The Only Logical Solution

Football fans in Australia have been frustrated for many years by the national squad’s failure to qualify for the World Cup. Their last appearance was in 1974 and an ill-fated move to prop up the Oceania Group has meant repeated failure to qualify through a repachage route against European, Asian and Latin American teams.

The good news is that this fiasco will end for the 2010 qualifying after FIFA announced that Australia could join the Asaian qualifying round. This will mean more serious qualifying matches, which will be good for standard of football, as well as being good from a commercial point of view.

Sadly, however, there still remains some ambiguity from FIFA about the number of qualifying places. FIFA need to address this, because clearly Latin America does not merit having its number of slots reduced and neither does Asia, after the last World Cup. Moreover, Central and North America could well justify an extra slot after dramtic improvements from their smaller nations and consistent performances from Mexico and the USA. Soon FIFA will have to address the fact that African nations have been underperformers at the highest level and perhaps do not merit as many automatic slots as they currently have.