There’s been a lot of complaints online about the format of the 24 team euros. After a brilliant start the final match day of the group stage was a dull event with many teams in the later groups knowing a 0-0 draw or 1-0 defeat would be enough to send them through. I’ve seen many suggestions onli...
forum.pieandbovril.com
some good discussion on the format.
I was thinking about this myself. They won't go back to 16, so if you expand to 32 you are looking at adding some of Israel, the two Irelands, Wales, Iceland, Finland, Bosnia, Sweden, Norway, Russia (if they ever behave themselves again) and other decent sized teams who didn't qualify. All of those teams would fit in nicely at this tournament and are no worse than some who did qualify.
So a 32 team Euros could go back to top two qualifiers only. The only issues would be (as stated in the thread) qualification becoming pointless even for mid-level countries, and finding countries able to support hosting outside of the major powers. Of course this could lead to more coalitions in terms of bidding, but we have already seen that in recent decades and will see it more and more with a 48 team World Cup.
I also quite like this suggestion as a compromise in a 24 team tournament:
- Give the best 4 group winners a bye to the quarter finals and eliminate everyone who wasn’t top 2. The remaining 2 group winners and all 6 runners up would play a repechage round.
