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Gareth Bale - Wales
Zlatan - Sweden
Eriksen - Denmark

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Too bad Zlatan retired from international soccer

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I'm curious as to at what point will big spending clubs just incorporate a "no national team duty" clause into their expensive players' contracts. I, for one, hope that it is sooner than later.

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Not to sidetrack this thread, but why is that? I would hate to see that happen.

TXAggie2011 said:

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I'm curious as to at what point will big spending clubs just incorporate a "no national team duty" clause into their expensive players' contracts. I, for one, hope that it is sooner than later.

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Not to sidetrack this thread, but why is that? I would hate to see that happen.

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For a lot of players (i.e. from poor/corrupt countries) all of their comp comes from their club.

The FIFA money that the new president wants to rain on more confederations will flow into the usual channels of corrupt pockets.

At one point or another, if I'm (for example) Manchester City, I'm not going to agree to pay wages to a player that is going to leave periodically to go play for Cameroon or Cambodia or Uzbekistan for free and get hurt on my dime.

I'm asking you, not what you'd do if you wrote Man City's checks.

p.s. From the club's standpoint, I'm not sure how much it matters for which country a player plays or how much they get paid. Its still the same dynamic---I'm paying them, they get hurt playing for someone else, they can't play for me.

Now, I can see it mattering from a marketing standpoint. You're happier if your guy plays for a country with fans that turn around and buy your club's merchandise. (But that's an argument for letting them play.)

TXAggie2011 said:

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I'm asking you, not what you'd do if you wrote Man City's checks.

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Got it.

For me personally, I see it as the only remaining meaningful check on FIFA.

FIFA makes the lion's share of its money selling broadcasting rights to the World Cup. Its two biggest assets are US Spanish language and US English language broadcast rights (as of 2014, correct me if that has changed).

I see FIFA as completely amoral, corrupt to the core, and generally bad for the game specifically because of the power it wields based solely on the assets it controls. So I would favor that sort of action specifically because of my personal objection to FIFA. They were losing me but completely lost me at Qatar (before you go on calling me a butthurt American, I would have at least accepted Australia or another country with footballing history that didn't need to use slave labor to make the tournament happen).

If FIFA was anything other than a corrupt payday for the well connected, it would start by doing things like not hosting its marquee event in places like Qatar and would take real action against delegates taking bribes. It shouldn't take the USDOJ to punish that sort of corruption.

As I see it, there are two potentially meaningful ways to check FIFA's power:

(1) high wealth subgroups opt out of FIFA. If the USSF and high-wealth UEFA constituents decided that they are fed up with the endless corruption, opted out, and said, "we are forming a new governing body. Oh, by the way, it will be based in the United States and all of its actions will be subject to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act," the level of dirty money changing hands in exchange for political favors would dry out. This scenario would be effective but is overwhelmingly unlikely to occur.

(2) top level clubs decide that they don't want to subsidize national federations, their teams, or, ultimately, FIFA's main revenue generating asset while risking their own investment. This scenario would be less effective as (1) but it would diminish the quality of the tournament to the point that it would be indistinguishable in quality from -- say -- the U23 Olympic tournament since none of the top players will be there.

Did not know this... that sucks.

wangus12 said:

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Gareth Bale - Wales
Zlatan - Sweden
Eriksen - Denmark

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Too bad Zlatan retired from international soccer

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It's a moot point because I doubt many of the current stars will be around in ten years, but you don't think a Zlatan would come out of retirement if his fringe national team was almost guaranteed to qualify?

Was the expansion to 32 a big problem?

I don't like the 3 team pods because it leads to collusion but it's more soccer.

I dont think it was but it happened when i was a kid....

Its obvious that even at 32 there are already matches that are very watered down in terms of quality teams so 48 is just going to exacerbate that

It looks like this is happening. Six automatic slots for CONCACAF?!!! The same # slots for CONMEBOL. I'm sorry but I would argue that the 6th best team in South America (Ecuador as of today) is much better than Trinidad & Tobago (6th in the Hexagonal).

FIFA Expansion

I would still prefer these two organizations to merge even though it probably would make WC qualifying much more difficult for the USMNT and probably Mexico as well.

Asia gets 8? Africa gets 9? CONMEBOL got shafted but not necessarily by CONCACAF.

you cant reasonably add any more slots in conmebol...they only have 10 teams....already that will be 60% of their teams advance

This is FIFA paying back all the small FA's who voted Infantino in. The extra 16 teams are all but assured of being horrible.

Very obvious FIFA is desperate to get India and China and their 3 billion people into the World Cup.

South America deserves 8.

Also it seems that everyone has forgotten that the World Cup is a four year long tournament with 32 teams that make the finals.

India? They're only expanding to 48 teams, not 148.

32 was perfect, in my mind. Yeah there were some mismatches even then, but the whole tournament was pretty exciting.

And regional tournaments should be 16. Last year's Euros showed that, imho. Way too many of the group games were snoozers.