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SPORTS | 17-09-2020 16:43

World Cup fixture pile-up overshadows FIFA Congress

When the 70th FIFA Congress meets on Friday, one issue will very much be on members’ minds – how to find time in the football calendar for hundreds of qualifying matches for the 2022 World Cup.

When the 70th FIFA Congress meets on Friday there is one issue which will be dominant in members’ minds.

Just how during an ongoing global pandemic are the six confederations going to find the time to complete the qualifying process for the 2022 World Cup under the current home and away format.

With 135 games already played and another 650 to go, the last thing football bosses needed was the North American body, CONCACAF, last week scrapping its autumn qualifiers and delaying everything to the spring.

Its southern counterparts, CONMEBOL, who may well go the same way, have the added complication that most of their players are based in Europe and the risk of infection by criss-crossing the Atlantic is not going to sit well with their clubs.

Can you imagine Lionel Messi, Neymar or Sergio Agüero coming back from international duty in South America and telling their managers they have to quarantine for two weeks?

Likewise, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) has also pushed everything back until next year while still only on the second round of its group stage qualifiers

Only UEFA, Oceania and the Confederation of African Football can still be fairly relaxed about putting off their matches until 2021 because of their easier qualifying formats.

So what’s the answer when the danger is that you wait until the spring and there’s a second, or even a third, Covid-19 wave that puts everyone back to square one?

 

Act now

According to a well-placed football insider, the three most at risk confederations need to act now by scrapping the ten-day FIFA windows for home and away matches.

Instead teams should be brought together in one centralised  location – as happened with the Champions and Europa League – for three 20-day windows, he said.

For example, the 10 CONMEBOL countries could meet in Spain and Portugal because of cultural ties to the region and play the matches in June/July (at the same time as the postponed Euros), September/October and January when there is normally a break from club competition.

“There are no fans anyway so what’s the point of dragging teams all the way from Europe to South America?” said the source.  “All those empty stadiums and all that risk of getting infected through international travel. The clubs will start complaining, especially if their players have to quarantine when they get back.

“I can’t see things normalising in 2021 and playing matches in a centralised format is the only way to go. But the confederations need to start planning for that now, they can’t wait until the same problems happen again in the spring. The only thing we know with absolute certainty is that we don’t know what’s happening next week.”

For TV money purposes the confederations, who get US$10 million a year from FIFA, would prefer to play the same number of games but may ask for compensation if they have to reduce the two-leg format.

The football administrator went on to explain that the World Cup would have to go ahead as planned because FIFA depends on it.

“Everything FIFA does is funded through the men’s World Cup,” he went on. “The staging of the Women’s World Cup is funded by the men’s World Cup, the staging of the Under 17 and under 20 World Cup for boys and girls is funded by the men’s world cup.

“FIFA forward programmes whereby all national associations get US$1 million a year, all that money would disappear. FIFA’s day-to-day administration, they would basically have to let everything go if the marketing and television rights around the World Cup was lost.”

Last month football’s governing body predicted a US$120 million drop in revenue until 2022 due to the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic, mainly because of the postponement of the new expanded Club World Cup which was due take place in July 2021.

 

Schedule

Talking about how the centralised format might work for CONMEBOL he went on: ‘Let’s look at South America which has 90 matches if they keep the same format. That is played over 18 FIFA days, or nine pairs of FIFA days as it is currently structured.

“So right now South America must find 18 dates. Let’s say they have those matches in a central location to avoid travel. If we have three 20-day FIFA date windows – in July and September ’21 and January ’22 – they can play 15 matches. They will have three games left which could be played in March 2022, which is a FIFA date, anyway.”

Compared with CONMEBOL’s 10 countries, the AFC has 40 teams, split up into eight groups of five. Still only midway through the second round group stage it too has been forced to push back all remaining 2020 matches to 2021.

One option as a centralised venue for the AFC could be Qatar, which is hosting the World Cup in 2022.

Four stadiums have already been completed there and the tiny Gulf state has just started hosting the remaining 39 matches of the AFC Champions League with the final on December 19th.

The CONCACAF matches would mostly have to be played in America because the US has the best training facilities but infection rates are so high there that the border is closed with Canada.

The source added: ‘Basically at this point anyone looking at the calendar and their own situation, it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together and say: ‘We cannot really follow what we started.’

“The whole world should have some sort of unified international calendar, but not the existing one. The existing one doesn’t make sense under the current circumstances, it’s not going to happen. It’s impossible.”

Anthony Harwood

Anthony Harwood

Director at Clio Media agency, ex-foreign editor at The Daily Mail, head of news at Daily Mirror.

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