A controversial idea in football that would revolutionize competitions in less than ten years is beginning to develop …
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 aim 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,” said Arsène Wenger, FIFA’s director of world football development. interview published this Friday by L’Équipe.
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 “.
In addition, a mandatory rest period for players of at least 25 days after the final stages would be set.
In practice, the qualifying matches for the international championships would be grouped into two periods, in October and March, and each year at the end of the season the final phase of the World Cup or the continental championship would be held. , alternatively.
This concentration of international encounters would mean, for example, fewer trips from one continent to another for many players, who would not be so tired of the changes this entails 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 the competitions but to “focus on the big ones, which make sense” because “society is demanding more and more important matches with great emotion and more frequent”, not that the qualifications be prolonged for a year and a half.
On the timing of his proposal, things would remain stable until 2024 and the 2026 World Cup, which has already been agreed to be hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada, would also remain. So the changes would truly come in 2028. “That means seven years will pass during which mindsets will have continued to evolve along that line,” he notes.