With plane travel etc... the way it is now a days, maybe they should just scrap countries qualifying from Europe, Africa, Asai/Australiasia, South America etc.. and just put all the teams into one hat.

You still wouldn't qualify.

Not saying we would, Just in general terms though. 4 countries qualify from a handful of teams. Can't be right.

It's quite a high standard of team though. If there were only 2 teams qualifying, then it would be Argentina and Brazil every time, so the others might as well not turn up.

I have no problem with 4 South American teams being there. If we were to just give more spaces to European teams, if it would just achieve a similar footing to the Euro's. They bring something different.

I disagree, the World Cup would be a lesser tournament with only 2/3 South American teams, they have won the cup 9 times. There are no whipping boys in the group either, also they have 4.5 spaces, the 5th team playing off with CONCACAF's 4th placed side, which should be quite easy.

And it's 5 if the 5th place team win thier playoff.

50% of South America can qualify and we get what? 13 places from 53 countries!?

Thats not true though, even with Maradona the Argies needed a play off with Australia to reac USA 94, also when Brazil won it in 2002 I think they came 3rd or 4th in qualifying. It's inevitable that the World Cup will get bigger at some point.

If they knew there were only two spots, they would up their game. You would play the group differently from if there was four spots.

What size could they up the World Cup to, without making it a complicated format? 64 teams would ruin the standards of the tournament.

I agree but Paraguay and Ecuador are no mugs, especially at home. They would probably up it by 4/8 and involve a complicated best placed 3rd team scenario like the Euros is going to.

It's just like watching Brazil Brazil.

In fairness Europe contains a high level of dross ie Liechtenstein, Andorra, Faroe Islands, Malta, Luxembourg, Scotland to name but a few.
Seems a fair system to me.

SA getting 4 teams is not the disgrace its North and Central America getting 2.5 teams which is ridiculous given that Only Mexico and to an extent USA are in any way competitive

It should also be pointed out that for some reason, three countries in South America compete in the CONCACAF section

I wonder if we should apply?

They get 3.5, 4 teams made it to WC 2006, probably a bit much.

tell you what, why dont you just change the name from world cup to european cup then and be done with it, better yet tell all the teams that are not halfway decent (eg your Andorra, Luxembourg, Trinidad and so forth)to sod off and play in their own mickey mouse tournament and let the glamour boys do their thing on the main stage, sounds fair to me,

Your so right after all teams like Saudia Arabia, Jamiaca and T&T really made the 'World Cup' in terms of footballing excellence. the debate isnt that those confederations should not have the chance of representation but ultimately the wc should be the 32 best teams in the world, not the best 14 and some other numpties to make it geographically 'fair' and make up the numbers.
Right now UEFA nations are being punished for being the strongest confederation. Imagine if the FA cup was run on the same lines......sorry guys too many teams from the NW of England are involved...Man City and Blackburn will have to sit it out so we can get Exeter and Telford to the Qtrs.

Could either up the teams to 40 or 48, and have the usual 8 groups with either 5 or 6 teams in them. Still wth only the top two from each group qualifying.

It would mean the group stages going on for around 3 weeks as opposed to the 2 weeks it currently lasts for.

It should be the same group format all over the World.

5-6 team groups.

they will have to expand the finals some time soon. Europe has shitloads more Independant states than what it did 20 years ago.
With Yugoslavia, Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia for example all breaking up - This has brought on shit loads of new European teams. Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Rep, Slovakia, Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Slovenia.

That's a shitload of new teams to come into the existing qualifiers.

So at some point they;re going to have to expand the World Cup and allow more teams in. I think the Euros are already doing this after 2012.

They've added eight spots since most of that happened (there were only twenty-four teams at USA 94)... not sure how much more Europe got though.

Good point. The allocation changes all the time so it's a hard one to call.

the world cup already has too many sides.
the last thing they should do is increase it further

Sadly as we all know, Football sold it's soul years ago. FIFA/UEFA will want more teams in major tournements as it means more ££££.

Just looked this up. Europe's allocation has been:

2010 - 13
2006 - 14
2002 - 14.5
1998 - 15
1994 - 13 (out of 24)

The figures from 2006 backwards all include one team who automatically qualified, either through being the holders or the hosts... Italy have to go through the qualification process this year.

So despite there being a decent increase in the amount of European teams since the early nineties, the allocation has stayed pretty constant (and the ratio has actually gone down).

I quite like it as it is though - might as well have a Caribbean or Asian team in it that has no virtually no chance of winning than another generic Euopean team... that has virtually no chance of winning.

Why should a country benefit purely because of its confederation though, especially as the membership of the confederations isn't exactly logical? Somebody suggested Scotland should switch to CONCACAF - sounds like a damn good idea to me, it would almost guarantee we qualify every 4 years, rather being in UEFA where non-qualification is almost guaranteed.

Plus the away games would be a lot more attractive than the usual former soviet states.