Elimination of the 4th best in concacaf....

[Sam !!]

I saw someone mention this on Big soccer and decided to put my own feelings on how thing's should be approached in the future....We will truly have a situation where one of Mexico, Honduras and Jamaica will be mere spectators when the Hex rolls around. While there are other groups with the likes of Suriname, a very weak Haiti and Cuba boosting the Concacafs true contenders goal differential. Jamaica, plus the aforementioned, find ourselves round in round out playing potential death matches every single time we suit up. I think the remaining teams that are still in contention from concacaf's group 2 all deserve a right to play in the final round of world cup qualififying. It is also my opinion that whichever countries that do move on would not be any less competitive come next year's Hexagonal.


My question for everyone on our board is do you think it's time that Concacaf adopts a Conmebol style 10 team qualification process with I guess an uncaf, Caribbean and North American playoff system to determine the 10? This change would possibly determine the selection that would really and truly be the best representatives from our region.

[Jangle]

something worth looking into

[Hortical]

Under the existing scenario, the groups are too unbalanced. I would support a scenario where at least the top 8 teams qualify for the final round.

[Culture Sound]

yo Sam is a good plan still...but you are basing it just off our current self inflicted dilemma...the way how the system is set right now is fair in my opinion because it gives more small teams a chance to get a one lucky win in the prelims and make it to the semifinal round and take that experience and monetary earning to develop their football which will benefit the region in the long run. I don't think that our region is deep enough to have a system like CONMEBOL which will make the 10 team round robin boring and discouraging to the smaller teams...in my opinion

[Warlord]

My question for everyone on our board is do you think it's time that Concacaf adopts a Conmebol style 10 team qualification process with I guess an uncaf, Caribbean and North American playoff system to determine the 10? This change would possibly determine the selection that would really and truly be the best representatives from our region

.

That type of format will not work in our region. There are too many financial and logistics issues with a format like that in our zone. The current format of preliminary knockout and group stages (semifinal round) and (hexagonal) is much better.

The only problem with Concacaf's current format is that it gives bigger teams like the USA and Mexico a virtual free pass to the hex. I mean there are seedings involved with those teams which get to skip by preliminary knockout stages but if the rest of footballing nations in Concacaf can get better they can challenge the top two. Over the last decade + we've seen improvements from Honduras, Panama, T&T, Cuba, Haiti and Guatemala, so it is possible as time goes on.