WEEKLY WHINE

How to squeeze Qatar into the calendar

Recently, there has been much talk about the 2022 Men’s World Cup to be held in Qatar. In particular, should it be held in JUN-JUL 2022 to maintain consistency with the established norms? Or should FIFA think outside the box and move the tournament to a different time of year?

Well, FIFA, UEFA, and the international footballing community are gradually realising that it might be bad for business if fans spontaneously combusted as soon as they step out of doors. We have therefore seen both the European Club Association and UEFA announce their support for a winter Men’s World Cup in the last two weeks.

But how would we accomplish this, and how much would it disrupt the international calendar? You will no doubt recall our recent proposal for the GoobNet International Timetable and Schedule for Advancing World Football and Unifying Leagues. Let us now take a moment to examine the period leading up to the 2022 Men’s World Cup and see how it fits into our proposal.

APPROACH

First, we had to determine when to hold the tournament. Both JAN-FEB 2022 and DEC 2022 have been proposed. We will take the worst case of JAN-FEB 2022, because it will be more disruptive to move the Men’s World Cup earlier in the year than later.

We then had to decide on the specific dates. We have settled on FRI 21 JAN-SUN 21 FEB 2022, which means that players must be released to their national teams no later than FRI 07 JAN 2022. Players may therefore still celebrate the late December holiday season before joining their national teams. Likewise, England may still participate in its long tradition of overworking its players with the Boxing Day fixtures and New Year’s FA Cup matches.

This will also affect the qualifiers, of course. To allow at least six months of preparation time for the qualified teams, the qualifiers must complete by the international dates of JUN 2021. The six international dates in SEP-NOV 2021 become friendly dates as a consequence.

But how are we going to finish the qualifiers that early? One approach would be to maintain the same total of twenty match dates by converting the friendly dates of FEB-MAR 2020 into qualifier dates and holding Men’s World Cup qualifiers on the international dates of NOV 2019. However, this would disrupt preparations for the continental championships, because these tournaments’ qualifiers would have to finish in OCT 2019.

The alternative approach would be for each confederation to devise qualifying formats that require fewer matchdays. This would be easy to do, because our proposed qualifying format allocates two group phases for CONCACAF, CAF, and the AFC/​OFC tournament. Eliminating the semifinal group phase and replacing it with a second elimination phase would reduce the total requirement to 16 matchdays rather than 20. However, CONMEBOL would almost certainly be opposed to this; the marathon single group qualifying campaign has become quite popular.

Either way, we must rearrange some of the match dates. Because the intercontinental playoffs are on the last two dates, the teams must have some lead time to arrange their travel. We have therefore moved two of the four dates of JUN 2021 back two months. Therefore, the final round in each confederation will complete in APR 2021, two months before the playoffs.

PROPOSED CALENDAR

We have therefore devised an approach that accommodates the 2022 Men’s World Cup in JAN-FEB 2022. There are still twenty match dates available for the qualifiers, starting in NOV 2019, although we encourage the confederations to consider alternative qualifying formats that would begin in 2020.

Below is how our proposed calendar would look for the 2018-22 period.