European Championships to Expand?
As we’ve noted in our historical series, the European Championship (originally European Nations’ Cup) started out on a small-scale in the 1960s: just four teams played in the finals, allowing an exciting knock-out tournament as qualifiers.
Now Uefa is considering expanding the Championship finals to take in 24 teams, greater than the number of teams that played in the entire 1960 qualifying campaign.
This is a terrible idea. I’m sure television executives are still shedding tears over England’s failure to qualify for Euro 2008, but letting everyone in bar San Marino in the future will make the qualifying tournament a joke, and fill the finals with tedious matches.
Of course, Uefa would make more money out of a larger tournament, with added ticket sales, and television/marketing revenue, and Platini can sell it as a benefit to the smaller nations. Here’s hoping they restrain themselves.
Photo credit: Antoon’s Foobar on Flickr.
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Tom Dunmore is the founder and editor of Pitch Invasion. Follow him @pitchinvasion on Twitter.
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“A serious threat hangs over the development of European football: the malign and ever-present influence of money,” wrote Platini in his letter …
“But money has never been the ultimate objective of football: the main purpose has always been to win trophies.
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UEFA is trying to double its Champions League revenue in the United Kingdom.
The governing body has set a target in the neighborhood of GBP 150 million with a new tender for the rights for the Champions League due to be issued shortly.
UEFA receives GBP 87 million from its present Champions league deals in the United Kingdom, a deal that ranges through 2009.
—
Money, money, money
Must be funny
In the rich man’s world
Money, money, money
Always sunny
In the rich man’s world
Aha-ahaaa
All the things I could do
If I had a little money
It’s a rich man’s world
Mr. Platini
In some ways, it’s not just the number of teams involved – it’s the format that may have to be used to accomodate them.
There’s every chance we’ll have another format like the 1982 World Cup with 6 groups of 4 in the first round, then 4 groups of 3 in the second. With no knockout games (and the excitement they generate) until the semi finals, it could be as dull as… well, the 1982 World Cup, for instance.
Good point, Chris. Or it could be like the 1994 World Cup, with sixteen teams qualifying for a second round, meaning even most 3rd place finishers in a group of four made it. Making it even easier for a poor team to advance to the knockout stage.
24 nations? That’d be half of UEFA. Qualifying would be a even more of a tedious procession than it tends to be (even McClaren’s England would have qualified for a 24 team championship for gods sake) and the tournament itself would be worse off. The format at the moment is, in my opinion, close to perfect. There’s not too many competitors, but just enough to allow the occasional wildcard entrant (Latvia in ‘04 for instance), it’s easy to follow the entire thing without missing work/shutting yourself off for a month and there’s less of the mismatches that a World Cup sometimes throws up.
But hey, there’s money to be made. Who am I to tell them what’s what?
We still wouldn’t qualify!
Ha! Your* having a real shot at qualifying was the only positive thing I could come up when faced with this trainwreck of a proposal. And yet I imagine it wouldn’t feel “real” to you even if you did.
The only thing that would make it more of a farce would be a plan to invite Brazil, Argentina and the African champion (thus achieving Papa Sepp’s old plan of a biannual World Cup through the back door).
What an unspeakably horrid idea.
*Wales, for those who don’t know the blogdroed