this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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I've always liked how clean the CONMEBOL World Cup qualification is, just all 10 teams in a round robin league table format with 18 games. In contrast AFC is so huge there are so many rounds of qualifying to go through.
That, and the best teams in the zone will always play each other as part of the qualifiers.
Club competitions are also split into zones, not a big fan of this but I guess the sheer geographic size of AFC and clubs having less resources makes it impractical to have a truly continent wide competition until the later stages.
Some people keep saying that CONMEBOL and CONCACAF should merge and play the qualifiers and continental competitions together, but it's most likely an unified confederation would follow the same zonal model used by the AFC, thus rendering an unified confederation basically useless.
Maybe, the only zone would be the Caribbean, which CONCACAF already has its own separate thing for them to get into qualifying with the rest of the continent. Probably keep that and let everyone else play a more together deal.
Other than that you have way less countries in a combined confederation than AFC.
Also a huge difference in a combined Americas federation and AFC is time zones. Travel is more brutal going east and west because of time zones like you do in AFC. In an Americas federation the time zone changes are not near as drastic.
The time zone change between the Middle East and Japan is 6. The time zone change between Brazil and the Mountain time zone is 3. The Pacific time zone is 4, but that’s a small part of America, Canada and Mexico who all three have closer time zones.
With Canada and America having an eastern time zone which is a difference of one, and Mexico having Mountain time and a sliver of central (don’t think there is a stadium in their very little central).
So the biggest time zone difference for Brazil and Mexico would be 3, all others in CONCACAF can keep it at 1.
I have always thought it should be a tournament out of itself. Especially now with so many teams qualifying, it would give all teams something to fight for until the end
In that case, just make the 4 Copa America semi finalist qualify. But I prefer it the way it’s now, it helps building a team long term and better prepared for the WC.
I love it but it’s a gauntlet of a knife fight. So many grudges, so many tough away trips.
My only frustration is how long it takes—this cycle won’t be over until September 2025.
I think that’s the beauty of it though. A World Cup campaign truly is a 4 year run/cycle here in South America.
100%
Because they don't have many countries in conmebol