What's Up? 24

Mystical Miruvani

It's the World Cup in about 20 days! So I've got some stupid, I mean great ideas to make the world cup better than it already is.

The World Cup rocks. It's a fact, no other sporting event is watched by more people, apart from the Olympics, which is only watched by more people because it incorporates football. If the Chelsea flower show had a football tournament I'm sure more people would watch that as well.
The main problem with the World Cup is that FIFA has made it too easy for the good teams, in past World Cups some of the big teams missed out, it made it fun, even when England missed out in 1994. Now that the TV revenues from the big countries are so important FIFA wouldn't dream of letting a country like Spain or Italy miss out. So they make it as easy as possible for them to get through, seeded qualifying groups, and even a last chance saloon of the play offs should they fail to make it through their poor qualifying groups. Add to that the fact that now the World Cup is up to 32 teams there's even less chance of a big country missing out, yet despite this expansion Oceania still don't get a guaranteed spot, yet Central America gets 3! This is possibly something to do with the fact that FIFA is DESPERATE to bring football to America (world's biggest TV market) and so wouldn't risk them missing out. On a similar note, the USA are ranked above England in the FIFA rankings, despite achieving very little of note. The 1994 World Cup was held in America, despite their professional league folding a few years previously, a new league was set up shortly after, but in a typically American way the team names are daft and there aren't teams there are 'franchises'. America just doesn't understand football. The reason being that Americans are stupid, notice how all their main sports* are very stop-start and ALWAYS have a winner? Thats just not football, it's supposed to free-flowing with the possibility of their being no winner, it's what makes football great. Ever watch ESPN? They have a scrolling bar along the bottom full of useless stats from the nights games. Their sports lend themselves well to being statistically analysed. For all Carling Opta's attempts, football isn't like that, statistics aid the functional footballer, the Kevin Nolans, the Claude Makeleles, but ultimately the most exciting footballers are those who don't always get it right, but when they do that's the bit thats remembered, for example Andy Cole is one of the Premierships top scorers, and he'll rightfully be remembered as a great goalscorer, but his goals to shots ratio isn't that great. The statistical analysis makes the games easily digestable which is the American way, football is a sport that engrosses you and deserves more than a quick glance at the rolling bar at the bottom of the screen, can you imagine seeing 'Beckham 125yds dribbled and 320 yds passed'? How daft would that be?

* with the exception of Ice Hockey, which is too fast, I can't keep up with the puck!
PS - American Sports are actually quite good, except baseball.

Above I mentioned how FIFA were doing their utmost to gain TV revenue by effectively giving free passes to the top teams. Wouldn't it make sense to extend that to players? There are some players who weren't born in good footballing countries, or who weren't picked for their team, eg, Robbie Keane and Jermaine Defoe. Wouldn't it be great for them to join the party? Of course it would! I have two ideas. The first is the only good thing to come out of American Sports, the draft.
The draft is brilliant, it ensures that there is some kind of parity between teams, where successful teams have to rely on stability and good coaching to succeed rather than throwing vast amounts of money at 'team building'. It'd be difficult to implement in domestic football as the draft relies heavily on the college system as it's feeder mechanism. We don't have anything similar here. American sport also has a salary cap, where each franchise has the same wage bill and can spend it on whichever players they like, but of course, 4 or 5 stars will take a vast chunk out of the budget. It's a brilliant idea, but with football being a global game it'd be impossible to implement as English clubs would be disadvantaged in European competition if such a cap was in place. Anyway in the draft, all the bewst college players line up and the teams choose who they want, the team with the worst record the previous seasons getting first choice, it's BRILLIANT!!!

How could I add this to the world cup? Well, all the best players not going to world cup announce their availability and the teams at the world cup can choose two players from this pool of players. So the worst team in the FIFA rankings get first choice, so Togo would choose Samuel Eto'o and so on. Of course, you'd have to question the motivation of players in the draft, I'm sure Mr Eto'o wouldn't be best pleased to be playing for a team with no chance of winning the cup, but I don't want to waste time thinking about consequences to my awesome ideas.
My second idea is to make a non-world cup dream team and play them against the world cup winners a week after the final. Of course it'd be of no consequence to the winners who wouldn't care, but it could be a charity game or something and so the dream team wouldn't care either.
Those are my A-M-A-Z-I-N-G ideas, I hope you like them. Oh, and by the way, Holland to win the world cup.

A picture of Lisa Scott-Lee, and why not?