[+] Let's talk about the World Cup!

Pale Violet Light · Jul 9, 2026

Horwath said:
it averages out to 5/8 for QF for UEFA teams, which means that UEFA really has too few representatives in the world cup.
now it's 16/48, but should probably be 24/48 if we look at the ranking and Ro16 and QF numbers.

The World Cup should be about global representation, not solely based on rankings and last round results. I want to see South Korea beat Italy. I want to see Cape Verde play Argentina - a match many here would have dismissed as meaningless, based on their beloved rankings. And if the price I pay for watching these games is to watch New Zealand (or some other terrible team) get thumped 5-1 by filthy Belgians then so be it.

If you only want to watch European teams: the Euros already exist, hold your horses and wait a couple years and you’ll be happy as Larry.

Horwath · Jul 9, 2026

Pale Violet Light said:
The World Cup should be about global representation, not solely based on rankings and last round results. I want to see South Korea beat Italy. I want to see Cape Verde play Argentina - a match many here would have dismissed as meaningless, based on their beloved rankings. And if the price I pay for watching these games is to watch New Zealand (or some other terrible team) get thumped 5-1 by filthy Belgians then so be it.

If you only want to watch European teams: the Euros already exist, hold your horses and wait a couple years and you’ll be happy as Larry.

that is why I said that global qualifying groups would probably be better.

then you would have very "exotic" games played, games that probably would never happen at actual world cup.

but the actual world cup, the 32 or 48 teams, should be best of the best, and yeah, few bad teams always manage to scrape by in the qualifying, but that is normal.

Horwath · Jul 9, 2026

AnotherGuy said:
The larger issue is to fix the corruptness that exists to give every team a fair shot than focus on representation in the final 8.

this should be OFC 1st priority of FIFA, but, we all know it will be a long road to that.
If we even get there, too much money is at stake here, to be without corruption...

Retros_x · Jul 9, 2026

Pale Violet Light said:
The World Cup should be about global representation, not solely based on rankings and last round results.

I see your point but I really don't want to see some artificial handycapping to push low-tier teams to higher rounds or something like that just for representation purpose. Its a tournament for the best team of the world, not a show parade. South America and Europe are the dominating regions for football, it should be expected for them to be the majority of teams in the ko stage. For more exotic match-ups you need to watch qualifier games or group games, but in the ko games its kinda expected to be dominated by european and south american teams. It makes it even more fun if an outlier team has unexpected success.

Pale Violet Light · Jul 9, 2026

Retros_x said:
see your point but I really don't want to see some artificial handycapping to push low-tier teams to higher rounds or something like that just for representation purpose

I’m just talking about qualifying.

Do you believe this is happening within the World Cup itself? We seem to have two camps here: those who believe FIFA has their hand on the scale for the more popular “big teams” (largely from Europe and South America), because they draw more viewers; and those who believe FIFA has their hand on the scale for the smaller teams, so they can spread the game globally and rake in that international cash.

The only thing I’d say we’ve seen conclusively here is FIFA intervening on behalf of one of the hosts, which is massively corrupt but doesn’t necessarily fit either narrative.

delericho · Jul 9, 2026

Pale Violet Light said:
We seem to have two camps here: those who believe FIFA has their hand on the scale for the more popular “big teams” (largely from Europe and South America), because they draw more viewers; and those who believe FIFA has their hand on the scale for the smaller teams, so they can spread the game globally and rake in that international cash.

I think it's actually both - they 'nudge' things to ensure more global representation at the World Cup, but once there (and certainly beyond the group stage) they 'nudge' things for the benefit of the "big teams".

I do wonder: if Argentina hadn't already equalized, just how minutes of stoppage time would they have 'found' for the end of that match?

delericho · Jul 9, 2026

I should also note that it's not just FIFA or the World Cup that has these sorts of issues. VAR, in particular, was supposed to clean up a lot of problems but seems to be conveniently selective in which incidents it looks at and which just happen to be ignored.

trappedslider · Jul 9, 2026

Not all countries treat soccer/football the same.

No matter what you do, unless you invest in the sport back in a team's home country there's a large chance they will get steam rolled by a country that invest heavily into it's sports. Not everyone wants to watch/attend a steam roll match.