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You're missing the point. The world cup should bring most of the BB community together, but as it stands most users don't care because their team isn't even in the tournament. The continental cups get more attention from the average user because those feature every nation, even the ones doomed to lose every game by 50 plus points.

Besides, if the idea of 2 African teams qualifying irks you already, what harm does it do to give more berths to the other three continents? You act like Asia is no good when both China and Taiwan are ex-world champions, the former winning it 7 times. Australia rarely even gets to play the world cup, but last time we did our worst loss was by 27 to... China, not the european teams you claim drill the other continents by 40. And for your claim that Africa is irrelevant, tell that to the USA who got knocked out by a blowout loss to Senegal last season.

The point is, we can definitely have a larger world cup and still have it be competitive. Africa doesn't need more than 2 berths, but that's 25% of their continent, so it's a perfectly reasonable argument to make that Asia and America should get 5 spots and Europe as many as 12. That would make it 24 teams with no crapshoot repechage at the start of the season.

China always plays the WC, whats your point? Also, Australia get to the world cup repechage quite often, but failed basically every time, wouldn't you call that a fair shot?

Until the previous cycle it was never a fair shot; the European team got to play the African team first and hence TIE for free. Even now I'm sure most people will agree that it's a crapshoot. What happens if Israel doesn't make that comeback in the 2nd half against Taiwan? Then they don't even get to compete in the WC last season despite clearly being good enough (and going on to win the whole thing).

The format right now makes every other season irrelevant for over 75% of national teams in the game, and out of the remaining 25%, half of them still don't get to play the world cup proper. Don't you think this is a problem? The best teams will filter through to the second group phase regardless, but the first group phase should have a more diverse cast of teams to get more people invested in the tournament and their own teams fate. If nothing else, don't you think Europe deserves more berths? The max they can get right now is 6, and the 7th best team in Europe at any given time is still a heavyweight.

Last edited by Jay (OTT) at 11/30/2021 3:14:51 PM

If Africa was to be merged I'd put them in with Europe. Same or similar timezone, and the format would work out relatively okay: 8 groups of 7, top three advance to 4 more groups of 6, group winners from that contest the finals.

Guess they're staying in their own bubble for now then. Asia and America can't take them on board as then we'd have a prime number (29) and a tournament format is impossible.