Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has broken his silence over the Fifa crisis, when speaking to Arsenal Player. The world footballing body has been under scrutiny since May when a raid on their headquarters saw several leading figures of the organisation be arrested and President Sepp Blatter be suspended.
Fifa have since declared that it intends to be far more transparent in its operations but Arsene Wenger believes that the restructuring of the organisation needs to occur both on and off the field.
Wenger has criticised Fifa’s policy of increasing the number of teams that are included in competitions and claims that seeking popularity from either Africa or Europe will only weaken international competitions as a whole.
It is now or never – you would like to put it all on the table. You see the European Championship has gone from 16 to 24 teams.
I bet you [because of] the way the system was organised, to be elected as new president of Fifa, the programme would be to move the World Cup from 32 to 40 teams. Why? Because Africa today has five countries in the World Cup and Europe has 13 – that cannot work for much longer.
You cannot take countries away from Europe and if you want to be elected as Fifa president, you need the votes from the African countries, so you want to give more to Africa. So the next World Cups will be 40 teams.
The Frenchman then moved on to suggest that the way that international fixtures and competitions are organised leaves no real time for players to rest properly and so if Fifa carry on in the manner that they have, the Frenchman can see the top clubs keeping hold of their players and walking away from other competitions.
We face a situation where it’s impossible for the players to get through a season and have rest. This kind of friction that it creates between the clubs, national teams and international competitions can create a split.
One day the clubs could move away and say, ‘Enough is enough, we pay a huge amount of money for our best players so we’ll get them together ourselves and organise our own competitions’.
It’s important that all of that gets on the table while we have the opportunity.
