With the exception of Cape Verde, who are making their debut next year, Africa’s qualifiers are all established on the world stage: Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia. <\/p>\n
Six are in the world’s top 50 with Ghana, in 73rd, the lowest-ranked of the nine. It would be a stretch to suggest any of these countries don’t deserve to be there over a European nation.<\/p>\n
But what do the numbers tell us? Let’s use relative strength again by looking at the top 50 and weighting it to the confederation. <\/p>\n
Uefa has seen its share of the World Cup places fall, from 54% in the 1990s, to 33.33% today – yet nearly half of its teams (46.30%) are inside the top 50. <\/p>\n
So, is it fair that Europe was only given three more slots when Fifa added another 16 places for the 2026 event?<\/p>\n
Africa now gets nine places with 53 participants, 21.43% of the automatic slots but only seven (14%) are inside the world’s top 50. That suggests they might be over-represented by a small amount, but not too much.<\/p>\n
Concacaf is about on point with relative strength. It now gets six nations at the World Cup (14.29%), with five of its 32 teams (15.63%) in the top 50.<\/p>\n
The real outlier is Asia, which has only four of its 46 participating nations (8.70%) in the top 50, yet it gets eight automatic places (19.05%).<\/p>\n
So perhaps Gattuso did have a point in there somewhere, but he’s unlikely to get any sympathy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With the exception of Cape Verde, who are making their debut next year, Africa’s qualifiers are all established…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-145068","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}