I think the time has come for international football in Europe to have a pre qualifying tournament to remove the requirement for so many pointless matches and a subsequent re-jigging of the international calendar, now before we go any further you may want to get a drink, this is going to take a while! OK I think Europe gets 14 places at the World Cup, so ideally we want 7 groups with 2 countries qualifying from each. I also think that 8 matches are enough for the teams to play in qualifying so that requires 5 teams per group. There are currently approx 63 teams involved in world cup qualifying in Europe, so my suggestion would be that the 24 teams who qualify for the European Championships (I think it is being increased to 24 nations for the next tournament) would automatically go into the draw for World Cup qualifying, plus the 4 highest ranked teams in FIFAs rankings that don’t qualify for the Euros and that gives us 4 teams for each group. The remaining 35 teams are then split into 7 groups of 5 and play a mini tournament over the summer (whilst the Euros are on perhaps) and the 5 group winners from this also go into the draw, resulting in meaningful groups of 5 and hopefully 20 competitive matches in each group. So if we were looking at 2018 World Cup qualifying campaign this would start in the Autumn of 2016, I would suggest 4 sets of two matches, played in Oct 2016, then in May 2017, June 2017 (rather than a tour), September and finally Nov 2017. That would allow for 2 friendlies to be added when the group games in our group didn’t include a fixture for us and one other friendly could also be scheduled in March 2017, to be played in midweek (Wednesday) with no need for cancellation of league fixtures. With further friendlies as preparation if we qualify once the season has finished.