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I never once mentioned England in all this and was certainly never claiming that all football played by the ‘bigger’ nations is entertaining.
I'll just clarify that I only use England as an example of a team perceived to be big, and also because they're well known. Insert any team you want there.
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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.
Just their presence in the tournament involves whole nations, some of them very passionate about football and others in need of giving football some exposure in their countries. But depending on what you call small, you have things like Croatia, South Korea or Turkey reaching semi-finals, and results such as Nigeria beating Spain or Senegal and Denmark beating France. These can't happen if those teams aren't there.
I suppose that in any random collection of 64 games you're going to find more bad games than in 31, by pure mathematical law. But you will also find more good ones, and I choose to look at it from that point of view. Memorable games? Those, by definition are going to be very few and far-between, no matter if you play many or not. And I repeat: you never know where those games and moments are going to come from.
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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.
No, I think, and I suppose I'm correct, that you are trying to prevent MORE nations from participating, be they bigger, smaller or sleeping giants.
Why? Qualifying and finals are always very different kettles of fish. A team labelled a failure because they didn't qualify might have done very well if they had gone through, and teams with brilliant qualifying records then crash or underperform. We've seen it happening lots of times. So why not let more of those teams make their final point where it's due, on the pitch?
The main reason why I'm for enlarging to 32 (I don't like the enlargement to 24) is that I think expanding to 32 does very little damage to the competition, adding just one game for the finalists, and in exchange you get double the number of countries and more people interested in football for a month. Right now, it's like having a big bus and only using half of its space, while you leave people at the stop. In European Championship terms, 32 works because:
a) there are in Europe that many teams which are at least able to hold their own,
b) you leave the really dead wood out, no San Marinos,
c) the organisation and layout of the tournament is very easy: 16 teams fall after 3 games, then elimination matches until the final.
However, I'm equally forceful in being against expansions to 36 or more because the organisation and the rules would be more muddled and would have to use some third-placed teams going through, which is too weak a requirement.
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