The opening four rounds of Women’s World Cup qualifying in
Europe have shown Nadine Kessler, UEFA’s head of women’s football, why a format
change is needed to cut down on one-sided results that have accentuated the
gulf in financial resources and number of professional players on different
teams.
“The qualification systems for the World Cup and Euro, which
UEFA organizes and not FIFA, they’re already going to be examined very closely
and we will see an improvement in the future,” Kessler said in an interview
with The Associated Press.
While the quartet of heavy wins for England, France and
Denmark could partly be attributed by them being in six-team groups — which
usually contain at least one low-ranked opponent — Spain in a five-team group
has scored 23 goals without its defense being breached in its opening three
wins.
UEFA is navigating a balancing act — just like in the men’s
game — for how to give lower-ranked nations the experience of competing against
elite sides while not stilting their progress by being subjected to heavy
defeats.
“I think we need to really take a look closely to have more
evenly-matched matches,” Kessler said, “but also to have some opportunities to
still see where’s the bar and to compete against the very best.”
UEFA adopted the format used in men’s tournament qualifying
for the 2022 Women’s European Championship and 2023 World Cup, splitting the 51
European nations into nine groups — removing forms of prequalifying or
separation of the higher-ranked teams as had been used previously in the
women’s game.
“We’ve done this (preliminary round) already and also maybe
that was not the right solution for competitive balance,” Kessler said. “Then
it was changed to group stage with all this. I can tell you that the debate
about this pre-qualifying seeding, it all happened.”
Kessler was speaking after the draw for Euro 2022, which
England qualified for as host nation. So England has only just started to play
its first competitive games since reaching the semifinals of the 2019 World Cup
but has faced no demanding opposition.
Starting on the path to the 2023 tournament, which is being
co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand, Sarina Wiegman’s side has won 10-0 away
at both Luxembourg and Latvia and breezed past Northern Ireland 4-0 at Wembley
Stadium last weekend.
“What you want to do is develop women’s football worldwide
of course but the difference between qualities now is actually huge and it’s
not very competitive when you win 8-0,” Wiegman said after England thrashed
Latvia to open World Cup qualifying. “Having too many matches which finish 8-0
— or those kinds of results — that’s not good for the game.”
Especially not when trying to attract fans to matches.
England’s most testing qualifiers are likely to be against Austria, which has
scored 21 goals and let in three in four games but was held to a draw by
Northern Ireland.
“We want to take a look properly and not just come up with a
quick solution because that qualifying campaign is still important,” Kessler
said. “It doesn’t mean that we need to have the exact same format as we now see
in the men’s.”
Kessler said one possibility is adopting the Nations League
competition that was introduced into the European men’s game in 2018 to produce
more competitive fixtures between teams on a similar level by splitting them
into brackets.
“We really need to assess properly the actual issues we have
and then come up with hopefully a format that will be debated at all and then
help European women’s football to grow further,” Kessler said. “There are
nuances you have to look at.”
Kessler knows about the challenge in narrowing the gulf well
from her playing days. The path to winning the European Championship in 2013
began with Germany scoring 64 goals and conceding only three times while
winning nine of its 10 qualifiers and only dropping points once in a draw to
Spain.
Kessler — the 2014 world player of the year — has spent
recent weeks as part of UEFA’s opposition to FIFA’s push for biennial World
Cups. The focus now is selling out games when the pandemic-delayed Euro 2022 is
staged next July across England.
“We have got to be realistic and look back on a few previous
women’s Euros — we never sold out the tournament,” Kessler said. “European
teams dominate on a club level, European teams are at the forefront of
investment happening in all the stages. So we want to underline with that
tournament again that women’s football is a top priority for Europe.” -AP
0 comments:
Post a Comment