All Time World Cup!
First things first: How many teams would be involved? With a couple of tweaks here and there, the World Cup has had three formats over the years: Until the 1980s only 16 teams qualified –too few if trying to reflect all the greatest players ever. More recently that rose to 32 teams, but that ran the risk of allowing too many weak teams. Therefore, it was decided that the All-Time World Cup would comprise 24 teams, split into six groups, as was used from 1982 to 1994.
This was not a universally popular format, as is meant four ‘best losers’ qualifying along with the top two in each group. But it could be argued that that format kept every team in the hunt for all three of their games, and would prevent a deserving team being knocked out by getting drawn against two giants.
These days which country a footballer plays for is fairly straightforward, and once he has played for one country, he can’t play for another. But the rules on eligibility have fluctuated a lot over the years. Until the 1960s it was fairly common for players to switch allegiance mid-career, often for tenuous ancestral reasons. Thus Luis Monti could be a World Cup runner up with Argentina in 1930 and a World Cup winner with Italy four years later. Ladislao Kubala actually played for Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Spain in his illustrious career.
For the All-Time World Cup, the ruling was to simply back-date the current rules, and so players were tied to the country they first played a full international for. So, Puskas was Hungarian, not Spanish, and Monti and Raimundo Orsi were Argentinian, not Italian.
On another note, very few players who are still active today have been selected. The levels of achievement needed to be worthy of this tournament can take a whole career to accumulate, and the press always tend to over-hype whoever the present-day stars happen to be. The benefit of a little perspective helps sort the wheat from the chaff. There were exceptions though, such as Robbie Keane and Raul, who are already their country’s all-time top scorers and could therefore hardly be omitted.
There is a further consideration however: What about players whose actual nations changed or no longer exist? For example, Robert Prosinecki scored at Italia 90 for Yugoslavia, and at France 98 for Croatia, while Mattias Sammer ‘moved’ from East Germany to a united Germany. The fall of the Eastern bloc radically altered the map of Europe, and therefore European football.
A decision needed to be made on whether to include present-day, independent teams, or the historical, unified sides.
Without wishing to offend the fiercely proud citizens of countries such as Croatia and the Ukraine, it was decided that due to the overall nostalgic feel of the tournament, the teams would play in the configurations in which they had spent most of their footballing history. That meant a divided Ireland but one team each for Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the USSR.
I have however endeavoured to reflect the backgrounds of the players in each squad. For example an S or a C next to each player in the Czechoslovakia squad to denote whether they are Slovakian or Czech.
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