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Two teams with 1/4 of the world's potential customers did not make the cut for this year's tournament, more's the pity. The tournament will likely be expanded
by onlypassingthru 2mo ago
Two teams with 1/4 of the world's potential customers did not make the cut for this year's tournament, more's the pity. The tournament will likely be expanded until these two teams can qualify.
- mcmcmc 2mo agoWhy bother? If it’s not a popular sport there already, the viewership wouldn’t be worth the cost
- dghlsakjg 2mo agoI don’t know about China, but India has a lot of fans and had pretty good viewership. Whether a national team qualifies isn’t that strongly correlated to whether the sport is popular. Most of south and Central America are as fanatical as Brazil or Argentina, but they were not in the tournament.
- fakedang 2mo agoXi Jinping is a massive football fan and tried incentivizing China's own league early on in his first term. He was quite successful in that too - just that Chinese people preferred watching the European leagues rather than their homegrown ones.
- gitgud03191 2mo agoWouldn't it be easier for countries of 1+ billion people to find 11 players who can play at the level of other countries? The Asian Football Confederation is hardly the most competitive in the first place.