Roiling football blather

nomos

nomos

Administrator
just realized i've got a big decision to make next time i go watch a game at the pub. do i wear my my eduardo jersey or the henry one? :slanted:
 
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don_quixote

Trent End
mixed_biscuits said:
FIFA should already be in the dock for having changed the qualifying arrangements during the competition, to seed the big teams - that was blatantly unjust and involved far more premeditation than Henry's handball did.
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no one was moaning when it happened in 2005. if they've done it before i don't see why they shouldn't do it again. after all, it's in fifa's interests to have their top rated teams in the finals.

if you don't like it - tough. sorry.
 
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don_quixote

Trent End
wcquals111909.jpg
 
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droid

Guest
don_quixote said:
no one was moaning when it happened in 2005. if they've done it before i don't see why they shouldn't do it again. after all, it's in fifa's interests to have their top rated teams in the finals.

if you don't like it - tough. sorry.
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The problem with that decision was the fact that FIFA waited until the last minute to announce it rather than doing so at the start of the qualifyers, giving a false sense of hope to lower seeded teams and making it blatanty obvious that they were biased in favour of the larger teams and commercial interests.
 
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don_quixote

Trent End
i don't think so! although i'd probably do better than sepp blatter.

honestly, if i were in charge of european qualifying it would be completely different and a lot of the small nations would be whittled out before they even got a shot at the likes of france, italy, germany, spain and england.

In fact two or three huge groups like south america with pre-qualifying for those groups for any teams other than those in the top 15 or 16 in europe would be a lot lot better.

for example -
13 qualification spots.
51 teams in europe.
over summer of previous euro champs/world cup the bottom 31 teams in europe play a uefa sanctioned mini-tournament with a proper trophy (development trophy? with a host) to sift out 12 of the best "minnows" in europe.

top 20 teams in europe auto qualify for qualifiers + 12 best minnows.

4 big groups of 8 - top 4 in each group qualify. 5th placed teams have a play-off ko tournament for final qualifying spot.

to give you an idea of how this would split up:

uefa national coeffecients
1 1 Spain 39964
2 2 Germany 38294
3 3 Netherlands 37821
4 4 Italy 35838
5 5 England 34819
6 6 Croatia 33677
7 7 Russia 32493
8 8 France 32218
9 9 Portugal 32210
------------------------------
10 11 Czech Republic 30871
11 12 Sweden 30695
12 13 Switzerland 30395
13 10 Greece 30252
14 14 Serbia 29811
15 15 Turkey 29447
16 16 Denmark 29222
17 17 Slovakia 28228
18 18 Romania 28145
------------------------------
19 19 Israel 28052
20 20 Bulgaria 27198
21 21 Finland 26827
22 23 Norway 26210
23 24 Scotland 25646
24 22 Ireland 25638
25 26 Northern Ireland 24518
26 25 Bosnia-Herzegovina 24382
27 27 Austria 24381
------------------------------
28 29 Latvia 23303
29 28 Slovenia 23204
30 30 Hungary 23048
31 31 Lithuania 22071
32 32 Belarus 21515
33 33 Belgium 21426
34 34 Wales 21274
35 35 Macedonia 19409
36 36 Cyprus 18791
------------------------------
37 37 Montenegro 18751
38 38 Albania 18319
39 39 Estonia 17792
40 40 Georgia 15819
41 41 Moldova 15734
42 42 Iceland 15404
43 43 Armenia 15164
44 44 Kazakhstan 14730
45 45 Liechtenstein 13581
------------------------------
46 46 Azerbaijan 13500
47 47 Luxembourg 11872
48 48 Malta 11517
49 49 Faroe Islands 10620
50 50 Andorra 9197
51 51 San Marino 7783

pros:
meaningful games between the top teams in europe
less chance of teams with a decent team ending up in a group with italy, ukraine and france and being screwed over by like what happened to a scotland team in euro 2008 qualifying
silverware opportunities for smaller european sides
no one-sided shit games against the likes of andorra.

cons:
bad for smaller nations if they do not reach the qualification stage

however i'd see it as an incentive. imagine - qualify and you're guaranteed at least two or three big home games against the biggest teams in europe
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
What's on the Blatter platter, Sepp?

Droid OTM.

my Irish mate and i were screaming blue murder at the pub's screens.

BTW Cracker i saw a load of your lot (corking game) pre-Saints, canned up at Clapham Junction last Sunday morning, comedy jester hats in attendance..
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Re DQ's qualification proposal: the problem is that this assumes what the competition is meant to decide: who's good and who isn't.

It would be better to go the whole hog and just play a Brazil-Spain best of seven with everyone else given the summer off.

Another problem with your proposal is that it is very unresponsive to changing or exceptional circumstances (teams are not stable entities): would Greece have had the chance to win the European Championships given a drawn-out and highly stratified qualification set-up?

It also reinforces economic inequalities, deglobalises the game, lessens the opportunity for upsets, reduces chances for learning by the lesser teams, eliminates any idealistic sentiments that the presumption of equality might support, encourages players to jump ship to further their international careers, undermines generally the professional game in the unfavoured countries, encourages ethnic or nationalist biases...
 
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don_quixote

Trent End
right, well they do it in oceania, asia, africa and north america. the only reason they don't do it in south america is because there's only 10 countries there. i don't understand why europe do this godawful mixed-ability qualifying where an essentially good, competitive team could not qualify because they failed to win a midweek fixture in kazakhstan and ended up in a group with the last world champions.

meanwhile new zealand qualify after playing no more than fiji, vanuatu, new caledonia and bahrain.

pre-qualifying is perfectly fair when there's such a mix of quality. and just because you start at the bottom it doesn't mean you can't qualify. north korea played in the first round in asian qualifying, but japan, australia, south korea don't enter until round 3.

do you think the world cup finals draw should be seeded?
 
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don_quixote

Trent End
mixed_biscuits said:
Another problem with your proposal is that it is very unresponsive to changing or exceptional circumstances (teams are not stable entities): would Greece have had the chance to win the European Championships given a drawn-out and highly stratified qualification set-up?
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of course they would! they'd have an even better chance


greece qualified in 2003 from a group containing spain and ukraine. they lost their first two games in that group.

they could have ended up in a group containing wc finalists and notoriously goot qualifiers germany and holland or england (who of course were under sven and also very good at qualifying for tournaments at the time). they may well not have had a chance to qualify.

they would have clearly been good enough to traverse a pre-qualification round. then they would have ended in a group where they only had to finish 4th/8th and would have almost certainly contained a weaker link of the teams who got through automatically.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
don_quixote said:
do you think the world cup finals draw should be seeded?
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The seeding should be determined by performance in the same tournament's qualifying phase; the general rule being that, as much as is possible, the information that is used is from the tournament that is being played.

Anti-competitive qualifying procedures should only be used to ease or avoid significant organisational problems (as is the case with the FA Cup).
 
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don_quixote

Trent End
mixed_biscuits said:
The seeding should be determined by performance in the same tournament's qualifying phase; the general rule being that, as much as is possible, the information that is used is from the tournament that is being played.

Anti-competitive qualifying procedures should only be used to ease or avoid significant organisational problems (as is the case with the FA Cup).
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so you disagree with the seeding and pre-qualification for the league cup, uefa champions league, uefa europa league, significant seeding for world cup qualifying in 4 continents, group seeding for world cup qualifying for uefa, afc, ofc and caf, european championship qualifying seeding, world cup finals seeding, the entire sport of tennis... where does it stop?
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
don_quixote said:
so you disagree with the seeding and pre-qualification for the league cup, uefa champions league, uefa europa league, significant seeding for world cup qualifying in 4 continents, group seeding for world cup qualifying for uefa, afc, ofc and caf, european championship qualifying seeding, world cup finals seeding, the entire sport of tennis... where does it stop?
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Yes, absolutely, unless seeding is necessary for the tournament to be viable in the first place, that is, a response to organisational pressures only. For instance, it would be impossible to find the best club team in Europe within the space of one year in the absence of a winnowing process.

Tournaments should, as much as is possible, be open to all who fulfil the basic geographical criteria and also be independent of the results of previous tournaments.

If you imagine a level playing field covered with clean slates, then you would be approaching what I'm aiming for.
 
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Lewis

Wild Horses
I would definitely like to see almost all of the absolute minnow nations weeded out in a pre-qualifying stage.

The bottom 8 in the rankings - Andorra, San Marino, Faeroe Isles, Luxembourg, Malta, Azerbaijan, Liechtenstein, Armenia for instance - play in an straight knock-out and the winner takes a place in one of the main qualifying groups.

So England's most recent group would have just been:

England
Croatia
Ukraine
Belarus
Kazakhstan

2 less pointless international matches and two weeks of the footballing calender freed up straight away.

Anyone whose serious about qualifying has to take 6 points of any of the above teams anyway. (& points taken against these sides are already discounted when they calculate the best runner up)

I don't believe every single ancient principality and microstate has a divine right to top level international football. San Marino is home to 30,000 people. There are conceivably better pub sides playing in the UK. They should have the chance to earn a place in the main group stages but it shouldn't be a given.
 
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droid

Guest
This brings up another issue for us. We usually make it out of the first round of the world cup, but thanks to Henry's cheating, the linesman's incompetence and FIFA's intransigence our seeding is now going to be lower for the next 10 years or so.

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droid

Guest
Keane is a bitter old fucker. Not content with screwing up one world cup for us, he has to gloat over this as well.

FIFA and the French FA are playing pass the parcel now. FIFA say no replay unless the FFA agree to it, the FFA are saying its up to FIFA to make the rules...
 
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don_quixote

Trent End
droid said:
This brings up another issue for us. We usually make it out of the first round of the world cup, but thanks to Henry's cheating, the linesman's incompetence and FIFA's intransigence our seeding is now going to be lower for the next 10 years or so.
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it's on a 4 year cycle so i wouldnt say it was decades long.

released today in fact: http://www.uefa.com/MultimediaFiles/Download/uefa/KeyTopics/92/18/20/921820_DOWNLOAD.pdf

ireland will be in the third pot - there's splits of 9.

the draw will be on february 7th

"Final Draw for the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ – note to media
The detailed criteria to determine the seeded teams for the Final Draw for the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™ will be confirmed at the next meeting of the Organising Committee for the FIFA World Cup™ in Cape Town on 2 December 2009 (and announced at a press conference following the meeting).

If the criteria to determine the seeded teams were to include, as in the past, the FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking, then it would be the October 2009 edition of this ranking which would be considered, and this for sporting reasons. In fact, using the November 2009 edition would create an uneven situation, specifically for the European Zone, where the play-offs involving the eight best runners-up led to an imbalance in the number of qualification matches played between the teams."
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this means england have nothing to fear. by any foreseeable seeding formula they should be in the top pool of seeds.

2006 world cup seeding formula list:
1 Brazil 59.3 29.3 30.0
2 Germany 59.0 30.3 28.7
3 Italy 56.7 27.3 29.3
4 Spain 56.3 25.3 31.0
5 England 50.7 26.3 24.3
6 France 49.0 23.3 25.7
7 Argentina 49.0 21.0 28.0
--------------------------------
8 Portugal 48.7 22.3 26.3
9 Netherlands 43.0 14.7 28.3
10 Mexico 38.3 19.3 19.0
11 USA 34.0 13.7 20.3
12 Switzerland 30.0 15.3 14.7
13 Paraguay 28.7 11.7 17.0
14 Ghana 24.7 13.3 11.3
15 Cameroon 24.3 3.0 21.3
16 Korea Republic 23.3 15.7 7.7
17 Australia 23.3 11.3 12.0
18 Japan 23.0 13.3 9.7
19 Greece 22.0 0.0 22.0
20 Côte d'Ivoire 21.0 6.0 15.0
21 Nigeria 20.7 2.7 18.0
22 Serbia 20.0 5.3 14.7
23 Denmark 19.7 7.7 12.0
24 Uruguay 19.3 2.7 16.7
25 Chile 12.7 0.0 12.7
26 Slovenia 8.3 2.7 5.7
27 Honduras 7.0 0.0 7.0
28 Slovakia 6.7 0.0 6.7
29 Algeria 6.3 0.0 6.3
30 South Africa 6.0 3.0 3.0
31 New Zealand 2.3 0.0 2.3
32 Korea DPR 1.3 0.0 1.3
 
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