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Some of the 'utter dross' has been played by teams that went on to become champions or by teams perceived to be in the top bracket in terms of 'watchability'. Besides, the value of the 'lesser teams' cannot be decided on how many upsets they provide only. If that's the case, let's weigh England's value looking only at how often they beat someone bigger than them, for example.
Woah woah woah…I never once mentioned England in all this and was certainly never claiming that all football played by the ‘bigger’ nations is entertaining…I’ve only recently mentioned how Italy bored their way to the WC final.
My point was, how often have the smaller teams (who, and this is just fact, are only at the finals due to expansion) actually added anything of any worth. That doesn’t mean that all the bigger teams DO give worth, rather the expansion per se has added nothing of note.
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What have Latvia, Georgia, Belarus et al contributed to the overall European Championships? Nothing more than numbers to be brutally honest. The expansion of a tournament does not make it better as the teams you bring in are theoretically poorer.
One can argue the same about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, only they have been doing it for longer. As long as the argument keeps being the same, I'll give the same answer: sometimes it's the big teams who just contribute only 'numbers'. Shouldn't we cull them too?
2 things:
1) I never mentioned ‘culling’ (which suggests an active ‘exclusion’)…by your reasoning, England were ‘culled’ from Euro 2008, which they were not, they simply didn’t qualify.
2) If a team doesn’t reach the finals, they shouldn’t be there…simple really. If that team happens to be England, Italy or France then c’est la vie. That’s what the qualifiers are there for…France didn’t qualify for several world cups in the 90s and England failed to reach USA 94 / Euro 2008…the reason? They weren’t good enough.
In this case, would Euro 2008 have been ‘better’ had England qualified in 3rd place? I’d say no as they are poor and would not have added anything in terms of quality.
The main thrust of my argument was about quality, rather than quantity. It’s good to have a mix of supposed top dogs and minnows as it provides the contrast that football thrives on. Double the amount of teams and the only place you can get them from is further down the qualifiying tables…ergo, the teams who were ‘not good enough’.
You seem to think I’m trying to prevent so called smaller nations from participating, whereas I’m purely arguing against letting in poorer quality teams (be they Latvia or Germany) as the overall quality drops.
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all that happens is the talent pool becomes diluted and it acts as a bye for the better known teams into the next round.
A bye? England didn't even get that in qualifying from Croatia and Russia. Or, now that Latvia has been mentioned, neither did Germany four years ago. .
England? Who mentioned them?
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