Goughy said:
There will always be teams that underperform like S&M. However, look at the breakdown of the 1/4 finalists. There are 6 European and 2 S.American Teams. Adding in another African country is a joke. Weakens the competition further. Look how poor Togo are and they qualified ahead of Nigeria, Senegal etc. Sad fact is that Africa has produced a number of very good player and their teams have advanced but European soccer has progressed faster.
Yes, they did, and England missed the World Cup in 94, and Holland in 02. The fact is, sometimes good teams stuff up in qualifying and don't make it, and every team except Brazil has missed a WC at some stage. Europe is the strongest region in world football in terms of the strength of the middle of the pack teams, which is why they have the most spots by a long way, but part of the point of the World Cup is that it is a world competition. And as far as the gap widening is concerned, that's clearly not true. Look at the performance of Ghana and the Ivory Coast at this WC, where IC would have qualified from any other group, and Ghana not only beat the number two ranked side in the world, but played them off the park. If anything, it's been a constant theme of this WC that the gap between the top and bottom sides in world football isn't really that large. Note Ecuador beating Poland 2-0, Ghana beating the Czech's 2-0, Ukraine struggling against Tunisia, Ivory Coast beating S&M, and so on. The balance of 6/8 European sides left is significant, but it's the lower quality sides from a region that already gets a dozen spots that matter, not the ones that are capable of winning the tournament, and there's no evidence that Europe deserves more spots. And of course, at every WC there's a handful of European sides that make it and don't do anything, just like Tunisia etc at this one from Africa.
Togo are rubbish yes, and Angola aren't much good either, but the strength of African football is shown by the quality of the teams that didn't make it, as well as the performance of a couple of those that did. The weakest division in the world is North/Central America, which has four teams at this world cup, of which only Mexico performed notably. From Asia, only Australia made the second round, and they didn't qualify from Asia for this competition. Africa and South America on the other hand, like Europe, have genuinely high quality sides that are capable of competing with anyone in the world, and that should be the criteria for getting extra qualification spots. Currently North/Central America has 3.5 spots and Asia has 3.5 also, so I'd like to see that go down to 3 each, or maybe 3.5 for Asia and 2.5 for CONCACAF, if the competition stays at 32 spots. Given the goal of expanding the international nature of the competition and the quality that African sides have shown consistently since 1990, the extra spot should go to Africa.
Anyway, I think you underestimate the quality of some of the football sides from other parts of the world that missed out. Uruguay are certainly better than your dismissal of "not very good", and the likes of Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal, Columbia and so on are quite capable of competing with most middle of the road European sides too.