I’ve always liked how clean the CONMEBOL World Cup qualification is, just all 10 teams in a round robin league table format with 18 games. In contrast AFC is so huge there are so many rounds of qualifying to go through.
I love it but it’s a gauntlet of a knife fight. So many grudges, so many tough away trips.
My only frustration is how long it takes—this cycle won’t be over until September 2025.
I think that’s the beauty of it though. A World Cup campaign truly is a 4 year run/cycle here in South America.
That, and the best teams in the zone will always play each other as part of the qualifiers.
Club competitions are also split into zones, not a big fan of this but I guess the sheer geographic size of AFC and clubs having less resources makes it impractical to have a truly continent wide competition until the later stages.
Some people keep saying that CONMEBOL and CONCACAF should merge and play the qualifiers and continental competitions together, but it’s most likely an unified confederation would follow the same zonal model used by the AFC, thus rendering an unified confederation basically useless.
I have always thought it should be a tournament out of itself. Especially now with so many teams qualifying, it would give all teams something to fight for until the end
