Where European football goes, the rest of the world follows. Following Uefa president Michel Platini’s decision to increase the number of teams at Euro 2020 from 16 to 24 comes the announcement this week that the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) is planning to do the same with the 2019 Asian Cup, with the UAE one of the countries bidding to host it.
The ramifications for the international game in Asia will go far beyond the tournament itself.
For a start, the new format will see the preliminary qualifying rounds for the Fifa World Cup qualifiers and AFC Asian Cup qualifiers merge.
After the end of the first preliminary stage, AFC member associations will be divided into eight groups; the group winners and four second-placed teams will gain automatic qualification to the Asian Cup finals as well as progressing to the final round of World Cup qualifiers, which as things stand sees the 10 teams split into two groups.
The next best 24 teams from preliminary qualification will compete for the 12 remaining places in the Asian Cup in another round of six groups made up of four teams.
The proposals may be driven as much by financial considerations as footballing ones, but AFC chiefs believe that the changes will lead to a higher standard of football.
“Competitions are the main products of AFC and I am happy that it is in the good hands,” the AFC president Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa said on the federation’s website.
“We must market our product and generate income to sustain football across the continent. I am sure that the changes that happen will have big impact in Asian football and will benefit our Member Associations,” he said.
Many member associations will have one avenue of qualification to the Asian Cup closed for good.
The new process will mean this May’s AFC Challenge Cup in the Maldives will be the competition’s last edition.
Since its inception in 2006, this tournament has not only acted as a launch pad for Asia’s emerging countries to experience tournament football, but more importantly, for the winner, it was an automatic route to the Asian Cup. Tajikistan, India and North Korea (twice) have been the main beneficiaries of the biennial event.
Now those teams, and the likes of the Philippines, Myanmar and Palestine, will have to qualify the old-fashioned way. With eight extra places up for grabs, some will argue this development is a positive trade-off, not to mention an opportunity for the teams to play a higher standard of opposition on a more regular basis.
However, one big question remains: are there 24 Asian teams good enough to merit a place in a major continental competition?
Sadly, a cursory glance at the state of international football in Asia would suggest the answer is no. The qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil showed that beyond the teams who progressed – Japan, South Korea, Iran, Australia – there was a major gulf in standard.
Uzbekistan and Jordan played out a desperately poor, if dramatic, two-legged play-off for the dubious honour of facing the fifth-placed team from Conmebol (South America) qualifying. Jordan, having overcome the Uzbeks on penalties, were then thrashed 5-0 on aggregate by Uruguay.
Few nations can point to dramatic improvement in the last few years.
The UAE, after a superb 2013 that saw the Gulf Cup of Nations triumph in Bahrain and swift qualification to Australia 2015, can now reasonably claim to belong to the upper echelon, but elsewhere there is nothing to suggest that the standard of international football in Asian countries is rising.
Certainly not in the Middle East and Arabian Gulf, where the likes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar have noticeably regressed.
Furthermore, with 24 of 47 member nations making the finals (more than 50 per cent), there will be many mismatches at the start of the qualifiers and dead rubbers at the end of them.
The proposals still need to be ratified by the AFC Executive Committee, but there is unlikely to be much opposition to them from member associations.
In January 2015, the Asian Cup will kick off in Melbourne and the proceeding three weeks will show exactly how far the participating teams have come since the last tournament in Qatar.
Should the proposed changes take effect after that, it will be a further four years, however, before we discover whether the new format has had a positive impact on Asian football or simply diluted a tournament that is already lagging behind its European, South American and African counterparts.
akhaled@thenational.ae