Solution for the Winter World Cup

Faced with having to make a decision on whether or not to move the 2022 World Cup to the winter, FIFA responded in the way Governments normally do when presented with insoluble problems. They set up a taskforce. Cue a few high level appointments, several months of meetings, and a lengthy written report that will no doubt reveal, shock horror, that it’s dangerous for players to be playing in 50 degree plus temperatures, but that a winter world cup would disrupt domestic leagues. They’ll then set up a sub-committee to look into it further.

Well, FIFA I can save you a lot of money and a lot of time, as I have a plan for how the 2022 World Cup can be played in winter without throwing life, the universe and everything into the sort of disarray European Leagues are predicting. What’s more, it’s so breathtakingly simple that I know exactly the reason why you haven’t thought of it so far.

My proposal is this. Get rid of International Weekends in the 2022/2023 season. That’s all you need to do to give you the time you need to fit in a winter world cup. You won’t have to reschedule the domestic league for four seasons as someone suggested. You won’t even have to disrupt the league cup like David Moyes suggested, in a less apocalyptic prediction of the devastation we should expect. Best of all, we would get a winter world cup, which would mean we’d be able to sit at home in front of the TV and yell simple platitudes such as ‘he’s got to be sent off for that’ and ‘England’s problems started when they went for foreign managers not when they gave Hodgson the job’ without needing to leave the house. Sounds appealing already doesn’t it?

Now I know the first response will be what about the matches that would have been played on International Weekends, but thinking ahead, I’ve also solved that one without the need for a taskforce. The 2022/23 season will see the first half of the qualifiers for Euro 2024, so, ignoring the oh-so-important friendlies where top premiership players get a week off as their managers mysteriously discover they have a seven day injury, these are the games you have to reschedule. My proposal for doing this comes in three easy to understand bite-sized parts.

The first is to structure the qualifying groups so that every team plays every time there is a qualifier. Get rid of the five country groups that mean every country has weekends where they have to play friendlies, and make them all the same size. The second follows on from this. An increased number of qualifying groups would mean more teams qualifying as group leaders, and less places available for teams to make it via the play-offs. So the next part of the proposal is take advantage of this, get rid of the play-offs and save two more international slots for domestic fixtures.

The final, and most radical part, is to take all of the internationals that would still be left to be played, and move them en-masse to the time vacated by moving the World Cup. Not only would this solve the problem of how to fit the domestic season in around the world cup, it would also reduce the overall number of internationals that Premiership managers moan about, give us football to watch in June and July, and provide European nations with a good mini-warm up tournament ahead of Qatar. What’s not to like?

Of course there will be people saying it’s wrong to disrupt the season and expect players to be taken out of domestic duty for four weeks because of international commitments, but that’s been happening for years with the African Cup of Nations and I can’t think of anyone who’s come back from that looking like a shadow of the player they were before. Besides, even if they did, they would not be the only ones. Everyone would be returning jaded. The more successful their home sides were the more knackered they might be of course, but you have to balance this against the counter-argument that weeks without games are more likely to adversely affect a player’s mindset, and you also have to consider the number of games they’d have been playing had there not been a world cup.

If that leaves the top teams with the lion’s share of players who return a lot weaker we could look on it as an experiment, as suddenly the teams with smaller budgets and fewer internationals will be more evenly matched. It could make the second half of the season vaguely exciting. Teams that are lucky enough to have Scottish, Welsh or Northern Ireland internationals might find they’re heading into a golden period with full strength, fully fit squads to compete against the tired old wrecks of Man United and Chelsea*. If it were this year, it would make the money Real Madrid paid for Gareth Bale seem like a shrewd investment, rather than a sign of transfer fees getting even further out of hand than they were when they signed Ronaldo.

This just leaves the 1^st division, the 2^nd division, Conference and other non-league competitions, who don’t benefit from weeks off during the international breaks. Once the two weeks of group games are out of the way, there’s no reason why they can’t carry on as normal with some minor fixture tweaking. Also Sky’s absence from most of the World Cup coverage, would mean a three week window for first and second division chairmen to eagerly scan the fixtures list and hope they have a local derby or a match at home to ‘fallen giants’  so that they are blessed with live coverage. Or they could just use the mid-week slots allocated to the later stages of the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy, and non-league equivalents, to fit in any displaced fixtures, given that most teams will be knocked out long before then. Either way, it doesn’t seem too hard to solve.

So that’s the European domestic leagues dealt with. No taskforce and no sub-committees needed to solve the problem, and I’ll offer it up to FIFA for free, but on one condition. The condition is that the 2022 taskforce turn its attentions instead to what to do about the problem of the exploitation of migrant labour that has allegedly seen passports withheld, people forced to work fifteen hour days in searing temperatures with one fifteen minute lunch break and no water, people denied medical treatment and not paid if they are unwell, and 44 deaths in two months, alongside predictions that more than 4,000 more could die between now and 2022 unless working schedules and squalid living conditions are not radically overhauled, and all so that Qatar can build the stadiums it needs to host the world cup at a fraction of the money it will receive for doing so. For me, it’s that problem, rather than the problem of a world cup in winter, that’s why serious thought should be given to taking it somewhere else.  

*For the purpose of clarity, the description ‘tired old wrecks’ excludes John Terry who teams already face on a weekly basis.