The World Cup is undoubtedly the more prestigious tournament and the one to win being that it involves the entire footballing world (in qualifying at least) and has more history etc, but can an argument be made that the European Championships actually provides the better and more exciting football, with teams playing other teams of similar ability, with few of the mismatches you tend to get at the World Cup, at least at the qualifying stage?
In the WC most of the teams that qualify for the World Cup finals are European and most that make the KO stages are also European (eg last time all four semi-finalists were European). In this year's EC on paper at least there are few easy looking matches - even Austria, as the weakest team in Fifa's world rankings ran Croatia pretty close, although having home advantage might have had something to do with that. But looking at the matches we've had and will have - eg Italy-Netherlands, aren't these the sort of games that you'd normally expect to see in the KO stages of the WC, just that they have been brought forward to the qualifying stages for this tournament.
Italy losing tonight makes their route to the KO stages more difficult - realistically they have to win both their remaining games, and while they are beatable, neither France nor Romania will be pushovers. In the World Cup if they lost their first game against Holland they'd expect to play at least one weak team from Asia, Latin America or Africa (I know not all teams from those areas are weak) before the KO round giving them a banker, not having that to fall back means that there is more at stake in their next two matches and that has to be good for the inegrity of the competition, because they can't take those matches lightly. The same applies in the other groups, in Group A the Czechs have to play Turkey and Portugal as well as the Swiss hosts, in Group B Germany, Austria, Croatia and Poland will play each other and so on. In every group there are tough matches that you wouldn't see at this stage in the World Cup and that should make for some exciting football with one or two of the big teams, like Italy, having to win when normally they'd be looking to coast into the KO rounds and looking to pick their game up from there.
Thoughts...
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And it terms of country level football, Brazil are a top 3 country, and no major championship should have one of the best countries in the world excluded.
The Champions League is harder to win than the old European Cup but in the old competition you only played against champions and had to be one too. I prefer the old system personally.
I believe that is already the plan for the one after next - so 2016. Could be a shame as it will dilute a lot of the reasons why BFR thinks it's so good in terms of football quality.
I much prefer the WC, though - so many more different aspects to it, but then I'm the kind of mug who'll happily pay £50-£100 for a ticket to see the likes of Togo v Switzerland in 2006. Mind you, Japan v Brazil was worth it...On the other hand I have never felt motivated to spend a holiday at the Euros.
Agreed. And in the current FIFA rankings the top 2 teams in the world are not European.
its early days, i wouldn't analyse it too much.
Most memorable games from competitions normally come from the 1/4s and 1/2s.