Quality Control

World Cup expansion is another nail in the coffin of the international game, says Jonathan Wilson

- Jonathan Wilson

There are easily a hundred reasons for feeling dismay at FIFA’s decision to further despoil the World Cup by extending the finals to 48 teams – and at least one of them is tactical.

Football has changed radically over the past 30 years. At the very top, the quality and the level of entertainment are probably higher than they have ever been, but the structures of the world’s premier club and national competitions seem increasingly to militate against that.

The symptoms may be different, but the root cause is the same: greed has conquered any notion of sporting integrity.

But there have been other changes, and one of those is how we consume football – which itself has implications, if not for tactics per se then certainly for how the public responds to tactical approaches.

In the 1980s, it was common for people in England to say, without irony or affectation, that their favourite time of the season was FA Cup third-round weekend. It had a romance, a sense of democracy that appealed to a sense of what English football was all about. It wasn’t a franchise system like you had in US sports, it was an environment in which the lowliest had the chance to rub shoulders with the mightiest. But the reaction to this season’s FA Cup third round seemed largely to be boredom, with a shrug, a yawn and a wish for the Premier League to start up again.