World Cup Qualifying (Men's) for CONCACAF in the 21st Century
What was THAT format, and why was it broken
CONCACAF gets a shakeup in the 2022 World Cup Qualifying format!
This is most welcome, as the previous system had its flaws. In this article, we are going to take a walk through the qualifying process before and after and do a bit of analysis as to who benefits from and who is penalised in the new system.
But first, a refresher.
Within CONCACAF there are 41 association members (7 from Central America, 3 from North America, 31 from the Caribbean (and South America)). Of these 41 members, 35 compete to qualify for the World Cup. Why do those other 6 members not compete for the World Cup? COLONIALISM!
French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique and St. Martin are still considered part of France, and Bonaire and St. Marteen are still considered part of the Netherlands. Which means they are ineligible for FIFA membership, but still can compete in competitions like the Gold Cup.
Out of the 35 competing teams, 3.5 will qualify for the 2022 World Cup. It would have been great with a nice round even number like 36 (or like… 42 come on Greenland, join CONCACAF) But, we will do with what we have! ONWARDS… I mean… BACKWARDS?
To the (recent) past!
From 2006 to 2018, the procedure has gone some changes, but the overarching structure is the same. Some qualifying rounds with higher-ranked teams getting byes to higher rounds. Let us see what they looked like:
1st round (very early knockout round)
2006: Bottom 20 teams, home and away knockout.
2010: Bottom 22 teams, home and away knockout.
2014: Bottom 10 teams, home and away knockout.
2018: Bottom 14 teams, home and away knockout.
Now, immediately, we see an issue here. Half of these teams will only play 2 competitive games in a given world cup cycle while being in the federation with the most members, low ranked teams might play the least games. This can’t be beneficial to them and by extension the region. But, more on that later.
2nd round (continuing to thin the herd inconsistently)
2006: remaining 24 teams (ie EVERYONE), home and away knockout
2010: remaining 24 teams (ie EVERYONE), home and away knockout
2014: teams 7-25, and the 5 winners, round-robin group of 4. winner advances
2018: 7 winners from prev round and next 13 lowest-ranked teams, home and away knockout
ALSO 2018: 10 winners of the above round, do a home and away knockout
I forced the “3rd round” of 2018 qualifying here because I wanted something resembling consistency, and 2018 has 5 rounds as opposed to the typical 4. Also, it seems like this is where the region had no clue what it wanted to do. At least the next two rounds offer consistency.
3rd round (little groups)
Three 4 team groups home and away round robin. Top 2 advance. This is done in all four cycles leading to:
4th round (THE HEX!)
A six-team round-robin (home and away), with the top three teams advancing to the world cup and the 4th place team advancing to a home and away knockout against a team from another federation. The Hex is beautiful. Wild things happen. I love it. I hate it. Long live the Hex!
So what is the problem?
Low ranked teams are eliminated from world cup qualifying closer to the previous world cup than the one they are trying to qualify.
Let us look at the recent World Cup Qualifying campaigns in detail. The first thing we are going to look at is the CONCACAF ranking of each nation at the start of a WCQ campaign (2006-2018).
From this chart, we have a few interesting takeaways.
1) Honduras belongs in the “big 3”. This might be a personal bias which the data is now telling me I am wrong, but, Mexico, USA and Costa Rica were the CONCACAF “big 3” for me as they were the most frequent World Cup participants this century. This makes sense as they have not missed the Hex in that same time frame, as well as even qualifying twice.
2) Six teams constantly compete for the final two spots in the Hex. Jamaica, Panama, Canada, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago and Haiti are the teams which (according to the flawed system known as FIFA rankings) should complete the Hex. However, we know that rankings don’t always equal results. Canada, Cuba and Haiti have not made the Hex in the 2000s, and Guatemala and El Salvador (the next two ranked teams) have.
3) Everyone else is doomed. We don’t actually see it in this chart but the next one.
Speaking of which!
Here is the number of World Cup Qualifying games played by each team, organised by ranking.
We see a story being told here, one of haves and have nots. In the red corner are Hex teams, who get to play competitive football and then the blue corner… who cannibalise each other each campaign for a couple of games and that is it (The blue corner should have ended at Suriname, sorry St Vincent and the Grenadines).
Many times we hear the narrative that the best way to get better is to play games, and those games should be competitive, not friendly. Well…. in a 4-year qualifying cycle, the majority of CONCACAF teams would have played 4 competitive WCQ games or less. (yes I know Gold Cup games also exist but trust me, it is a very similar chart)
What we also can see is that 2014’s round 2 group stage got it right. More teams played more games. Which is what we want, and hopefully (we will see next article) the 2022 WCQ cycle fixes this!
Now for something completely different.
Now to look to the future! 2022 (pending pandemic)
What remains the same:
We still have 35 teams in the competition (Greenland still hasn’t joined CONCACAF…..)
3.5 teams qualify for the World Cup
In a very inspired decision, the majority of teams in CONCACAF go directly into a group stage.
Round 1: Round-Robin groups of five. First place from each advance
Round 1.5: Home and Away knockout of the six group winners
Round 2: Winners from above and five highest-ranked teams in a home and away round-robin. Top 3.5 go to the world cup. The OCT (RIP Hex)
This is AUTOMATICALLY more football being played at the lower end of CONCACAF. Teams which would typically have 2 games in a cycle are guaranteed 8 competitive games. This is great for the development of the region.
What about on the other end? The “Big 3 (and Honduras)” however, play 2 fewer games than they would have in the 2018 campaign. With 14 games in the 2022 cycle and 16 games played in 2022 they miss out, but they should be fine. This also shows that the narrative that the teams which have the bye have it easier than they would have before. If they were a team which used to make the Hex, they will now be playing almost the same number of games in the Oct.
Who loses from this? If any group of teams should be upset, it is that “group 2” from above. Whoever is the 5th seeded team (in this case Jamaica) benefits greatly, but if ever was a case of “too many games” the three teams which come from the first round would be playing 24 games in their qualifying cycle, this would be the most in the world. This is most likely three teams out of Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Canada, Guatemala, El Salvador and Curacao.
(Curacao needs to be written about in another article and the positives of CONCACAF Nations League).
How does this match the rest of the world?
Let us look at how many games were played by each nation for the 2018 World Cup Qualifiers.
Ideally, I think you want teams to be playing a comparable amount for growth. From this listing, we see red CONCACAF splotches EVERYWHERE.
UEFA(brown) is one uniform batch of games played, with just the third-place teams playing an extra game. CONEMBOL(yellow) has all teams playing the same. OFC(grey) and CAF(blue) have very few games but they are consistently few. Which leaves AFC(green) and CONCACAF(red) with the biggest discrepancies among their member nations.
It gets kinda mathsy below here… sorry.
We can also represent this graphically. Below is a cumulative plot with the x-axis showing the fraction of the maximum number of games a region plays and the y-axis showing the fraction of teams which play that many games. Ideally, you want this curve to be as close to the right as possible (like CONEMBOL and UEFA)
We can get some quick stats from this. 40% of CONCACAF teams are out of the qualifying campaign while playing 1/8th of the possible games. This is the worst. AFC eliminates a few teams early, however, it is only 12.5% of the teams in the region who go home early. We can see an improvement (ie chart shifts right) when looking at the expected games played in CONCACAF 2022 below. CONCACAF teams are now playing 68.5% of the possible games in their campaign. (I really wanted to round up, because I am an adult). This is a success.
Conclusion
Well… This went long. Time to wrap it up.
The old system was broken.
The new system shows lots of promise.
I will miss the Hex.
I will learn to love the Oct.
Onwards!