A 24 team Euro....maybe we just eliminate qualifying

I just saw this story on the BBC web site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/europe/6162093.stm

I must say I have my doubts about the reasoning behind this. Let us look at the last tournament when we had 16 nations. If we take all the nations that lost in the playoff we would add: Scotland, Slovenia, Wales, Norway and Turkey, we would still have to take THREE more nations. Doing a quick scan of the best of the rest we could envisage having had to take 3 teams from the following: Iceland, Poland, Belgium, Serbia or Ireland. So for the sake of this rant, we say that Poland, Ireland and Belgium would have also qualified.

Why would we even need to have a qualifying tournament??? If the European Nations tournment expands to 24 teams, we might as well say - the "top" 15 nations in Europe: Italy, France, England, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia, automatically get in, the rest fight for the remaining 9 spots....I am being completely ridiculous but the point is every good to decent football nation will have an almost 80% chance of guaranteeing a spot in the finals.

With 24 teams why even put the players and teams under the physical strain of qualifying. The existing system already guarantees that the football powers are guaranteed a spot. It a rarity that we do not see a Holland or England miss out on the tournament, such as we saw when the actual tournament had the best of best from Europe, such as in 1984 when England, Holland, Italy, and the USSR did not make the final stages. Or that 4 years later, two of the semi final teams (one of which was defending champ) France and Portugal did not make it out of qualifiers.

The tournament, with 16 nations, still is small enough to make it an exciting tournament, one where groups are guaranteed to have football power houses: such as Group D in 2004 Germany, Latvia, Czech Rep and Holland....or Group A in 2000 England, Germany, Portugal and Roumania.....or Group D of the same year Denmark, France, Holland, Czech Rep.

With 16 nations it made the games exciting from the outset, and it kept the qualifications facsinating. All one has to do is look at the interest the qualifiers are having for the next Euro. If the tournament gets expand to 24 teams I fear that the 2 years of qualifying that leads up to the tournament will be a bore for the large national powers and even the second tier powers, it might be interesting to see if a smaller nation such as Cyprus, Albania or Georgia can qualify but will that make the final product any better, when these smaller nations will most likely get shown an early exit when the tournament starts?

I thought the tournament was great when it was only 8 teams, that made the qualifiers that much more interesting and nerve wraking...the tournament itself was great since there were no "weak" teams. Alas the might Euro has spoken, advertising and TV revenue drives the day which means having a larger tournament is good....but we don't need 24 teams...especially since the World Cup only grants Europe 14 spots.