Why International Soccer Is More Fun Than the Premier League
As Manchester City and other top European sides look set to coast to domestic titles, plenty of regional powers, including the U.S. and Italy, crashed out of World Cup qualifying. Can the unpredictability of the international game help it reclaim some of its lost power?
In Italy, it was “the apocalypse.” In Chile, their best players were partying too much. In the Netherlands, Total Football became a “Total Failure.” And in the U.S., it’s a “debacle” and a “complete disaster.”
International soccer is a nightmare — but only depending on where you call home. While the failed qualifying campaigns of those four nations might seem like evidence of widespread institutional complacency within various regional powers, it also speaks to the game’s growing parity across the globe.
As the club game continues to stratify into the Haves and Have-Nots, international soccer has provided the kind of unpredictability that’s missing from late August through May (with all respect due to Leicester). Through the past decade or two, club soccer has become what we think about when we think about soccer, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
In 2010, The Guardian’s Jonathan Wilson, author of Inverting the Pyramid, the seminal history of soccer tactics, wrote about the tactical trends that emerged from Spain’s first World Cup-winning campaign. In the past, the strategies on display at the World Cup would go on to define the soccer you’d see over the next four years. But in 2010, it was the opposite: The 4–2–3–1 formation Spain (and other countries) employed to great success had already been in heavy use across La Liga, the Premier League, and the Champions League for years. As Wilson wrote, “[I]nternational football these days lags behind the club game.”
Given the massive growth of the club game, it’s no surprise that the on-field sophistication has followed. I can root for Liverpool, and so can a 15-year-old in New Delhi; the club game is truly global in a way that international soccer, paradoxically, can never be. All of Europe’s top five leagues took in more than $1 billion in revenue in 2015–16. And the Champions League generates so much revenue that it doled out more than $1 billion in prize money alone in 2016–17. In addition to all the money is all of the time. Save for the occasional international and winter break, club teams are together for 10 months; national teams play together maybe 10 times total in a given year. Club managers are able to handpick their rosters and work with them in training. Plus, the players themselves make most of their money from their clubs, so that’s where their focus is.
Since the resources — both financial and otherwise — are tilted away from international soccer and heavily toward the club game, that’s where the best managers go and it’s where the best soccer is played. We’re long past the day when that was still a debatable point. However, as tends to happen in a global, open, and neoliberal economy, the wealth and the talent has been funneled toward the top.
“This has happened as a consequence of growing revenues in European football,” said Omar Chaudhuri, head of football intelligence at the consulting firm 21st Club, “with top clubs in each league entering a cycle of qualifying for the UCL, taking the money, reinvesting, becoming stronger, qualifying for the UCL again, and etc. If you look at the vast majority of leagues in Europe, the top team already has at least a three-point gap at the top.”
According to FiveThirtyEight, PSG, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, and Barcelona all have at least a 90 percent likelihood of winning their domestic leagues — and the season isn’t even a third of the way through. Meanwhile, the international game is upside down, and it has been for some time.
As ESPN’s Michael Cox wrote after the group stages at the 2014 World Cup, “For once, a football cliché is true: at this level, there are no easy games.” Remember this match between Germany and Saudi Arabia from the 2002 World Cup?
That just doesn’t happen anymore. The same global growth that has contributed to the stratification of the club game has led to the leveling of the playing field on the international stage. There are only a handful of managers who can truly make a difference at the highest levels — and they’re all coaching club teams — but the number of competent professional coaches across the world hasn’t stopped multiplying.
“It’s clear that the best players in each country are now able to get access to the best coaching globally,” Chaudhuri said. “Iceland are probably the best case in point here.”
As you’ve likely heard, Iceland is smaller than [enter your midsize American city of choice], and they still made the World Cup — for the first time in the nation’s history. Around the turn of this century, the Football Association of Iceland built a bunch of full-sized indoor fields and synthetic outdoor surfaces that could withstand the country’s harsh, near-Arctic weather, and they systematized their coaching development system. Per The Economist: “In 2003, not a single Icelander had a UEFA A- or B-level coaching qualification. Now around 800 do.”
In North America, the growth of MLS has opened up new opportunities for plenty of players outside the U.S. Say what you will about the quality of the league, but compared to other top-tier pro leagues in North and South America, MLS can offer its players a higher standard of living and a guaranteed paycheck. In qualifying for its first-ever World Cup, Panama’s roster included more than a dozen players who spent time playing in MLS.
In light of so many big-name teams missing the World Cup, there’s been speculation that a secondary, NIT-esque tournament might pop up to give the Americans and Italians a vehicle for competition next summer. Much of the worrying about whether this should or shouldn’t happen seems to miss the point: The World Cup no longer has anywhere close to enough spots to include every interesting national team.
So, other than expanding the World Cup, which will happen in 2026, what can be done? (The 48-team World Cup will have its own problems — the 32-team knockout stage will encourage plenty of conservative play in the group stages, and some of the new Asian and North American sides could be overmatched — but not because there aren’t enough competitive nations on the planet.)
UEFA is instituting the Nations League, a system that will essentially replace friendlies with a series of micro leagues divided up by team quality. (League A consists of Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, France, Croatia, England, Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Iceland, and the Netherlands.) Those results will determine four qualifiers for Euro 2020 and the seeding for the remainder of the 2020 qualification process. According to various reports, FIFA is considering expanding the Nations League idea into a global competition.
“Some kind of divisional structure that pits teams of similar quality against each other, I think, would generate a fair bit of interest,” Chaudhuri said. “Fans would also take an interest in the results of other teams, which is vital for general interest in a league.”
There are still plenty of problems with the international soccer landscape. It is, after all, run by FIFA. The calendar remains a mess, and with an already-bloated club schedule, players increase their risk of injury with every extra international they play. But there’s an opportunity for the international game to continually provide fans with the kind of uncertainty that club teams just can’t offer.
Other than American, Italian, Chilean, and Dutch fans, who says large-scale failure isn’t fun?