might get a third-placed team with as few as one or two points go through to the knockout stages. *Sigh*

So, anyway:
Argentina 1 - 0 Ecuador (Messi became his country's highest scorer in World Cup qualifying matches and joint top overall with one Luis Suárez)
Brazil 5 - 1 Bolivia
Uruguay 3 - 1 Chile
Colombia 1 - 0 Venezuela
Paraguay 0 - 0 Peru

Ecuador were docked three points for this qualification cycle for fielding an ineligible player in the previous one.

 

[AdrienIer]

First round of CONMEBOL qualifiers. The qualification tournament has ten teams playing in a double round-robin format. The first six qualify for the expanded world cup directly and the 7th team will enter an intercontinental play-off.

All of this is due to UEFA's mania for not giving up WC spots and instead just inflating the tournament so that again you might get a third-placed team with as few as one or two points go through to the knockout stages. *Sigh*

South America used to give 40-50% of its countries a place at the WC, and now it's 60-70%, but the UEFA is the baddy, yeah...

Note : In almost all cases the UEFA is bad, just not always the only problem in world football. Last WC 8 out of europe's 13 got out of the group stage, when SA was 2/4 with the 5th losing its playoff.
Note 2 : Despite what I just said about the ratios, it's good that europe got so few added spots in the new WC format. Africa needed them badly for example, and even though the WC qualifiers in europe are brutal for some good teams it's not as bad as Africa's qualifiers.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

A true 'World Cup' would have an appropriate number of slots for each confederation based on the number of members. The World Cup as it is is just 'Europe and South America and the Rest' Cup.

 

[Takhisis]

South America used to give 40-50% of its countries a place at the WC, and now it's 60-70%, but the UEFA is the baddy, yeah...

Oh no, I'm not making it exclusive to UEFA, no.
South America's CONMEBOL is an incredibly corrupt and self-serving organisation, but it being handed out extra berths comes simply from FIFA upholding the existing power structure instead of reassigning berths. A 32-team World cup worked in terms of organisation. 48 teams, with the return of the nefarious ‘best third-placed’ is yet another vision of FIFA's incredible corruption which already saw it de facto endorse Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia and 2014 invasion of Ukraine by giving it a World Cup anyway and giving it to Qatar for 2022.

Back in 1950, with most of Asia and Africa (and the Caribbean) still owned by European powers there was still a varnish of legitimacy on legal terms.
Nowadays, either one of Africa and Asia have more land surface and population than Europe and UEFA still gets a ridiculous amount of berths.

And, by the way, more or less everyone here thinks that the new amount of berths makes the tournament a joke. It's a screw-up by FIFA.

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Oh hey, Rubiales has resigned.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

And Bellingham's form finally falters. Also, what a comeback by Barcelona, 3 goals in the last 10 minutes, even more impressive considering they conceded an early goal and then conceded again in the 75th