FIFA’s director of world football development, Arsène Wenger, has said that “there is no financial intention behind it”
FIFA not only wants there to be a World Cup every two years, but also continental championships to be held with the same frequency, but in alternate years, so at the end of each season there would be a big national team competition.
“The goal is to continue to improve the quality of football by improving the frequency of competitions in parallel with the improvement of the rules of the game”, Explains the director of world football development at FIFA, Arsène Wenger, In an interview published this Friday by The team.
The former French coach, who is now working on plans to reorganize the national team competitions, denies that his initiatives are guided by economic goals and that they would result in a hellish pace for the players.
“Not at all,” he said. when FIFA distributes the money to all the federations in the world “.
Besides, a mandatory rest period would be set for players of at least 25 days after the final stages.
In practice, the qualifying matches for the international championships would be grouped in two periods, in October and March, and every year at the end of the season the final phase of the World-wide one or the continental championship would be celebrated, alternatively .
This concentration of international meetings would mean, for example, fewer trips from one continent to another for many players, who wouldn’t get so tired of the changes this means for them, he argues.
There would be fewer qualifying matches, which in his opinion arouse less interest than the public 15 or 20 years ago, than what he wants are more attractive “easy to understand” competitions.
Wenger insists that what needs to be done is not to multiply competitions but “Focus on the big ones, which make sense” because “society demands more and more important matches with great excitement and more frequent ones,” not that the qualifications go on for a year and a half.
On the timing of your proposal, things would remain stable until 2024 and the 2026 World Cup would also remain, which has already been agreed to be hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada. So the changes would truly come in 2028.
“This means that seven years will pass during which mindsets will have continued to evolve along this line,” he notes.