← Split Zone Duo: College Football Podcast
Split Zone Duo: College Football Podcast
What Can World Cup Expansion Tell Us About the CFP?
00:57:56
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- [00:00]
A
We're coming and we ain't backing down. We don't need a bunch of cats
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B
in here looking in the mirror.
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A
Everybody just do your job. You understand that? Hey, will you shut up?
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B
I'm bitterly disappointed with the officiating today. Guys being dudes and they run through our, like through a tin horn, man.
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C
Thank you, Lee. Thank you to our split zone duo listeners. Fun one today. I'm Alex Kirchner joined by Richard Johnson and a great guest for a crossover episode that I've wanted to do for quite some time. Richard, you know that I hate the idea of a 24 team college football playoff. I don't even care for the idea of a 16 team college football playoff. I've liked 12 just fine. It has provided, I think, bit of cushion for losses, maybe a little bit of dilution of certain regular season moments, but it's created more stakes in other games. The Big ten in the SEC have gotten paid, but I think it's worked out decently so far for everybody else and I really don't want to see it expand. I've said it a million times and yet there's just been this like really hard thing for me the past couple weeks, which is that I have been watching, like many of you, the World cup, which had been at 32 teams since 1998 and that seemed like plenty, but this year it grew by 50% to 48 teams. Nobody disputes why FIFA did this. It was for television, obviously. But this odd thing has happened which is that it just seems like expansion has been pretty awesome. I've been following Cape Verde just like everybody else. Incredible story. Curacao, Jordan, Uzbekistan, all made their first appearances, created these big moments of national pride. Cape Verde has actually tied two of like the best soccer playing countries in the world. I hate to tip my caprichir to FIFA, but would you agree that this has been going fairly well?
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B
I think it's interesting because I don't know if I'm ready to render my opinion on that just yet. I did go to Norway, Senegal at MetLife the other day, saw a great game, saw Erling Haaland who look, I will say it's one of the great travesties that we can't get 15 pounds of body weight on Erling Holland and stick him at X receiver and just see how much fun we have. I do think in the second round of games we started to see some cream rise to the top. Second round of the group stage game, some cream rise to the top in some of the games, like Portugal just Absolutely. Smoked Uzbekistan like yesterday for instance. So I'm interested in seeing how many kind of dead rubbers as they call it, we have in the third group stage games where like nobody has any jeopardy like the US they can lose by 10 goals. It doesn't matter. That's one thing. The other thing is with the extra round of knockout games, right, we have a round of 32 now versus just going straight into a sweet 16, round of 16 situation. I'm interested in how those games go before I kind of render my opinion on whether 48 is, is a good number, the right number. But yes, as you, you stated, FIFA did this for television money and to, to basically, I don't know if necessitates the right word, but validate, I guess doing this across three countries and multiple cities in three countries, especially most of them being in the United States.
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C
Well, I've had a lot of questions about this, including am I the bad guy for opposing College Football Playoff expansion as staunchly as I do when to my eye, at least as a casual fan, it seemed like it's going well. And so to help sort through those questions, we have a tremendous soccer voice. One of the wisest people in the field, Mike Goodman, the co host of the Double Pivot podcast. It's a soccer podcast co hosted with Michael Kaylee, one that my smartest soccer friends swear by as an indispensable resource for understanding the world's most beautiful game. Mike, thank you for coming on Split Zone Duo.
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A
I am happy to be here. It's like the, you know, the one time every four years where I do a whole bunch of non soccer media because it's, you know, know it's a big deal. And yeah, I'm happy to talk about the expansion of the World Cup. It's a, it is a really legitimately interesting set of circumstances, I think.
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C
I really enjoy doing two things here. One is when I can talking about other sports and finding ways to connect them back to college football. And two is challenging my existing beliefs because I'm just such a heterodox, free thinker, can't be put in a box, a real maverick. And it has, Mike, given me a little bit of a crisis of confidence which I don't want to get ahead of myself on and say that I am changing my view about College Football Playoff expansion. But I have been really curious about it just because of how this seems to have gone. How do you think expansion has gone in the World cup this summer?
- [04:35]
A
I agree that it's a little bit too early to declare it, to declare it totally successful. And I think that the round of 32 question is the question that I'm really waiting on. And here's why. Nobody, like, is confused about who can win the World Cup. There are maybe five teams that can win it, and if it's not those five teams, then there's like two or three others that could like, be really surprising. But of those two or three others that are like Germany and Portugal, who are like traditional powerhouses anyway to some degree, another. So going from 32 to 48, it doesn't really change the dynamics of who's possibly going to win. Which you would think would be a problem, right? Like you would, you would think that like, that is like, oh, well, there's more meaningless games. But the other part of the World cup, which is only ever four years, has a two year long qualifying process. It's a spectacle, it's an event, it's a showcase. And the group stage is as much about that showcase as it is about like who's gonna win in advance. So you have this weird mix, right, where like there's this mix of like, you know, of those five favorites I mentioned, right, it's, it's France, it's Spain, it's England, it's Argentina and it's Brazil. Three of them have, have, you know, in their opening two games dropped points. You know, England tied with Ghana, Spain, as you were talking about, tied with Cap Verde, and Brazil tied with Morocco, which is a little more competitive. But like, nobody thinks that that means that, oh my God, these three teams are in trouble. It's part of the deal. And, you know, so the, the most playoff expansion that you're talking about, it's like, is there a round and does that extra round involve more jeopardy? And for the World cup, it's just more about the spectacle in the group stage still. Which is why I think that like if you get a dead round of 32, if you get a round of 32 where there's 16 games with 16 clear favorites and 16 teams move on, which is not all that impossible, I think you will start to feel like a little of the good, like the, the feel good vibes start to start to get questioned and be like, do we really need this?
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B
Yeah, I do think that the one other thing that we lose there is like, so Spain draws Cabo Verde in the first game, right? You do lose the jeopardy of Spain potentially maybe not getting out of the group, right? Like England draws with Ghana yesterday and they're still going to get through Right now it's that they get the draw and it's an incredible day, but everybody's still going through, right?
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A
It's true. And, and like you have traditionally seen with 32 teams there are usually a couple of, you know, four year, you know, four years ago Germany didn't go through. Eight years ago Germany also didn't go through. There are most years one or two teams in the group stage who shockingly go home. That's not, that's really not going to happen this year. And it's because you're going, the structure of the tournament is you're going from 48 to 32 and it's just, you know, it's really hard to be a good team and not go through in that case.
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C
And that's because select third place teams out of the four team groups get through. As opposed to previously it was just the top two of every four go through, correct?
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B
Well, it's literally almost all of them.
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A
So it's 8, 8 out of 12 third place teams go through and there's, it's the, the best eight as determined by record followed by goal difference, so on and so forth. This was the case when it was at 24 teams. So up until 1994 the tournament was 24 teams before it expanded to 32. And this was the same method where you had, you went from 24 to 16 and it was third place teams went through in, in, in that format. It's, it's forgiving, right? Like it's a really forgiving format and it does take some of the drama away from the groups. Now that said like, like your path, your draw in the knockout stages when you get a bracket and everybody gets, you know, can look ahead is dramatically different depending on whether you win your group or come in second or are our third place team. And like you can see that with the United States who have like walked into a cupcake draw here like they came into the tournament and like I think most people expected them to get out of the group but it wasn't a slam dunk. And right now I think that like Michael Kelly, my co host, he's got his expecting goals like projection system. He has the US is the fourth most likely to get to the quarterfinals and that's like based mostly on the strength of their like how easy their draw is going to be because they're winning the group. So there is like a lot to play for in the group still. But it's not shock eliminations and it does take the edge off.
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C
That's really Interesting to me because it sounds in a different way similar to the new first round of the College Football Playoff, where there's also not much chance that the number five team, for example, is going to get eliminated. But I suppose if you messed up once, that would be it. Instead of in the World cup group stage, where if you mess up once, even one and a half times, if you just win one game out of your three, you're, you're more than good. You might not even need to do that in certain cases.
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A
And yeah, I think three points, so three draws will generally get you through. I think, you know, you can, you almost do it with the third place teams. You almost do it like a cut line in golf, like a projected cut line. And you're looking at like the, how many points and what goal difference you need. And usually like the math is going to, math out around three points and a negative two goal difference is right on the cusp. So there is, so the, the, the jeopardy is fairly low down in, in the, you know, in the competitive stakes. But like that said, and this is just the thing about soccer is you have these like, cross competing purposes for being there. Like Haiti is not going to be sad about the fact that they're not going through, right. Like cup of now may be sad if they don't go through having gotten two draws, but when they came into the World cup having one great result or one like, okay result and, and playing Spain tough would have been a great thing. And the way that soccer has always dealt with this kind of competitiveness is like, winning the league isn't the only thing, winning the tournament isn't the only thing because there's a lot more competitive imbalance across the soccer landscape than there is across American sports. What they do is there's just a million different things to play for, like week in, week out in, you know, European soccer leagues or even at mls. Um, and it sort of carries over to something like a World cup where a lot of what you're there for is like, you know, qualifying was winning for us, scoring a goal might be winning for us, you know, a point, you know, being alive on the third group stage. There are all these like, stages of accomplishment that really exist because the World cup is this once every four year spectacle. So it's not just like, yeah, advancing another round in the playoffs
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C
when this expansion was conceived. I'm curious if you think, other than for television money, I'm curious if you think it was geared in some ways to be friendly towards the Cabo Verdes. Like, to get more. To get more access? Or was it, I'm curious, like, where the balance is between catering to those teams and like, an extra safety net for Brazil when they underachieve in South America?
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A
No, it's. It's much more the first thing. And to understand why, you have to understand a little bit the politics of FIFA, which is that whoever is in charge of FIFA is put there by a vote of the confederations around the world. Every. Every country's got a vote. And, you know, you go to the af, you know, the to calf after the African confederation, and you say, hey, oh, you know, if you support me and your countries vote for me, I will expand the tournament. And that gets you a lot of support. And in fact, in a lot of ways, FIFA, which runs world soccer and the World cup and UEFA, which runs soccer in Europe, are in a cold war. There's a lot of, like, we are competing for the eyes of worldwide soccer fans with each other. And, you know, last summer the club World cup was launched by FIFA for the first time, which is kind of like a direct shot across the bow of. Of UEFA, which has the Champions League, obviously. You know, years ago when there was this brief attempt to form a super league in Europe, those teams thought they had the tacit support of FIFA. And again, it was because of this tension between FIFA and UEFA, which is always just sort of simmering below the surface. And it turned out that one sour and FIFA had all sorts of deniability and said, no, no, no, we, we support the current structures, but this is. There is this undercurrent. And so this expansion of the World cup is 100% about the people in power at FIFA. Gianni Infantino, running for reelection, set blatter before him did similar things catering to the world as the broader base of their political support within the organization.
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B
I find FIFA be almost refreshingly corrupt.
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A
I think people
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B
think that there's corruption in American sports. I don't say that there isn't. I'm not trying to say that. But I mean, FIFA's artists just playing in a different game in a different sandbox. Much like the ioc.
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A
Very much like the ioc. Yeah.
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B
I hear FIFA kind of akin to like a floating government wherever they go country, while whatever country they go, even this one, you know, they are doing things with the ticket prices, with the transportation prices. Hello, just took a $98 train from Penn Station to MetLife. They are doing things what.
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C
Continue. I don't want to get bogged down. I don't want to get bogged down. What?
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B
Brother.
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C
Brother.
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A
Oh, it's a great. That whole story is a great story about how that, how that came to be.
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B
$98. It is. That is the cut rate. It was supposed to be $150 for me to get from Penn Station to MetLife via Secaucus transfer. Yes. 98 bones.
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C
So whose fault is that? Is this on New York or New Jersey or both?
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B
This is on New Jersey. Basically, the governor in New Jersey was like, I want them, the tourists or the people going to the games to pay for it. Because as we know, MetLife is in New Jersey despite the fact that they keep calling it New York, New Jersey. To the point, Mike. Oh, my God. To the point. I, at the. I don't know if you, if you've been yet, but at the game they were doing things like get on your feet, New York, New Jersey.
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A
Oh, it's, it's absurd. I, I will also say that there are games at Foxborough and it's being called Boston. And I had the, My timing was I flew back from Europe shortly before the tournament began and I had a whole bunch of Scottish people on my flight who were coming over because Scotland was playing their opening match versus Haiti at Foxborough. And you know, I would just sort of be like, oh, yeah, we're going to the game in Boston. I'd be like, you're sure? You know how you're getting to the stadium, right?
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B
Like, Mike, it's funny because I'm literally in Boston right now. I'm doing this show in Boston. And so, yeah, we were walking around this morning getting breakfast and there were still. There were some English fans here because England played here yesterday. And it's the same deal. It's. It's not easy to get from Boston to Foxborough. It's like a one lane or two lane road to get down there. It's not in Boston. And it's the same thing that the train tickets are like crazy expensive, like, all that kind of stuff. So FIFA is doing things here that they know that they can get away with because it's America versus when they go back. Hydration breaks. Hello. Like UEFA's already said they're not going to do hydration breaks for the 2028 Euros in England. Like they're doing things because they can get away with them. Here is FIFA.
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A
Not to take us too far afield here, but it's actually really interesting, the ticket, the. The transportation stuff. In particular. 2022, the World cup was in, in, in Qatar. Right. And one of the things that FIFA was able to do because Qatar is a very centralized, authoritarian state, is they could say to Qatar, hey, we want the world cup ticket to come with free transportation, free mass transportation when you're in the country. And the government could just say, okay. And we had Adam Krafton, who's a reporter for the Athletic, who's great. He came on our podcast, he was talking about all this stuff, and he was like, you know, FIFA wanted to do that with the United States. And it's like, that doesn't work in the United States. And when you make the deal to have the world cup in the United States, they just say to you, look, if you want free transport, that's great. Go talk to the cities. You know, even if we wanted to give that to you with FIFA tickets, we cannot. And so Viva actually had a little bit of a different. Of a difficult time after Qatar in 22 and Russia before it in 2018, like getting the sort of sweetheart, autocratic deals that it wanted to get for people attending the world cup for the world cup event. And so what you have is this stuff that develops.
- [18:14]
C
If you have been listening to this show since the beginning or for any amount of time, you already know our dear partners at home field, you can find them@homefieldapparel.com I think every time of year is a good time to check out home fields products to wear them in various parts of your body. The one I want to talk about right now, though, is your head. It is summertime. If you are like me, you have been struggling a lot with the extremely bright rays that come off the sun and go near your eyes and onto your forehead. And I am happy to report that right now at homefieldapparel.com, you can check out home field's hat mystery boxes. No matter what your favorite style of hat is, you can get dad hats, trucker hats, snapback hats, corduroy hats. You've probably seen all of these different styles in the home field catalog for your school or another school whose collection you admire. You can also buy single hats, of course, for your school or just about any other in the home field catalog. Check this out at home field apparel.com look stylish. Keep the sun out of your eyes. These are two of the most important food groups this time of year. Thank you very much to our partners at home field apparel.com I have a question, Mike. Richard kind of alludes to it as corruption as part of the FIFA model with maybe pandering by elected officials to large voting blocs. And so they expand the World Cup. It almost sounds, granted, the line between corruption and just straight up, you know, populism, which is much more, much, much less of a negative connotation, can be a little bit blurry sometimes. Is this corruption, or is this just the result of FIFA being a governing body where you have to please a lot of people? Because I actually think, oh, I mean, college football might benefit if the Mountain west got a vote.
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A
It is. It is corruption, but it's corruption because, like, at every step along the way, these guys have their own little fiefdoms. Right. You know, distributing money to every football association in every country around the world is not a highly audited, thorough process of resource allocation.
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C
Right.
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A
It's at every step along the way, at every domino, it goes through a corrupt little fiefdom where everybody is getting their form of a cut. And everybody in the process understands that. When you say we're going from 32 to 48 teams for the World cup, we are changing the degrees of access and who has the ability to get their own little taste. And, you know, for a United States World cup, what that's really about is FIFA sort of sticking the money funnel in as far as it can go and extracting as many dollars and states from the United States consumer economy as it can for, like, yes, eventually some of this money gets to football development around the world, but a lot of it gets into the hand, the hands of the people that run the game along the way. And everybody sort of understands that that's what it's about.
- [21:16]
B
Yeah. If you're listening to this podcast, just Google Jack Warner if you want to have a party. He's a real, real pioneer man.
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A
Had an apartment for his cats.
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B
Absolutely. Yes. There's that. And then Alex, you bring it up and you. You mention it as, effectively, populism. Like, I never want to do a. You gotta hand it to FIFA, but like, Sepp Blatter did bring the World cup to Africa. Like, it's. It's. And you have to kind of in. In the way where you say, well, America's a land of contrast. FIFA's a land of contrast. Like, you have to. You have to kind of, kind of acknowledge that, while also obviously, you know, also obviously, obviously pointing out and bringing up the much more negative things that they have done on the ledger. Like, yes. Did they bring the World cup to Qatar, to the Gulf states, to a different part of the world?
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C
Sure.
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B
Did they use migrant slave labor to do it? Yeah. So it's. It's, you know, that's when we talk about FIFA. That, that kind of borderline of not even borderline. That's when we talk about when does populism become corruption. I don't even want to pretend that there's some firewall between the two.
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A
And, and like, just to add to the point on Qatar, it went to Qatar because of explicit bribes that were paid to get it to go to Qatar.
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C
People went to, that is not kicked
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A
out of the sport and went and went to jail. Qatar got the World cup because they bribed people to get the World Cup. It like cut and dry. It's. You don't, you don't need an allegedly at the beginning of that sentence. Yeah, so, yeah.
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C
So, Mike, when we get to this actual format that we have now with the 48 team soon to become 32, to become 16, and then on and on and on, because of the dynamic that you just discussed where everyone's got to get a taste in order to vote for people, it does seem that we've gotten a lot of World cup teams that we, I mean, four that have never been in it before and by definition, 16 more teams that would have been in it, and a lot of them do seem to be teams that wouldn't normally get the shot. How well do you think this system has worked to get more countries excited about soccer by way of providing quote, unquote access?
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A
Yeah, I think, I think it works. I think that, that, that there's nothing wrong with like, that part of the system and that construction. And I don't think there's anything wrong with the competitiveness at the World cup either for providing extra access to 16 teams. Like, I do really think that it is a spectacle and it is a good spec. You know, the thing that we joke on our podcast is like, FIFA has the football. You know, as problematic as FIFA is as corrupt as it is as, as, you know, morally challenging as being a fan during the World cup can be. You watch the games, you watch what it means to people, you watch the spectacle. And man, just FIFA has the football and the football really does, like, during these weeks just shine. And it, you know, it shines in so many ways. Like at the end of the tournament, we're going to get insane competitive, high stakes matches. Now. You get these awesome stories of like, you know, go into Cabaretti and watching a match there. We, you know, were able to send a writer to Curacao in the build up. Like, all of these stories are great and they're real and they are absolutely legitimate. Like, you know, so were the stories of people not being able to get visas to come and watch their teams. Like, you don't want to. Oh, you don't want to whitewash the problems with the good stuff, but that doesn't mean the good stuff isn't there. And the tournament really does have a lot of this, like, real fun energy.
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B
Yeah, it's. You know, when you talk about the Scottish fans, like, kind of taking over Boston, for instance, the Scottish fans who don't look a lot like me, take taking over Boston, and then you realize whose fans aren't here in such droves. You realize the referee that quite literally could not get into the country.
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C
A team that isn't allowed to make camp in the United States and has to go off across the border within, what, minutes after their game's in.
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A
Yeah, look, I do want to, like. I want to highlight that I think there's two sort of different competing things going on here. Like Iran, who is not allowed to stay in the country after their games and has just been allowed to come more than a day, more than 24 hours before kickoff to play their games, is what happens when the current political climate sort of, like, directs its eye of Sauron on a problem. A lot of the other stuff is what happens, because there is a lot of neglect of the World cup as an event in the United States. In the current political climate, there are a lot of problems and challenges that would have been solved even by the current political administration had anybody paid attention to them more than 20 minutes before the tournament started. But they didn't. And, you know, it's interesting.
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C
I thought that that was part of the point of the bribery with the fake peace prize, like that. It's like, I actually kind of assumed that some of this would go off with less of a hitch, kind of, because sometimes, you know, sometimes corruption makes the trains run really efficiently. It was sort of like that.
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A
I mean, that's why.
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C
That is why that didn't happen.
- [26:35]
A
Yeah. I mean, that is why Gianni Andtino was at the White House, like, twice a week for six months before the World Cup. Like, he, as sweet for president, understood the assignment, but there is only so much you can do to make things in a big, complicated country work. And, like, some of the stuff about there was a Swiss player who initially had their entrance to the US denied, and then 24 hours later came in. This was just because people were asleep at the switch. Like, you know, it really, really was.
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B
It's incompetence versus malice to an extent.
- [27:09]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And like, to Be clear, malice can absolutely drive incompetence. Right? Like. Like not having all. Not feeling like it's important to have this squared away in a way that it would have been otherwise is its own form of malice. But it is definitely coming from a different place than when you talk about Iran, who had to change where their base camp was going to be for the World cup because the United States decided they would not let them stay in Arizona.
- [27:39]
C
Mike, on the expansion logistics, there's a lot here that I'm really curious about. It seemed like from the different pathways that the expansion created, like you had these explicit cases like we talked about with Cabo Verde and some other teams where they just had a clear path now that they might not have had before. And that's great. Like when I'm. One of the things that I like about the 12 team college football Playoff is that hits that magical. A word access, which doesn't mean you can contend, but gives a certain level of meaning to the games that are happening before the playoff. The regular season in college football, and I guess in international soccer, it would be the two years prior of matches that teams are playing. The thing that I worry about with a college football playoff expansion is will Georgia literally never miss the playoff? Like, does this. Will there never be a truly high stakes regular season Texas game ever again? Because, well, Texas has had some years where they would have been bad enough to miss it. Maybe Ohio State's the best example. Can Ohio State literally never miss the playoff ever? Like in 50 years, never miss it? I noticed that Italy is not in this World Cup. That's a serious point. Like, do you think that the, that FIFA preserved enough scarcity that like, you can still, obviously you can still miss it because I. Italy's running World Cup.
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A
In my life, there was this imbalance before, even at 32 teams. And it's because, like, soccer talent is so unevenly distributed around the world that like the vast. Like the thing that's so incredible about Italy missing is that even in Europe most of their qualification games should be gimmes, should be cupcakes. Like England plays, you know, San Marino a couple of times or whoever. Like the lowest seated in there, shout out Lichtenstein. Yeah, exactly. Luxembourg is a very nice city. I have been there. But like, you know, they're not putting together a competitive football team really. And so you have this dynamic already. It was shocking in 2018 when the US missed the world cup because in Kakaf, you know, the north north, the North American and Caribbean Federation, US And Mexico are all like, structurally they're always supposed to make it. So much has to go wrong to miss it. So this has kind of always been the case at the margins where what you have is like the best teams in the world should always make it. And it's unbelievably shocking if they don't. And then it's everybody else competing for the remaining spots. Except it's like until this World cup actually Africa had kind of an insane like structure to their qualifying where like no matter how good you were, it was a one game or two game, really playoff at the end of it. And half the teams made it and half didn't from that round. And so you would have a lot of good teams miss every time. And then eventually Africa decided, this is insane. We don't want like many of our most high profile teams to miss the World Cup. We're going to change our structure.
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B
But Nigeria, Nigeria is still not here.
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A
Yeah, Nigeria is still not here. It is true. They have nobody to blame for that one but themselves though, is the thing. So like you do have like a couple of countries even at 48 teams where they shockingly miss out. But yeah, this thing is constructed. And again, it's. Because it's once every four years. It's like a, it's pretty damaging if you have a major team who is not in this tournament. It's constructed so that the best teams, the biggest teams in the world will only, only occasionally miss, apparently, unless they're Italy.
- [31:08]
B
And it also set up, I was also going to say it also sets up for in a way, and it's in a way that I don't think American sports fans realize. Like, Mike, you correct me if I'm wrong here. I've never seen a US team play like they have played the last two games.
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A
I mean, it's unreal, it's great.
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B
But what people don't realize is they've been, they've been playing possum, they've been hiding. And you're able to do this because you don't have to actually qualify when you host.
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A
There is that.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Now there's a, there's a fine line here, right?
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B
Sure.
- [31:44]
A
There's a fine line between, hey, we can, you know, experiment, not play our best, try to find new talent, try different tactics, different formations, all of this stuff and then come together in the World Cup. And then there's the problem of, hey, we're the United States. Most of the time we own. We play the vast majority of our games that matter against teams that are worse than us in our location, right in concacaf. And then we have to go to a major tournament in the World cup every four years, and there are 15 to 20 teams that are better than us. And we have to figure out a way how to be successful in both, in both circumstances. And that is like, I mean, that has been like the substantive challenge of U.S. soccer for 15 years. And so just the international structures around international soccer create really weird sort of ripples and dynamics in that way.
- [32:43]
C
I also think, and I wonder if this is sort of what you're talking about when you mentioned the spectacle of the group stage of the 4018 World Cup. If I'm looking more charitably on World cup expansion exclusively because it's in every four years event, like, I don't have time to be tired of any of these teams. And I, Richard knows, and a lot of our listeners might have intuited this. I like soccer just fine. I'm not trying to be a meathead about it. I'm not watching non, non World cup, non euro international team games more than a couple times every four years. And so I couldn't get sick of this. Whereas if a 9 and 3 Big 10 team that's lost all of its good opponents gets into the playoff and I've seen them 10 times that year, I might be kind of sick of that.
- [33:27]
A
Oh, that's absolutely true. And the other thing about this, right, is like if you look at, say, the Spain Cabo Verde situation, right, where that group, those four teams that are playing each other are Spain, Uruguay, Saudi Arabia and Cabo Verde, Saudi Arabia is a team that has been a borderline World cup team for 20 years, maybe longer. They famously beat upset Argentina in the group stage the last World Cup. Argentina goes on to win the whole World Cup. The difference between Saudi Arabia and Cabo Verde is much, much smaller than difference between either of those two teams and Spain as a when what you were doing when you expand the tournament is you're not letting in teams that are already dramatically worse than the teams that are there now. What you're doing is you're letting in more teams that absolutely are significantly worse than teams that have a shot to win the whole thing, but are not worse than the, you know, than the strata of teams that were already there that bring their own diverse stories, their own diverse situations without really making it competitive. Like, the competitive thing that we talked about is like, it's even harder for the good teams to get eliminated in the group stage. It's not that these individuals, individual Teams are so much worse.
- [34:44]
C
So I'm so interested by this part, this point specifically. FIFA brought in a bunch of new teams that, you know, aren't going to win, that, you know, aren't very competitive. Do you feel like the soccer world has a fracture of people on the other side of that who are, like, only best on best? I don't want these teams in this if they don't have a chance to win it. Why are we separate? Why aren't we just separating the wheat from the chaff? Because we do have that very much in college football. It's kind of the main culture war.
- [35:12]
A
Yeah, I think you have it a little bit, but at the same time, there's like, eight teams or whatever that have ever won a World Cup. Right. Like, once you've gone from six, you know, from 16 to 24 to 30, I think it's, like, a lot easier to make that argument from 24 to 32 than it is from 32 to 48. And then the other thing I'd say is, like, if you're a U.S. fan, if you are supporting U.S. soccer and, like, you know, obviously I do a lot of stuff internationally. I have to. I cover soccer. But, like, I'm an American broadcaster, right? Like. Like, the podcast is centered in America. I work at cbs, like, for cbs, you know, for the website covering soccer. Like, it's. I. I come from a distinctly American perspective. You can't really be on the side of, like, only the best of the best should be in this tournament because we wouldn't be there. Like, we are outside the circle of who should be here. And 1994, the last time the US hosted a World cup, was very much a case of, like, we want to expand who is interested in soccer generally to include the United States. And that project, you know, sort of you come back now to see if it's born fruit, but, like, the US Is on the outside of that circle, so you might get some of that. But, like, I don't know. There are other tournaments. There's. There's Euros, there's Copa America.
- [36:38]
B
The other tournaments thing, Mike, is. Is big, I think, because you hear what you would say is, oh, well, the G5 should have its own playoff. Well, Africa does. Africa literally has the African nations.
- [36:50]
A
Right.
- [36:50]
B
Like the other CONCACAF teams. Well, they may not win concacaf, and there's a conversation about whether CONCACAF and Com Ball, which is South. South America's federation, should merge so that America could play Argentina and Brazil and Uruguay. Different story. But like it. The Minnow federations do have their own playoffs every other two years.
- [37:10]
A
Yep.
- [37:11]
C
I find this more interesting to. To watch. I find it more interesting as a spectator as well. I think because of the nature of soccer once they're in, like you mentioned earlier, Mike, that you don't think any of the big brands, like the major prestige soccer nations are really at risk of getting knocked out over the course of the group stage because 32 teams get. Get through. But it does strike me that just because of the nature of soccer, like we just saw it, Spain can still get nil. Nil. Drew drawn against Cabo Verde in a way that, I don't know. Like, I was told that this was one of the biggest upsets in sports history. And I'm, I'm not disputing that. But, you know, zero. Zero seems possible, right? You can park the bus and you can have like, you can win a point. Like, you can win a spiritual victory in a way that if a college, if, if the college football equivalent happened, we would be talking about that coach as the greatest coach of this era right now. If the 12 seed were to go on the road and win a first round game, you know, 10, three or whatever.
- [38:14]
A
Yeah, I think it, I think it is true. I think it's also true that like, round robin changes things. You know, in that game, for example, Spain didn't play either of their two star wingers who are both coming back from injury. Could they have rushed Lamine Jamal back to start that game while he started the next game? So maybe, and maybe he plays half an hour more if it's an elimination game. And maybe that doesn't happen. It is true that underdogs have this possibility to get a draw in a way that doesn't exist in American sports. It's also true, I bet that the talent difference between Spain and Cabo Verde is still different than a 1 and a 12 seed in a college football playoff. It's certainly different than anything you're going to find in any American professional sport. And this is, you know, the gradients of talent across soccer and this is in large part because of the economic differences between the biggest and the smallest are just massive. I mean, they're, they are huge. And that's not to say that unexpected teams can't succeed. Like four years ago, Morocco made the semifinals, and that was legitimately very surprising. You know, Croatia is European, so sometimes they don't get included in this. But they are a very small, not very wealthy country that has just had a golden generation of talent and done very, very well. But it is in a knockout stage tournament. So, so hard to do that two times, three times to get deep into this tournament if you're one of these smaller teams, which is why it's important that you get these moments right.
- [39:59]
B
Mike, this is so you actually just brought up something that I legitimately am interested in. There's not anybody on Cabo Verde's team that would crack like Spain's squad, like Squee23, to the point where quite frankly, the reason why Morocco is actually pretty good is because their players on Morocco's team that hello colonialism, cannot get into Spain's roster even though they are eligible by birth, by grandparents, by whoever. But how many. And Alex, maybe you like how many players on James Madison could crack Oregon's too deep. You know what I mean?
- [40:43]
C
Four or five maybe. Maybe. Maybe that's close.
- [40:46]
A
I mean, to be honest, that's closer than what we're looking at. That is soccer. That is closer.
- [40:51]
B
Nobody in Cabo Verde is getting near Spain's squad, whereas maybe, you know, a couple players on Tulane could play for
- [40:59]
C
Ole Miss, but they could nil. Nil them. And James Madison could not possibly do that to Oregon.
- [41:04]
A
That's right. That's absolutely right. You have greater talent divergence in soccer and it is somewhat because it is just because it is so hard to score goals, somewhat harder to bring all of that talent to bear over a given 90 minutes. That's just sort of the structure of the sport.
- [41:22]
C
While we're talking about the World Cup, I want to say thank you to a company that can help you get all around the world. That of course is our partners at Nokian Tires. Nokian is running something really fun this summer. You can follow along at nokian tires na on social media, Instagram, etc. But also go to nokiantires.comguide and you can enter your destination, real or imagined for your own dream summer road trip. I know people are taking a lot of those. I'm fresh off of one myself. It's a great time of year to be traveling around, especially if you can do it on four wheels. If you do that at nokiantires.comguide you'll be entered to win Nokian Tires swag. You follow along on Instagram, you'll find practical tips, highlights from other people's best entries. You can even make up where you're going and Nokian will not bother you about it. Thank you very much to our partners at Nokian Tires. Travel somewhere fun this summer. It's a great time to do it, Mike. When James Madison was playing Oregon last December. Richard and I were both in alignment on this, and if memory serves, we were pretty explicit about it before the game. James Madison has no chance in this game. We are not going to entertain. Like, there are years where I would think that a really good group of six representative could win against the five seed in the playoff. Maybe. I'm not going to say it's never going to happen. I think it probably will. But, like, it just wasn't going to happen here. There was way too big a talent disparity. We didn't believe in it. But I still liked that this game was happening because the pathway to the playoff for James Madison enriched more of their games and more games in their conference and other conferences like it over the previous 15 weeks. Has that happened with. Has that happened, or does that even need to happen with international soccer? Sort of, you know, not during the World Cup. You mentioned Richard, like, they already have continental championships that are a big deal. So I'm not sure if, like, I'm not sure if international soccer fans were starved for access to the World Cup.
- [43:18]
A
Look, every country in the world starts the process of qualifying for the World cup, you know, with an opportunity. Every country in every federation around the world begins the playoff process of getting into the World Cup. It is like, you know, it is true that as you expand, you have, like, a more optimistic path if you are a Cabo Verde, if you're a. Especially this year, if you're a Curacao. Because in North America, right, the U.S. canada and Mexico all were automatically in this tournament as the hosts. And even with that, you still have teams that have been borderline World cup teams in the past that missed out from North America. Jamaica's not here. Costa Rica's not here. And so it is a competitive process in that way. But I think it comes back to sort of what. Like, I. I think what you're talking about with that path being viable is just how soccer works in general, right? That you have these signposts along the way that everybody is just decided is meaningful, right? Haiti qualifying for the World cup from CONCACAF this time, second time ever. It's just everybody understands that and believes that to be a worthwhile accomplishment regardless of what they do at the tournament. And that's a playoff process, right? That's a qualification through a playoff process. And for Haiti, those games mean a lot. You know, in a normal year, when the U.S. is qualifying for the World cup, people get up for those games, you know, because, like, you want to make sure that you have it locked down and now we all remember 2018 where they didn't qualify it ma. Those games matter. So I don't think that like expanding it like did a lot to change that dynamic and qualification because there's enough hope at the beginning of a qualification process that. Yeah, you know, a large percentage of teams are pretty invested.
- [45:21]
C
Richard. It's interesting. Hearing this is sort of breaking any connection in my mind that makes me think of what I see as the success of the World Cup. Expansion should apply then to college football. Yeah.
- [45:33]
B
Because when you talk about it's there is a true meritocracy. Meritocratic. Is that the word? To get into the World cup right at the end of the day like 12 and. Oh, 12 and one James Madison, that one loss being its conference championship game was not getting in to.
- [45:56]
C
They had.
- [45:57]
B
They would never have been voted in
- [45:59]
C
to the college football if they had lost their conference championship instead of a regular season game to Louisville. That would have been it. Yeah, right.
- [46:06]
B
They never would have, I guess 12 and 2 in that respect would have never gotten in versus you know. Yes, you can play your way there if you're a pick your minnow country.
- [46:16]
A
But like the complicated thing about it in soccer is what that means is that a 48 team World cup is not the best 48 teams in the world. And that's something that's like pretty comfortable in soccer. You know, you look at a 36 team UEFA Champions League tournament, it's not the best 36 teams in Europe. Right. Because it's teams from small. You know, in the best 36 teams in Europe, there might be eight, nine or 10 English teams. You get four or five or six, depending on the year.
- [46:43]
C
Six is hard.
- [46:45]
A
So like soccer sort of like it's not explicit about it, but they are comfortable with that concept. Right. That we have these tournaments and we create them because we draw in teams from these various places to make the field. And the field size is not just like the best number of teams.
- [47:04]
C
I wish that more people in college football were more comfortable with that because in a, in a lot of sports this happens to varying degrees. I mean what is a seven win NFC south champion happens every so often or an eight, nine NFC south champion? And. And I don't think that too many people swore off the NFL playoffs because of that. And it sounds like roughly nobody in the world of soccer is doing that either. Where this takes my brain is okay, like expand the playoff to 16 or 24 teams and actually guarantee more spots for the group of six because you're they're not going to do that. I know they're not going to do that. But, like, that would be a version of expansion. Even though I don't think those teams could win, that would kind of create this like potpourri of college football massive spectacle feeling. And it wouldn't be that out of line with the way that other sports act.
- [47:59]
B
But Alex, we're not going to expand the College Football Playoff that way.
- [48:03]
C
No, we're not.
- [48:04]
B
Like, because of who votes on it, who decides on it. Obviously it is two leagues that have the lion's share of votes in college football playoff expansion. You also cater to literally one school with the structure of the playoff and who gets a bid if they are in the top 12? Hello, Notre Dame.
- [48:21]
C
The Notre Dame situation is the opposite of what Mike was just describing for us with the way that governance decisions are made for the World Cup.
- [48:29]
B
Yeah, it's like if we took a team that was good 50 years ago, I'm trying.
- [48:32]
C
I'd be nice.
- [48:34]
B
Yes. I should be nicer to Notre Dame. It's like if we took a team that has historically been really great. I was trying to make an England comparison, but no, Notre Dame is historically better than England has been. Yeah, it's. You're not like the college or the FIFA version or the soccer version, I should say, of what College Football Playoff expansion should be is a Champions League concept. Right. Ten conference champions get in and everybody gets a way in and they plays their way in. That's what happens with the Champions League. Like, there's no reason why Bodo Glimt should have been in or should ever sniff a UEFA competition. That's Norway's sometimes best team.
- [49:18]
C
Like it's.
- [49:19]
B
It's in air quotes. Ridiculous to the sensibilities of an American sports fan. And yet they have that there and they're comfortable with it. And Bodo Glimp makes the semifinal of UEFA's second tier competition last year.
- [49:32]
A
Yeah, I mean, it does come with its own set of problems. Right. And I think you will find in soccer, people sort of complain about the same teams being deep in a tournament every single time. And they'll say that about the Champions League and they'll say that about the World Cup. You know, when we're. When we're down to the final eight and it's, you know, Argentina and Brazil and England and France and Spain and, you know, maybe there's like one or two unexpected teams. You will hear people say after all of that, 48 teams and all the whole thing, it's still the same teams at the end. And like that's true. Right? That's the price you pay for building a tournament where you want it to be the reward for some teams and the beginning of the path for other teams and putting them all on the same field. That's. That is the flip side of the coin. I like it. I think like, like I'm invested in how it works. I think it works really well. But I think that oftentimes you'll, I will hear people trying to quote, unquote, fix that problem. And it's like that's not really. That's that that existing is inherent in how you've built this thing. And I think that's okay.
- [50:47]
B
There's also a, there's a, there's a term for it too, by the way, and you'll hear it when we get to the knockout round. They call it the business end of the tournament. It's actually really funny. Like when we get to the time when, when the real teams are there, they literally call it, refer to it as the business end of the tournament.
- [51:03]
C
Mike, I feel like your point is really sound about the World cup being able to be two things. It can be a step a tournament, a step where you have to complete several more steps if you are a World cup championship contender or it's the reward in and of itself for a Cabo Verde or a like team which just gets to be there. I think what I don't want my tournaments to be and what I would say is to my eye, but please do argue with me, the downside of World cup expansion is like the case. I did a little looking here and you're gonna have to again double fact check me because I'm not the soccer man here. But it's the case of like Brazil or Sweden, a couple teams that as I was kind of reading through the qualification, qualification criteria, like teams that are plenty good enough to be here. We're just making the World cup isn't special to them, shouldn't be special to them. But they, they got in anyway because of expansion.
- [52:00]
A
Brazil's, Brazil's a little different. Brazil is one of the best five teams in this tournament. Yes, they had a kind of like down qualification campaign, but they're a team that like if they, they tied on points with a number of other teams, which is why the headline is that they were like fifth in South American qualifying. They would have, they would almost certainly it would have been a world stopping soccer shock if they were not in, in the tournament. Sweden is a perfect Example of this. Switzerland is a really good example of this. You know, it's mostly European teams
- [52:33]
C
that
- [52:35]
A
consistently get in the tournament. So, like, being here is not a big deal, but also are not.
- [52:44]
C
Can't win.
- [52:45]
A
Yeah.
- [52:46]
C
That's not you. That's why. That is my biggest beef about the way that college sports expansion is going right now. And it's actually worse in basketball. Like, they're expanding the basketball tournament so that last year's Auburn's men's team doesn't miss the tournament, which to me, sucks. Like, I don't need more middling Big Ten and SEC teams that are pretty good to be in the field if you were expanding it and you were bringing more hope to the masses and just letting me watch more basketball on that Thursday and Friday, like, cool. Great. I think what I fear is getting stuck in that no man's land.
- [53:23]
A
Yeah. And that's. That's sort of why, like, way back at the beginning of the podcast, when I was like, let's see how the round of 32 goes before we, like, crown this as a definitely successful achievement is it's like, let's see how many of these teams that are here, like, a lot, but don't have a chance to win the tournament. We feel excited about. About seeing play.
- [53:49]
C
Sure.
- [53:51]
A
And, you know, it's a little bit weird in. In international soccer because, like, how do you quantify Japan, for example? Like, Japan are a good team. They're here all the time. This is not an expansion issue.
- [54:04]
C
Right.
- [54:04]
A
Like, they're here. You know, they've. They're always one of the top teams in Asia, but, like, if they had a down year and so they didn't miss it, so they got into the tournament, like, it's really cool. Japan is not a traditional soccer powerhouse. They always play well. They play well against good teams. They have upset teams in the past. They're also not going to win the tournament. So are they a power conference team or they, you know, are they a mid major? Like, what are they? It's.
- [54:35]
B
It.
- [54:35]
A
It doesn't map exactly cleanly, even though, like, the. The set of. The set of issues are. Are the same.
- [54:43]
C
Yep.
- [54:45]
A
Australia is a really good example of this, too. Australia are at every World Cup. They actually moved from the OCEANIA conference into the Asia Conference because they were. I mean, this had a lot to do with club football and stuff as well. But it's just like every. All the teams from Australia were so much better than the teams they were playing against. They moved into Asia. They still qualify all the time. Like, I don't think they've, like somebody. I, I might be wrong, but I
- [55:08]
B
don't think I am.
- [55:09]
A
I don't think they've ever moved past around a 16. Like, if you expand, if they make it because of an expanded tournament, like, I don't think it's all that exciting. I think the jeopardy for them is like, are we going to be there again? But at the same time, like, they're not a European team that you see all the time. You know, they're, they're, they are something a little different. This is their chance to play against the. I mean, even the United States is of the world. Right? Like, so it's tricky. It's a balance.
- [55:41]
C
Yeah. Mike, this is. Even though it doesn't map perfectly onto college football, this has been really interesting for me to get a sense of your experience with the sport that you cover day to day doing kind of this maximalist, or dare I say not maximalist, maybe they'll do it again. Expansion. Last thing. If you were consulting the powers that be in college football on what they should be thinking about, and hey, who knows, even what they should do as they consider expanding their playoff. Pretend that you were not on a retainer or financially beholden to the Big Ten, the SEC, to Notre Dame, or to a G6 conference, but you just wanted the median fan of the sport to enjoy it more and for it to be a better event. What would you advise?
- [56:21]
A
I think that if you're going to expand, you need to do it in a way, as we were talking about, that makes a graduate at reward of some sort. There's a million different ways you can do it. Do you, do you know you can do a playoff that's split into two conference paths? Going to a championship game where maybe you keep all the big teams on one side and some of the other teams on the other side, you can have a much bigger, broader system where, like, you know, teams are going to lose at the beginning. But like, as we were saying, it's like the, like the pinnacle is getting there. I think the danger that I would see for college football, and it seems to be the path they're sort of like blinkered and locked into, is like you make a traditional playoff bigger, in which the only thing that matters is winning the whole thing, and you bring in more teams that can't win the whole thing. And I think that those two things are at odds, and you got to solve that problem.
- [57:15]
C
Mike Goodman of the Double Pivot podcast and CBS Sports. It's been a real pleasure. Mike, thank you for making the time. I know you're. You've got, like, 12 hours today of soccer watching and then additional writing you have to do. So we all really appreciate you making the time for us while you're at it.
- [57:31]
A
Thanks, Alex.
- [57:31]
B
Thanks for.
- [57:32]
A
This is a lot of fun. It's a really good conversation.
- [57:35]
C
U.S. world cup coming. What's our team cheer? What do we say?
- [57:42]
B
You don't want to do the full. I believe on this.
- [57:44]
A
Yeah, I believe I do.
- [57:45]
C
That's right. We don't have time for that. We're leaving that in our producer. Just leaving that in.
- [57:49]
B
There we go. I'm going to lunch.