Was wondering why the groups are so low on numbers and there's more of them. Then I remembered 48 team tournament. Urgh. Thought Europe weren't getting many/any extra places though. Re Serbia and Albania it wouldn't surprise me if the games were played behind closed doors. Kicked off massively last time.
I haven't been paying attention to this. Odd that groups depend on the result of upcoming games. Very odd that the loser of the France/Croatia game possibly gets an easier group than the winner.
One step closer to the final boss of World Cups (64 Teams). Europe went from 13 to 16, which to be honest doesnt make too much difference for us, I can get the desire from Africa and Asia for more places, but for some reason South America can have up to 7 qualifiers out of 10 teams, I know they are the strongest confederation but still. Funnily enough Brazil would have been struggling to qualify this time if it wasn't for the change.
I think me and you discussed this previously when it was announced and the absurdity of 70% of South American teams qualifying. The expanded Euros is **** and this will be even worse. The first KO round is going to be ridiculously one sided and that should be the point when the tournament starts to get interesting.
What a Friday night! Pompey got pumped 4-0, and Che Adams scores a 50-yard winner against Empoli. (Goal is at 1:10)
Probably, I do have a habit of repeating myself. I know it’s odd logic, but I am at the point where I think a 32 team Euros would be better. Reason being the quality gap between teams 24 to 32 in Europe is nothing and it would actually make the group stage more competitive because there wouldn’t be this daft ‘best third place’ nonsense, so teams would have to battle harder to get to the knockouts. I’d scrap separate qualifying though and just do it via the Nations League, because what is the point in having a qualifying tournament for 60% of teams to qualify. The 16 team Euros was the hardest tournament in international football but unfortunately it’s never coming back.
Yeah, I too hate the expansion. And I'm expecting to be even worse after they decided to revert to 4-team group, rather than 3-team groups as per the original plan. There will be way more group games with 4-team groups (72 games vs 48 games) - which is a ridiculous number of matches simply to knock-out one-third of the teams - and it creates the same "best third nonsense" that Shandy points out already exists for the Euros. I get that having 4-team groups allows for all teams to feature in the final round of matches, and that resulted in some great matches in Qatar. But that was about getting into the top two only. Knocking-out one-half of all teams (over 48 games) is invariably going to create more jeopardy than knocking-out one-third of all teams (over 72 games). The fact that FIFA only reverted from 3-team groups to 4-team groups in March 2023 is a pretty clear indication that it was Qatar which influenced that decision, despite it being a different sized competition.
Surprised to see that Oxford have sacked their manager. Arguably overachieving there, but seemingly not good enough. Usually, as an outsider, fans of said club might give an insight as to why a manager has lost a job, but even the ones I've read seem a bit miffed
The play acting & time wasting is truly criminal nowadays. Spurs look exceptionally good at it but I know MU can be as well. I suppose any / all “good” clubs can be & maybe annoys me because we’ve generally been crap at that side of the game.
