By Angu Lesley
Football writer,kick442.com-Cameroon
Patrice Beaumelle- the lead trainer of the Ivorian national selection has stated that Africa should get more than the current five spots at FIFA’s flagship football competition, the World Cup going by the number of nations on the continent. Beaumelle made the declaration on Tuesday evening following his side’s elimination from the 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifiers after a one-nil lost to Cameroon.
This comes barely 48 hours after South Africa’s Belgian trainer, Hugo Henry Broos made a similar with both claiming that half of the European teams that qualify aren’t any better than many African contenders who end up watching the tournament from home.
“My remark is addressed to FIFA. I have been in Africa since 2008. Having experienced a number of Africa FIFA World Cup qualifiers, I want to tell FIFA that it is not to have five nations qualify from a Confederation of 53 or 54 countries is a disaster,” Beaumelle began.
As if to say he like Broos are convinced Africa deserve more than they are getting especially looking at what other confederations get.
UEFA of the European football governing is the biggest winner from the current partition of slots for the FIFA World Cup as the body gets the luxury of providing 13 of the 32 nations that participate at the tournament.
According to Beaumelle, the allotment to Africa is a disaster and contributes to kill African football because it doesn’t allow some serious nations to reach the global showpiece. According to the former deputy coach of the Atlas Lions of Morocco, each of the eight pools at the World Cup finals should have an African nation.
“There 32 nations, it’s not normal that each pool doesn’t have an African team. Look at the intensity of the game and came offered today. Strange enough they still have to go through a play-offs to qualify for the world cup. This is not normal,” Beaumelle continued.
Many football actors have made a similar call in the past but the French man says it needs urgent attention.
Over the years, there have been cases where amongst the partipants from the continent the current champions and or some top Stars from the continent miss out qualification.
“I am not saying this because we didn’t qualify. I am French and previously qualified for the World Cup with Morocco but I think with this format we always leave home three to four nations capable of adding more spectacle at the world cup. Even if we went through I will have made the same remarks,” the trainer concluded.
At the moment, Europe’s allocation, the biggest by a huge margin and it doubles the allocation for all other continents including Africa.
It is worth nothing that the imbalance was created from the inception of the global football event in 1932 in Uruguay in complete absence of an African representative.
However, the results achieved by African nations have not helped this case -so far after 89 years of the existence of the tournament, no African team has gone beyond the the last eight of the competition.
Cameroon of Roger Milla as far back as in 1990, DEl Hadj Diouf’s Senegal in 2002 and an Assamoah Gyan inspired Ghanaian team in 2010 are the trio to have experienced the best run of the quarter-final of the though Ghana’s under-20 team won the youth World Cup in 2009 and Nigeria have won multiple Under-17 FIFA World Cup tournaments.
South Africa, Ivory Coast, Angola, Togo, Libya form a crop of Nations with world cup experience who will unfortunately miss the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup penciled for November-December that year.
Ten nations Viz; Senegal, Nigeria, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco seeded in Pot 1 plus Cameroon, Mali, DR Congo, Egypt and Ghana in Pot 2 are through to the two-legged play-offs scheduled for March 2022 per the results of the pairings planned for December 18.
Photo credit:Didier Lefa
There are plans to increase the number of nations in the world cup to 48 from 211 member associations of FIFA, but even with that Africa which forms a quarter of the membership of FIFA doesn’t have commensurate allocation.
Copyright©2021 kick442.com
All rights reserved. This material and any other digital content on this platform may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, written or distributed in full or in part, without written permission from our management.
This site is not responsible for the content displayed by external sites
