The Football Association has thrown its weight behind plans to revamp the European qualifying format for major international tournaments amid fears the process has become stale.<\/p>\n
Uefa is concerned that fans and broadcasters are no longer engaged by current routes to the World Cup and European \u00adChampionship. Expanded tournaments have removed a \u00adconsiderable element of jeopardy and there is an acceptance that \u00adfundamental changes must be implemented to reignite interest.<\/p>\n
England have cruised to qualification<\/a> for the 48-team 2026 World Cup with two games to spare, their match against Serbia<\/a> on Thursday night barely relevant after they won an uninspiring group that also includes Albania, Latvia and Andorra. It has become a procession for bigger countries and the FA\u2019s chief executive, Mark Bullingham, believes it is time to refresh the model.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s really important to overhaul it,\u201d he said. \u201cI think we need to keep looking at ways to make international football even better and there\u2019s genuine appetite to do that. Uefa are clearly leading that, but I\u2019m one of a group of countries that\u2019s helping them to look at options.\u201d<\/p>\n Bullingham sits on a Uefa \u00adworking group examining \u00adalternative \u00adformats. One potential move is to adopt a \u00adversion of the Champions League-style Swiss system model where, rather than face a handful of sides twice in one smaller group, a range of opponents are faced once and teams are placed in one league table. It would\u00a0mean Europe\u2019s giants\u00a0\u00adpotentially encounter at least one similarly ranked team. An \u00adalternative could be that the Nations League, which has proved attractive to supporters and television companies, holds greater sway in \u00addeciding who qualifies.<\/p>\n The FA chair, Debbie Hewitt, \u00adechoed Bullingham\u2019s stance. \u00ad\u201cFootball changes, the world changes, the number of tournaments changes, the number of teams playing in those tournaments changes,\u201d she said. \u201cSo if we stick with the same model of qualification it\u2019s probably going to get bent out of shape. I think we have to keep looking at challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n Hewitt suggested the existing group format would be retained for Euro 2028<\/a> and ruled out a pre-qualifying event for lower-ranked teams.<\/p>\n In October the Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, confirmed discussions were under way. \u201cThere won\u2019t be any more matches but a more interesting format,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Football Daily<\/p>\n Kick off your evenings with the Guardian’s take on the world of football<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Bullingham and Hewitt were speaking at a launch event in London for Euro 2028<\/a>, which will take place across the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. Ticket prices are yet to be announced but Bullingham confirmed dynamic pricing, controversially adopted<\/a> by Fifa for next year\u2019s World Cup, will not be used.<\/p>\n \u201cThere won\u2019t be any dynamic ticket pricing,\u201d he said. \u201cI think that\u2019s really well established. [There are a] couple of basic principles. One is not dynamic ticket pricing, and the other one is that approximately half of the tickets will be in category three, and also the fan first category, which is the category below that. So we\u2019re really confident there will be a lot of accessible ticket prices.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Football Association has thrown its weight behind plans to revamp the European qualifying format for major international…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281958,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-281957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}