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 ...