Do we need one?

Cut out the middle man and make a World League of Nations, three vertical divisions of 20 with continental divisions underneath.

Id just prefer that it was insured that at least one representative from each confed qualified for the AC so we don't have 9/16 (mostly irrelevant participants) from WAFF.

I'd hit that, too.

Despite having no automatic qualifiers, WAFF (+ 2 CAFF Iran & Uzbeki) have ~74% of the representation (excl. host nation) of this AC.

Leaving only 4 EAFF nations (25%) , 0 SAFF and 0 AFF. What a sham!

The thing is UEFA introduced this because their top teams are spread out in WC and Euros qualifying which means they only get to play each other in the big tournaments and friendlies and most of their competitive games are against lesser nations. The Nations League is getting brought in so Germany, England and Spain etc play each other more often. It also means the lesser nations like San Marino or Luxembourg might actually get a result for once against suitable opposition.

In Asia, we don't really have this problem, in fact it's almost the opposite. The lower ranked nations are largely eliminated before the top nations generally see each other in WC qualifiers, the top teams don't even need to qualify for the Asian Cup and rarely play the more obscure nations in the confederation (Eg: something like Japan vs Mongolia or Australia vs Philipines).

I'd actually be interested in a straightforward knockout cup involving every team. Home and Away legs and random draw. Would be short and sharp and give the smaller nations a real chance at hosting quality teams.

Edited by melbourne_terrace: 11/1/2015 12:48:18 PM

The UEFA nation league will probably kill most opportunities to schedule friendlies with euro nations as well making it much more important to not be locked into a similar deal with the AFC scheduling whichever fixture they come up with. It would be even worse again if it was some random knockout thing to be at held to.

With the Gulf Cup Suzuki Cup, I think there is 3 or 4 in total. We're included in a few I think ? 2 ?
Need something to make these Asian teams more permanent in the memory banks

Fair point, but the fact is:

A) fairly rare that rare that we play a decent european side in friendlies anyway
B) we moved to Asia for competitive game and we don't get enough of them.

The AFC have changed WC qualification process now though so AC qualification is part of the structure, so it will be interesting to see how things play out. There will still be an issue of no competitive football between late 2017 and 2019 for those that don't make the WC and AC.

UEFA are doing this because they believe it will make European Nations better and more desirable to football fans. Many friendlies in Europe currently do not get above 5000 in attendance. AFC and the others are not going to bridge the gap without some kind of response

Very good point, but that makes me think that we should do this too, let the Kyrgyzstans and Burmas have a chance in the WCQ group stages and let the higher ranked teams also use the friendly dates for a Nations League.

At the moment we have a situation where the lowest ranked teams play one or two double legged knockout stages before the first group stage, and I think it's very unfair to have a country knocked out on penalties after just one fixture, two years before the World Cup. How is the game supposed to grow then?

They've changed it to have more teams play in a second group stage for Asian Cup qualification, but it looks like there'll still be knockouts up front, which would suck.

Edited by paladisious: 11/1/2015 05:05:07 PM

This is why it would be awesome to have a FIFA League of Nations: Three or four world divisions of 20 teams each, with promotion and relegation between them and to and from the individual continental leagues below. Single round robin of home or away making 19 games over a 4 year season, should be easy to schedule. Even double round robin for home and away games would just be 9 or 10 games a year and shouldn't be too hard to fit in, replacing most of the current friendly dates in the calendar. (I believe there are 12 most years, currently?)

Use the FIFA Rankings to distribute countries into the initial three/four divisions, then replace FIFA Rankings with the overall league positions.

Imagine getting into the top division and having competitive games at the MCG or Homebush against Brazil, England, Italy etc. year in, year out. Second division wouldn't be bad at all either with USA, Serbia, Mexico, etc. All the national FAs would love it as they'd make a killing compared to meaningless friendlies on the same dates.

If I was in charge of FIFA, this would be one of the first things I'd do.

Yeah fair point, the current situation is the first knockout round only eliminates about 7 teams but that's seriously shit for them as the rest of asia get's guaranteed games all the way up to 2017. Something does need to fill the void, can't rely on friendlies.

Logistically would be a nightmare with Europe geographically at a massive advantage over everybody else. Is this supposed to be a home & away affair? Would it not detract from the World Cup?

It's 2015, shouldn't we just take our flying cars straight to the stadiums? FIFA has a billions dollar cash reserve, and the games will surely be profitable. It'd work.


Could be.


Would it? I doubt it, myself.

So your arguing that the League could reduce the standard of European teams not improve them?

my gut feel is that this is not a good idea for Australia

under the status quo we can play European, South American, African and North American teams on friendly dates and this would be much harder if we are locked into another Asian "comp" as well meaning we might find it hard to test ourselves against top 20 ranked sides

the main pluses of an Asian League of Nations for us would be the potential for more home friendlies through a 4 year WC/AC cycle and forging more rivalries with the likes of Iran, SK, China, Uzbekistan, and better ME nations, but both could also be possible now anyway

No.

We play half our friendlies these days in Europe to lesser the travel of most of the squad so dont know if we would be keen as a nation.

I agree it's not good news for Australia;

The competition will largely replace international friendly matches currently played on the FIFA International Match Calendar.

The status quo will end in 2018. This is not just a UEFA proposal. This is happening!