\n<\/p>\n
With the exception of Cape Verde, who are making their debut next year, Africa’s qualifiers are all established on the world stage: Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia. <\/p>\n
Six are in the world’s top 50 with Ghana, in 73rd, the lowest-ranked of the nine. It would be a stretch to suggest any of these countries don’t deserve to be there over a European nation.<\/p>\n
But what do the numbers tell us? Let’s use relative strength again by looking at the top 50 and weighting it to the confederation. <\/p>\n
Uefa has seen its share of the World Cup places fall, from 54% in the 1990s, to 33.33% today – yet nearly half of its teams (46.30%) are inside the top 50. <\/p>\n
So, is it fair that Europe was only given three more slots when Fifa added another 16 places for the 2026 event?<\/p>\n
Africa now gets nine places with 53 participants, 21.43% of the automatic slots but only seven (14%) are inside the world’s top 50. That suggests they might be over-represented by a small amount, but not too much.<\/p>\n
Concacaf is about on point with relative strength. It now gets six nations at the World Cup (14.29%), with five of its 32 teams (15.63%) in the top 50.<\/p>\n
The real outlier is Asia, which has only four of its 46 participating nations (8.70%) in the top 50, yet it gets eight automatic places (19.05%).<\/p>\n
So perhaps Gattuso did have a point in there somewhere, but he’s unlikely to get any sympathy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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With the exception of Cape Verde, who are making their debut next year, Africa’s qualifiers are all established on the world stage: Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia. Six are in the world’s top 50 with Ghana, in 73rd, the lowest-ranked of the nine. It would be a stretch to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1438,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}