It's rubbish and the World Cup in 2026 will follow suit to 48 teams. That's pretty much 25% of FIFA members turning up for it. We're going to be treated to a load of crap games like Albania v El Salvador before we get into anything half decent.
It genuinely makes me sad the way that UEFA & FIFA are ****ing up summer tournaments.
From 1996 - 2014, they had it perfect. 16 teams for the Euros, 32 teams for the World Cup.
Having 32 teams makes a World Cup sufficiently epic. It has this glorious flow to it - in the first couple of weeks, you've got three games a week on the telly, which are usually fairly evenly split between David vs Goliath contests, random games that you would never otherwise watch of the Slovakia vs Ecuador type, and contests between genuinely good teams. Then you move to the final group games, which can be epic carnage. And then just when I feel I've had about my fill of World Cup randomness, you're into the knockouts and the lose-and-your-home excitement until a Champion is crowned. It's always a special month.
And then by contrast, 16 teams works perfectly for the Euros. There's just less randomness in the European championship. Most of the sides play the same way (i.e. conservative, organised football), most are at least vaguely competent, none are absolutely terrible (yes, Turkey were bad, but they weren't Panama '18, North Korea '10 or Saudi Arabia '02 level of hopeless). So you don't need to add another eight mediocre sides. Wouldn't the tournament have been better if there had been four groups like Group F rather than spreading out the quality?
And the great thing about 16 or 32 teams is the simplicity of the structure. Four team groups with the top two qualifying just works. It creates the right incentives to go for it (almost impossible to get out of that without winning a game) and the excitement ramps up beautifully from Games 1 to 2 to 3.
By contrast, third place teams qualifying distorts every incentive, makes it much better to be in a later group so that you know what you have to do and ensures that some teams playing really bang average football (Hello Switzerland!) are going to be clogging up the knockouts. And don't get me started on three team groups - what an epically stupid idea those are.
But nope - greed and thirst for power has ruined everything.
And I can't even properly enjoy the last of the World Cups under the correct format next summer because it's in the frickin' middle of winter, in the frickin' middle of the desert and has blood on its hands.....