Quote Originally Posted by Psychotic View Post
China and India have populations of over 1,000,000,000. The Netherlands has a population of 16,000,000. Now, I know not all of these people are registered footballers, but I think we can agree that the amount that could be potentially registered as footballers is much higher in the two asian countries. If we're basing this on the amount of eligible players, does this mean they should be allowed to qualify for the World Cup ahead of the Netherlands?
I do believe we have missed the point here. My claim in post 917 was targetted at spaces allocated for continents (i.e. groups) not individuals. Besides this specific sub-argument has sidetracked too far off the point I was making so let's not continue him any further and stop wasting our time in searching for these bloody figures to back up our claims. (For your information, it took me way too much time to find a country (i.e. Brunei) that had the population I was looking for )

And no one cares about your pathetic little reserve players and no one in their right mind would ever check up on you anyway

*cheerfully deletes each and every Liverpool player*

Are you really serious about this?
Arsenal and Liverpool unfancied? I certainly would expect them at the very least to make the last 16.
Yeah, I expect them to make the last 16, I expected Arsenal to make the last 16 and then get knocked out in 2006, and I don't think anybody could say they fancied Liverpool making it out of their group in 2005. I'm a blind LFC optimist, and even I had my doubts.
The heck? I thought Liverpool's 2005-06 group didn't seem pretty bad. Naturally I would expect Chelsea to emerge with you but considering the others? Anderlecht have failed to impress in seasons before that and Betis had not only not featured in the tournament for as long as I can remember but to boot, have had no major impact in European football for the last, well decade (correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not in the mood to start rading wikipedia again, I'll settle with the services of my memory)

Yeah, but there are probably five times (at the very least) more professional teams in Europe than there are countries in the world, so reducing it to 16 while keeping the World Cup at 32 is extremely unbalanced.
I'm not going to argue with this seeing that I am content with the way things are run in the World Cup. If your hunch is right in the sense that there are five times the professional teams in Europe than there are countries than I guess football is vastly becoming a popular sport. However I doubt the increase of the number of groups (first from four to six then to eight) was because of this