In favour of restructuring Euro Qualification

San Marino made it 100 consecutive competitive games that they conceded a goal tonight (their last clean sheet was against Turkey over 11 years ago).  This is a new milestone for the nation that is now 113 competitive games without a single win since their first match vs Switzerland in Nov 1990 (won 0, drew 2, lost 111, for 15, against 514).  It begs the question should the qualifiers be restructured to give weaker nations a real opportunity to develop by playing against teams that they can actually compete with?  Are they actually improving by getting beat by vastly superior opposition all the time?  What would pre-qualifying look like anyway?

There are

• 54 UEFA countries
• 24 places at the finals
• 1 host country automatically qualifies

The current system is

• 9 groups (8 groups of 6 and 1 group of 5)
• 2 top teams from the 9 groups qualify automatically 
• 1 best third placed team qualifies automatically too
• 4 more third place teams qualify through a play-off

The first draw back is as mentioned before the lesser nations don't get to compete.  They are kept apart from the opponents that might make for a competitive match by the fact that they are all in the last Pot together and so can't be drawn in the same group.

Another obvious draw back is the uneven number of teams per group with the 5 team group looking like the odd one out.  Ideally there would be an even 8 groups of 6 but to do this we would need to whittle out 5 teams.  Let's do this through the pre-qualification.

So here is one proposal

• 45 top teams by pass pre-qualifying phase.
• 3 teams out of the remaining 8 lowest ranked teams have to fight for their place in the qualification proper.
• 8 lowest ranked teams split into 2 groups of 4 geographically to ease the travel burden on these cash strapped FA's.
• Each team playing each other home and away (total of 6 matches each).
• According to current ranking the 8 lowest ranked teams are Gibralter, San Marino, Andorra, Faroe Islands, Liechenstein, Malta, Cyprus and Kazakhstan.
• 2 group toppers join the other 45.
• 1 winner of a runner-up play off also joins the 45 to make an even 48 (8 groups by 6 teams).
• Top 2 teams of the 6 qualification groups proper qualify automatically.
• 7 third placed teams also qualify leaving worst placed third placed team out.

The pros are obvious.  There is a competitive edge to the pre-qualifiers and smaller teams have a clear chance of developing a winning mentality.  Something that the likes of San Marino don't get in the current system.

There is however the obvious question of scheduling.  I think that they could quite easily be scheduled during the international weeks before the World Cup when the rest of the teams are organising World Cup warm up matches.  The pre-qualifiers might need to run into the World Cup months but that is hardly a big problem.

The second problem might be fixture overload.  The teams that do qualify through this system will be playing the 6 pre-quailfiers and then the 10 qualifying matches as well.  A guaranteed 16 matches where they only play 10 in the current system.  For these small FA's this might be a problem.

There is the opposite problem for the 5 teams that are knocked out in the pre-qualification stage but they do at least enjoy 6 competitive matches which really isn't that far short of the 10 that the current system provides.  They would have to pad out their year with extra friendlies.

In my opinion the pros out weigh the cons.  I would like to see something like this happen.