Well there is an interesting story about the FIFA elections at last. The Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger thinks that this selection process will ultimately make things even harder for the individual clubs that have most of their players in their respective international teams as well. He reckons that it is now obvious that the World Cup will be enlarged to accommodate 40 teams instead of the current 32, and the European Championship has already been increased, so there will be less time for domestic players to get any rest between seasons.
Wenger said: “It is now or never – you would like to put it all on the table,”
“You see the European Championship has gone from 16 to 24 teams. I bet you [because of] the way the system was organised, to be elected as new president of FIFA, the programme would be to move the World Cup from 32 to 40 teams.
“Why? Because Africa today has five countries in the World Cup and Europe has 13 – that cannot work for much longer.
“You cannot take countries away from Europe and if you want to be elected as Fifa president, you need the votes from the African countries, so you want to give more to Africa. So the next World Cups will be 40 teams.
“We face a situation where it’s impossible for the players to get through a season and have rest. This kind of friction that it creates between the clubs, national teams and international competitions can create a split.
“One day the clubs could move away and say, ‘Enough is enough, we pay a huge amount of money for our best players so we’ll get them together ourselves and organise our own competitions’.
“It’s important that all of that gets on the table while we have the opportunity.”
When you look at players like Alexis Sanchez, who played (and won) the Copa America this summer, and played in the World Cup the summer before, there has been very little time for him to rest and recuperate between seasons. I see that Wenger usually gets frustrated with international games anyway, but just imagine if the clubs themselves decided to implement something like a “Club World Cup”, would they be more attractive to players and fans rather than them playing for their countries?