Howes not playing him properly. Thats why he’s struggling in our team. Nah just kidding. Clearly we need Wissa next to him but will we play 4-4-2?
So let me get this straight. The likes of Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Turkey have to get to the World Cup via a qualifying play off. Meanwhile already confirmed World Cup “teams” include Curacao, Uzbekistan, Cape Verde, Jordan and Haiti. Make it make sense.
It’s not complicated. Countries throughout the world belong to regional affiliations. FIFA assign a certain number of places in World Cup Finals to regional affiliations and they then decide how they want to assign those places. Some split them into various groups (e.g. UEFA, Concacaf) and winners go through with runners up playing off. Others put them in one big group (Conmebol) and assign places to number of teams based on finishing position. Italy, Denmark etc didn’t win their groups so have to play off. Curacao, Cape Verde etc won their groups so go through directly. If you wanted to assign places on merit you could put all ~200 teams in one big group and play say 20 games at random and assign top 48 teams to next World Cup Finals based on finishing position. However it could bankrupt some of the smaller countries and also add greatly to carbon dioxide and methane emissions. I like to see the smaller countries represented in the finals even if one of them is Scotland.
