I don’t know about you’ll but having more teams can make the World Cup dreadfully long and boring too, and many will avoid watching the initial matches as the big teams will probably be clashing later on only. Also I too felt that Italy should have made it this year, but in the end it felt like that they ran out of desire to play at the World Cup.
Yeah, I agree. I'm not sure how the new format of the world cup will work. The first few matches will probably feel a bit like the qualification matches to be honest.
Hopefully they keep the competition entertaining, because the whole point of the qualification is to keep the level up in the world cup itself.
FIFA obviously wants, for financial and marketing reasons, that as many national teams as possible can participate in the World Cup, and the interestingness and quality of the competition is less important to them.
It all comes down to profit in the end, as always.
I think that the fans will always be interested in the matches of their national teams, and that they will start to be interested in the rest of the competition only when the group stage of the competition is over.
It is really a shame that such a great national team, such as Italy, will not participate in the World Cup, but I believe that they will surely participate in the next World Cup, because it will be much more easy to qualify, given the much larger number of participants.