FIFA Set to Adopt New Proposal for International Football Calendar
The body governing football in the world FIFA are set to change to its new proposed international calendar.
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Former Arsenal manager, Arsene Wenger who serves as FIFA's chief of global football development is currently in charge of the proposed changes to the international calendar which includes hosting the World Cup every two years.
Wenger was speaking during a virtual conference from FIFA's headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. He said most countries do not want the number of matches in the international break to reduce bese of there will be a drop in income, according to reports from Sky Sports News.
There has been demand from the federations to keep the original number of games because they sell the qualifiers and they think the drop of income will be too big for them.
The smaller nations also said if you reduce the number of qualifiers and we do not qualify for the big tournaments, we have fewer opportunities to compete as with the current format. Everybody says the status quo is not accepted. We want a change. So what can we do?
Looking at the federation demand for more qualifiers than we proposed initially, we could add option three. That means in the initial proposal, for example, in option two you had four games in October and three games in March. We could play six games in October and two games in March and two games in preparation for the final tournament in June.
The decision to host the World Cup every two years have had a lot of mixed reactions from football associations. In May 2021, 166 associations voted for the possibility of hosting the World Cup every two years.
UEFA and CONMEBOL have both disagreed with the idea and have threatened to withdraw from the cmpeitionif FIFA decide to go on with the plan.