This is laughable, imagine at this years euro's they decided england, spain, italy, france, and germany could not be in the same group.
This is laughable, imagine at this years euro's they decided england, spain, italy, france, and germany could not be in the same group.
I think that Canada really needs more than one seed. But the only thing holding us back is our lack of proper professional teams.
For those who don't quite understand the way UEFA CL works there is a very logical explanation.
In UEFA they use a coefficient system to both rank all of the clubs within UEFA and to rank the national leagues. The ranking of the clubs determines the seeding of the individual club in the competition and the ranking of the national league determines the number of entries from every country.
I'm going to first explain how the ranking of clubs works.
Every time a club plays in a UEFA competition (whether CL or Europa) regardless of the round (whether prelim, group stage or knockout) the team can gather "points" according to their performance in that match. A win for example (I am not exactly sure about the actual point system) can earn a club 1 point and a draw say 0.5 point. These points get added to a team's coefficient. Regardless of the point system, it is solely based on that club's performance in Europe and is a lot simpler than the FIFA rankings in that I don't believe it weighs competition "difficulty."
With these coefficients, every team is therefore ranked. Based on these rankings you know the seedings in preliminary rounds and the group stages. For example, when doing the group stage draw, the top 8 teams involved are put in Pot 1, the next 8 in Pot 2, and so on. Your national league's strength has no relevance to which pot a team will be placed. For example, Man United is usually in Pot 1 because of their strong play in CL NOT because the English league is considered a strong league. Likewise, Tottenham was placed in Pot 4 a few years ago because they really never actually played much in UEFA competition and therefore hadn't gathered enough coefficient points to be placed in a stronger pot. In other words, if by some miracle the EPL finished next year as 1. Stoke, 2. QPR, 3. Wigan, 4. Villa, there is a good chance that all for would be Pot 4 teams.
Now the National League coefficient depends only on the clubs' performances in all UEFA competition from that league. That is every time an English team wins in UEFA, England's coefficient goes up. There is no connection with the National Team at all. It is for this reason that England has more teams than say Netherlands. So like the individual clubs, national leagues are ranked and this determines the number of teams permitted from each league in the UEFA competitions. However, the national league's ranking has no influence on how the individual teams are seeded as mentioned above.
So having read that, I'm sure many here are probably annoyed at how CONCACAF can possibly function the way it does. Though 4 Mexican teams and 4 US teams sounds logical, the automatic seedings of teams based on where they are from is pretty ludicrous as it doesn't reward clubs that play well in the competition like UEFA does. Furthermore, yes we can argue that we only have one team since we play a four team competition, but that rule isn't explicitly stated by CONCACAF either. The seedings and the number of teams from each country still remains completely arbitrary which is unlike UEFA.
Lastly, 3 team groups is silly as we saw from the original Canadian championship. There is going to be so much match fixing in the last round.