The Indy Football Podcast: How can we fix international football?
Jack Pitt-Brooke and new arrival Jonathan Liew join host Ed Malyon to discuss the future of the international game. What has gone wrong with it? And how do we fix it?
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Your support makes all the difference.The World Cup is less than one year away but it still feels, in England at least, as if there is a disconnection from international football as a global product. It does not have the draw or the power of the top end of the club game, and the quality of what we see on the pitch reflects that. England's 1-0 defeat of Slovenia that got them to Russia should have been a big occasion, but it was not.
So what can be done, in England or across the world, to fix this? How do we go back to the days when the World Cup, not the Champions League, was the pinnacle of the global game? Or is this just taking an Anglocentric view that is unrepresentative of the massive enthusiasm shown in Egypt this week after they secured their first qualification since 1990?
Jack Pitt-Brooke argues that the English or European disconnection from international football is because of the growing power of domestic football, which is such a dominant voice in our lives that there is no space for the international game.
Jonathan Liew, making his debut on this podcast, asks for the elimination of the traditional qualifier model, so that all games become competitive and that a reformed rankings model decides who makes it to the tournaments. That means no more meaningless games and a better range of opponents at international level.
Then Ed Malyon argues for a truly globalised approach to qualification, where the groups include teams from every continent, meaning that the calendar is truly shaken up and the same old predictable fixtures are avoided.
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The latest episode takes in all of the action from the international break.
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