I've read the thread Europe vs Asia and thought, what about other continents? As there are 5 continental zones for qualifications to the WC, these zones can be named "continents" and the continent vs continent results can be seen.
So I've tried to check all group results and see how does it look like.
Number of teams
Europe 10
Americas 5
Asia 4
Africa 3
Oceania 2
Total wins-losses, average score, %wins
Europe 27-7, 82.6-71.3, 79.4%
Oceania 6-4, 80.0-69.5, 60.0%
Americas 12-11, 78.7-72.4, 52.2%
Africa 3-13, 64.1-80.1, 20.0%
Asia 3-17, 70.7-82.8, 15.0%
I'd say %wins reflects how strong is average team in each continent.
Does not look good far Asia. But at least they won matchup against Africa 2-1, 73.0-70.0
Although Oceania lost matchup with Europe, but they got better point difference 2-3, 80.4-80.0
Oceania also got better point difference against Americas, 1-1, 71.5-67.5
And, finally, Europe have clear advantage against Americas, but they win much harder than lose, 8-4, 77.6-79.6
In conclusion, such statistics tells that in case if we'll get 8 additional teams to WC to make it total 32, it should be +6 teams to Europe, +1 to Americas and +1 to Oceania.
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Nice numbers.
"In conclusion, such statistics tells that in case if we'll get 8 additional teams to WC to make it total 32, it should be +6 teams to Europe, +1 to Americas and +1 to Oceania."
This is the case where we can not trust statistics to make decisions - we can not add any more Oceania teams, because they got nothing more. I am pretty sure that Vanuatu or Papua and New Guinea game against Serbia or USA would not be so interesting. IMO Americas deserved one more spot. Venezuela, Uruguay or Mexico are pretty nice teams.
You need to compare the 5th in Asia vs 11th in europe vs 3rd in oceania vs 4th in africa.
And you can see who deserve more spots.IMO Difference between 4th and 5th in asia isnt that big as the difference is in oceania between 2nd and 3rd.
IMO, Europe has 16 ready teams.Africa deserves 3.5, Asia 3.5, Oceania 2.5, North America 3.5 and South America 4.5.
europe 16 for sure
asia 3 for sure
africa 3 for sure
oceania 2 for sure
north america 3 for sure ( canada, usa, puerto rico)
south america 4 for sure
thats 30 teams. Then the 4th and 5th from asia, 4th and 5th africa, 3rd in oceania, 4th and 5th from north america and 5th in south america play a mini-tournament of which 2 qualifies to world cup.
Fair enough:
Europe 14
Asia + Oceania (playing togheter) 7
Americas 7
Africa 4
4 more europeans would be fair, since teams like Polonia, Italy are nice. But after that, it´s not like there are too many forces left in Europe.
And if we have to choise between two equivalents teams like Macedonia and Venezuela, my option would be to globalize the basketball.
I would definetly give 0.5 seats to continents. Let them battle each other in qualification, and the better team to advance.
Dont forget its 4 year thing. And in 4 years a team that is great can easily turn into garbage and the continent itself as well.