Key Monday for the World Cup every two years

This monday is a day key code in the future of world football: The FIFA Global Summit is held, to which the 211 associations belonging to the six confederations are summoned.

On the table, the project of the celebration of the final phase of the World Cup every two years, change that would begin to be executed in the summer 2026. It would be then when the first World Cup would be held, four years after the Qatar event in 2022. Although the great change would come in 2028, when the World Cup would be held again.

According to this FIFA proposal, the continental tournaments they would not be affected because they would also be disputed every two years and alternately to the world. Thus, FIFA foresees the dispute of the UEFA European Cup of Nations or the CONMEBOL America’s Cup in 2025 and 2027.

FIFA considers it a more coherent calendar because, together with a more rest of the players, better games would be seen, in addition to having more options to host a World Cup event.

This project, as we already have in Mundo Deportivo, involves several scenarios to locate the selection calendar. One passes by interrupt national competitions in the month of October and return in November. It would be the only interruption leaving for the month of June the final stages and in this way the month of July would be for the holidays.

The second alternative goes through a first window in October, about three weeks, and another in March where it would stop in around fifteen days. Also in this case the month of June would remain for the final phases.

This Monday’s appointment is the culmination of a series of encounters that FIFA has been maintaining with all the affected agents. The last took place in the past November 24 and in it the guests were all the clubs in the world together with the leagues of the different countries and the sports directors of the national federations. Last month of October were the selectors the guests at a meeting that took place on the 19th and 21st of that month.

There are already some confederations who have shown their opposition to this new calendar with a World Cup every two years. It is the case of the CONMEBOL or own UEFA.

In fact last Friday the UEFA made official a study requested from the Oliver & Ohlbaum consulting firm and where it alerted impact negative from the point of view economic of this World Cup every two years. According to this study, the announced goal of easing the calendar load for players collides with the duplication of the final phases, which would make each season end with a World Cup or a Confederations Championship. Tournaments of such intensity cannot be repeated every year without increasing the mental and physical exhaustion of players, who would in fact find themselves playing even more than one tournament per season, if all qualifying matches were played over one or two long blocks.

Increasing the number of final tournaments and reducing playoffs would make players with the busiest schedules will play even more, while leaving the rest with less on their calendar. The same would happen with their national teams. The teams that do not reach the final stages in the proposed scheme would not only play fewer games in total, but would also lose regular contact with their fans due to the long periods of inactivity.

A calendar that does not meet the technical needs of national teams, that does not offer the possibility of testing and gradually introduce new players and that it can expose them to play a whole qualification cycle without injured key players, would at the same time affect the leagues, exposing them to excessively long breaks, which would be harmful for everyone, especially for those who play the summer season and those who must suspend their championships in winter for climatic reasons. A month of activity by the national teams would leave non-international players without competition while their international teammates would play intensely. The clubs would bear the consequences of this inconsistency.

In addition, the report projects a deeply negative outlook for football of European teams, if the FIFA plan applies. Adding losses from centralized revenue (Nations League and Men’s European Qualifiers media rights, UEFA EURO distributions) and individual sources such as ticket sales and sponsorships, revenue of the European member associations could fall between 2,500 and 3,000 million euros over a four-year cycle, depending on the number of classification windows available (two or just one).

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