Want to Make the World Cup More Competitive?

Get the best teams in it and stop the pro European politics.

Every four years I write basically the same article relating how each of FIFA confederacies do in the World Cup. I thought this time I would write something completely different, but in football, I don’t call it soccer if you get confused call American Football, American Soccer or whatever, you have to wait until the last minute of the last game.

Here are the articles for 2006, 2010, and 2014. The latter one is very complete with graphs and a conclusion that the current system is simultaneously unfair to COMEBOL and the reason COMEBOL is the strongest conference. Once again, COMEBOL is the second conference in number of teams in the last 16 (four), beaten only by UEFA (ten), which is the conference with the most countries and, not logically, the most spots.

But when we use the efficiency index of the percentage of teams in the last 32 that move to the last 16, COMEBOL becomes the undisputed leader. COMEBOL brought 5 teams to the World Cup and 4 of them went on to the last 16, for an efficiency index of 0.8 or 80%. UEFA is next (10 out of 14teams went through) with an efficiency index of approximately 0.71 or almost 71%. Then AFC that brought 2 teams to the World Cup and had 1 reach the round of 16. That’s an efficiency of 0.5 or 50%. Then comes CONCACAF with 1 of 3 teams in the round of 16, for an efficiency index of 0.3 or 30%. CAF (Africa) and OFC (Oceania) got no teams in the round of 16. You can understand OFC failure that only had one team in the World Cup… But CAF had an outstanding 7 and none of them went to the last 16! No wonder two of my previous articles have shared the title: “Why are these teams playing the World Cup?”

Before you assume wrong I will remind you is not the number of countries in each conference and it is not the number of cups or the ranking. It is pure and simple politics. The Europeans in an effort to protect their privilege have used the conferences one against the other and cede a small number of spots to Africa in order to gain their support.

I argued in the last article that this is what has made COMEBOL so strong. But today I will argue that if you want to see a better World Cup you need the best 32 teams on the world in it and if that means most teams are from Europe and South America, so be it.