Paul and Chris got asked a question last week on the Podcast Show about what they would change in football if anything. The two of them mainly focused on the rules of the game but this question got me thinking what would I change and how would I do it?
I guess what it comes down to is what I absolutely hate about football at the minute and after some careful consideration I worked it out. At the minute the thing I cannot stand above anything else are these stupid international breaks we keep having every four to five weeks. How is the team meant to get into a rhythm when they have to stop playing for two weeks just so players can go and represent their countries, this doesn’t make sense. Clubs are the ones paying our players wages so why should they have their season interrupted just because of UEFA or FIFA. I will admit I’ve always been a club before country kind of guy, I believe your football club should be the most important aspects within football, your country is just a privilege but it should not come at the expense of your club.
So how can we get rid of these international breaks and what would football like without them? I would just like to point out I’m not advocating a complete ban on international football but what I’m proposing is we move our qualifying games to the summer break rather than having them spread out over the season. We have an international tournament every other summer which means every two years there’s always a summer where there is very little if any football to be played, like last summer. So can we not play all of our qualifying matches in that summer and get rid of the international breaks altogether? I’ve looked into this and I think this is possible, let me explain how. So I’m going to use last season and last summer as an example. We get four international breaks every season, sometimes five so if you got rid of all these international breaks in theory the season could end four weeks earlier, this would’ve meant last season we would’ve played Middlesbrough on April 23rd instead of May 21st. The Champions League Final with Real Madrid playing Juventus would’ve taken place on 6th May rather than 3rd June. So with the season ending so early football would have a longer the summer break and this is where the qualifying matches for next year’s World Cup could’ve taken place, we could’ve got them all out of the way in the summer which means once the football season begins we can focus entirely on club football. So I worked out that the first qualifying games could begin on May 20th and would include teams from groups A, B and C: The fixtures would like this:
GROUP A
Belarus vs Sweden
Netherlands vs Bulgaria
France vs Luxembourg
GROUP B
Faroe Islands vs Andorra
Hungary vs Portugal
Latvia vs Switzerland
GROUP C
Azerbaijan vs San Marino
Germany vs Norway
Northern Ireland vs Czech Republic
There are nine European groups in the World Cup qualifiers so in theory if you had three groups playing each day within five weeks you could get it over and done with, it would be like having a massive football tournament on the year that there isn’t one. The last qualifying games would be on 23rd June, with any play-off matches being played the week after. This would mean the qualifying tournament would finish well before pre-season and any players who were involved in the tournament would just arrive later for pre-season.
At the end of the day this is just an idea that I had of the top of my head but I think it will solve a lot of issues, for example; the transfer window closing while people on international duty. It will also solve this club versus country debate and would put an end to managers having nightmares every time they got to release their players for international duty.
I would be interested to know what people think about this idea and whether they think is a realistic possibility moving forwards.
Article by Imraan Adam
@imadam786