Quote from: Sithara007 on Today at 10:37:14 AM

Quote from: nullama on Today at 07:11:55 AM

Quote from: Sithara007 on Today at 03:15:26 AM

~snip~
Argentina still has to qualify despite being the defending champions? Anyway from your list, only Brazil and Argentina looks certain to me. Competition is extremely strong in CONMEBOL qualifiers. Upsets can always happen and last time it was Uruguay and Ecuador who managed to qualify apart from the two top teams. Colombia lost out and later tried their best to get Ecuador disqualified. Chile and Paraguay lost out as well, and they were also not too happy about it. Peru had a golden chance of qualifying, but they lost to Australia in the playoffs.

Yeah, since a long time ago the champion of the world cup has to go back to the qualifier stage. Only the host gets automatic qualification.

The winner of France 1998, which was France, was actually the last team to qualify automatically as the champion. So, in Korea-Japan 2002 we saw this happening for the last time, more than 20 years ago.

OK... Sounds a bit unfair for me. If FIFA can grant automatic qualification to the hosts (that would mean multiple countries using this loophole to gain direct entry to the world cup in 2026), then they could have given this exception to the defending champions as well. And that would mean that an additional qualification slot would be available for the CONMEBOL region, which is also fair given the extreme competition for qualification from that confederation. Either FIFA needs to ask everyone (including hosts) to qualify, or they need to give the direct entry to both hosts and defending champions.

That's something that is discussed before about the World Cup hosts getting automatic qualification without any condition with other teams.
The fact about this rule is some countries are not even in the situation to play in the world cup but they are playing there just because they are hosting it. But, imagine a country like America is hosting the next world cup but they don't play there, I think their people will lose interest to host this tournament, and maybe that's why they made this rule.