Why are you commenting when you clearly haven't seen it?

Here you go, you can see it for the first time:



Cut out his legs? By having a goalkeeper jump on his back?

If that had happened at the other end, I would've been having a go at Pickford and you would've post lolford or something

At least the whining continues.

apparently you're the only one that saw it, congrats

Thoughts on the following please:

FIFA/UEFA should use the UNL format (which I actually like) to promote more inter-confederation play. Take a team like England. In the typical Olympiad we'll play something like the following number of competitive matches.

8 UNL matches
10 Euros qualifiers
4 Euros Matches
10 World Cup qualifiers
4 World Cup matches

= 36 matches. Of these 33 to 34 will be intra-UEFA matches. It's boring. England against Cameroon, France against Japan, let's see more of that.

So keep the UNL, turning it into the de facto Euros, and every four years have UEFA + one out of Africa/(Austral)asia/N. America while S. America plays in a tournament with the other two.

e.g

2028: UEFA + CAF; CONMEBOL + CONCACAF + AFC
2032: UEFA + CONCACAF; CONMEBOL + CAF + AFC
2036: UEFA + AFC; CONMEBOL + CONCACAF + CAF

All the other confederations would have their own biennial UNL type events.

Alternatively keep the Euros, Copa América etc. but create two UNL - old world and new world say, so you'd have plenty of intra-confederation play outside of the very top leagues of the "UNL"s which would be dominated by UEFA and CONMEBOL respectively (but it's high enough variance that you'd get e.g African teams made it to League A)

I take it he's no good then?

Tbf I don't think that result was on the coach. He picked ~the team/formation his predecessors would have.

I'll be at the game tomorrow night, kind of expecting more of the same tbh.

Much I was love to see England play Argentina and Brazil more regularly, I think the way it is is one of the reasons the World Cup is still the pinnacle.

International football has become far more devalued since we can see so many of these 'exotic' players in the Premier League or Champions League.

The World Cup is the only competition that still has that bit of mystique about it, a tournament where you can find out about a player for the first time who you've never heard of. Granted, it's nothing like it was pre 90s but it's still there to an extent.

Firstly I deliberately kept UEFA & CONMEBOL apart, because that would be too much of de facto World Cup. And as constituted UEFA teams would play in a competition with, say, African teams once every twelve years (outside the World Cup) so you'd still have plenty of mystique.

Nah Conmebol + UEFA combined Nations league would be amazing

If you're going to do that just make it a World Nations League and have divisions three and below segregated by location so that Palau don't have to do a 23,774KM round trip to face San Marino. My only objection to that is it might devalue the World Cup?

World Nations League sounds great to me. I don't care if it devalues the World Cup a little. I hate the current international calendar where there are basically only meaningful games for us every 4 years. And Brazil/Argentina should play Italy,Germany,France,England way more often.

England have played Brazil once in 48 years and four times total (competitive matches). Granted that makes England-Brazil matches more special, but still, once every fifty years? Couldn't we play them once every eight years and still have it be a big deal? I thought the paucity was because England haven't gone deep in all that many WCs but even the krauts have only played Brazil twice/thrice in competitive matches. They'd never met in a competitive match before 2002, crazy! (Does Confederations Cup count as 'competitive'? If so their first competitive match was 1999, still wild since both of them reach the World Cup semis like half the time).

Yeah I remember in 2002 hearing that Brazil/Germany had never met at the world cup before and being mind blown. I'd be down for a world nations league.

Also lol at that goal being disallowed. I was just about to hit reply on an "It's coming home!" post itt when it got inexplicably ruled out.

Counter-argument (I've stated this one before but FIFA aren't returning my calls):

Every off summer (no Euros/Copa America/WC), there should be a huge knockout tournament with no seedings. The teams ranked from 211 to 128 have one playoff match to get to the main tourney. It would be absolute carnage.

Every off summer should be a League vs League competition.

I like this idea too although you need to work out that math. After the playoff match there would be ~160 teams not 128.

Sorry I just meant however many to get to a bracketable number

We know. He was just being a smart arse.


League v League sounds fun. It’d have to have a max 1 player per club rule though.
One of my favourite matches as a kid was the Football League v Rest of the World match at Wembley in 1987

https://www.theguardian.com/football...tball-festival

LÖLbandit would be on the edge of his seat for sure.

Who had the idea first? Here's my post from July in the WC thread.

I've been saying it for years. But I'm not greedy, I'll happily share credit.

You'd never fit in at FIFA or UEFA with that attitude.

He's probably the most disliked coach in Sweden after all the awful results he had with our NT, I was quite surprised you went for him. Only good thing he did was bringing Zlatan back

Enjoy the game! (even though you're off to a bad start)

Croatia making England look decent.

Maybe the thought process wasn't much deeper than "the last swedish coach we had worked out pretty well, let's do that again". His appointment definitely came out of the blue.

Main takeaways from the game: Belgium are good, we couldn't touch them for most of the game even if they hardly looked like they got out of 2nd gear. Hazard is an alien. Lukaku looks even more clumsy and awkward irl.

Kind of bummed I didn't get to see KDBGOAT if we were going to get slaughtered anyway.

Clearly the new format has generated more interest in friendlies.