Greg Dyke - respect him as a businessman but the saviour of English football, what's that eh?
Premiership rationale -
top teams have too many games and players are burnt out re international football, so let's ease the fixture overload and help the England team
Premiership practical -
cut down on cup games with lower league nonentities and restrict number of teams allowed into PL and instead play more friendlies across the timezones in new markets and have a Champions League with 4 teams (inc. 3 non-champions) and have endless "group matches" with good new TV deal. FFS didn't Man Utd get a bye from the FAC one year so they could play a big money game?
Must turkeys vote for Christmas twice?
Over the last twenty years, the Premiership teams play less league matches, and the League Cup and FA Cup have had their fixtures trimmed via more one off games (LC), and the FA Cup is now allowed only one replay instead of continuing until there is a winner, not withstanding there is a lot of 'squad rotation' in the cups.
The only competitions that have increased their fixtures are Champions League/Europa League and qualification games for the WC and Euro Champs, caused by the break-up of Russia (even though Putin is doing his best to bring them back together), and the break-up of Yugoslavia.
The European competitions only get interesting when it becomes knock-out, like the old competition used to be, whilst the qualification for the next Euro Champs could be easily simplified.
As France will automatically qualify as hosts, we need 23 out of 53. My method would be to take the worst 14 European nations by FIFA rankings, make them play off in two-legged matches, to qualify for the next stage, where they will play the seven seeded countries, again in two-legged play-offs, and the winners qualify for Euro 2016.
The other remaining 32 countries, again are drawn in two-legged play-offs for the last 16 games. All qualifying done and dusted, and every game important and qualifying is done inside 4 matches instead of 12/14 matches.
But UEFA don't do common sense...and nor does the FA.
