The 32-team World Cup has become more about being a carnival, a commercial event, than about the quality of football. You have only got to look at the last World Cup to see this. France, Portugal and Argentina were knocked out in the first round and, while you had some people saying how marvellous all this was, it nonetheless meant we were missing three good teams and some wonderful players when the real action started in the knock-out phase.
You could still run a 16-team tournament and have the best teams from Africa and Asia represented. In fact they'd have a better chance of winning it because it's Europe that comes out of the current set-up too well. There are too many European teams in the tournament, especially compared with South America, which has provided more than half the winners in the competition's history but gets only four or five places.
The World Cup should be about determining who the best teams are and seeing the best players; quality should matter more than quantity.
The event has become so horribly commercialised. No aspect of the World Cup is untouched. It's wearying when so much that you have to talk about and write about is about sponsors and what the teams are doing off the field. The circus around the game is growing. For example, Brazil are now charging spectators to come and watch their 14 training sessions at their training camp in Switzerland. There was a time when they would never charge anyone.
The first World Cup I covered was in Argentina in 1978 in a simple 16-team format and, while it's easy to get nostalgic, that's not why I regard it fondly. Teams were based in one city, making for a better atmosphere, and players often had an extra day or so's recovery time between matches.
One of the excuses for playing around with the number of teams has been that it will increase the quality of the football but I've seen no evidence for this at all. Look at the goalscoring: the goals per game average in Japan and Korea four years ago was the second lowest ever. And you get some awful qualifying games, in which teams scrape through playing crappy football, and they carry on like that in the later stages.
A compromise might be some sort of seeding arrangement, so some teams wouldn't enter until the second round. This works in lots of other tournaments. At the moment at least two thirds of the teams don't stand the remotest chance. Which is fine in terms of making it a big carnival but not in terms of producing quality football.
Very little is now centred on the football; it's all about politics and turning profits. We've got a system which is good for sponsors and TV but not for producing extra excitement. Greater quantity has not made for greater quality.
