Ok I realize this is relatively old news, but I have been busy! However still need to discuss this idiotic idea that the UEFA Euros will go from 16 teams to 24 teams in 2016. Obviously this was done with one motivator - MONEY. Pretty soon the Euros will have more teams in the tourney than the World Cup! 24 teams is basically half of the 53 member European nations...eliminate sides such as Andorra, Faroe Islands, Luxembourg, and Lichtenstein (no offense to those nations) and basically any and every nation that has a half decent soccer pedigree should qualify for the tournament. Ugh. Sounds a lot like the NHL playoffs...
I think that at 16 the tournament is perfect, granted I am a purist and loved it when it was 8 nations. However at 16 you still have most of the heavyweights in the tournament, as well as 1 or 2 surprises. With 16 nations, you were guaranteed to have solid groups, difficult group games, surprise nations (see Russia and Turkey) going far, exciting tournaments, and meaningful qualifiers. I fear that much of that will disappear with the expansion. While it will only add one more round to the knock out stages, it will dilute the group stages and more importantly make qualifying a formality for the heavyweights. Now speaking as a irrational die hard fan of one of those heavyweights, I am happy to assume France will qualify for the Euros from now on, but as a footie fan I think it is a bit silly. Let us look at the last Euros and see who would have rounded out the tourney:
The eight additional teams could have been:
- England
- Scotland
- Serbia
- Norway
- Ireland
- Bulgaria
- Northern Ireland
- Denmark
Um ok, all solid teams, but seriously. Look at the next "top nations" - Finland, Slovenia, Belarus, Ukraine....um ok. Again, out of all these nations England is the one "heavyweight" that missed out, and that is because they, once again underachieved and could not get a point from a meaningless game for Croatia at Wembley....same goes for Scotland. They could not beat Georgia or even draw with Georgia. With the new format the Scotland - Italy game would have be a "friendly." Of course, with more teams you might get what happened when Denmark surprised the world and won the 1992 tournament - a second tier football nation who wins the entire tournament. Or what happened in Portugal when Greece won the title. However we already have that with the current format. I would argue that adding another knock out round will LIMIT the ability for one of these surprise nations to emerge with the title. Longer knock out rounds usually mean the cream rises - heavyweight nations have more depth and talent, can adjust better and deal with injury and suspensions better than outsiders.
I cannot wait for the Euros to expand to 40 nations...allow the minnows to use the qualifiers to determine which go to the Euros to get destroyed by the heavyweights. Come on UEFA, keep the Euros as what it should be, an exciting and difficult tournament. What is better, a group with Holland, Italy, France and Roumania? Or one where North Ireland or Norway or Serbia is there?
Ah the power of money.
No comments:
Post a Comment