~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.
That was actually a good one if you ask me, I mean the last champions should be there, even if they are not as good anymore, it just means that the previous champion is there for other teams to beat at least. Even if they fail to go up in the group stages, that still means there are 3 other teams to beat them in the group stages as well. Long story short I supported it but it's gone so never mind that.
Host is still a big issue, of course host will play because it would be hard not to, but when the hosts are growing in size it's becoming an issue. Look at Canada/USA/Mexico right now, that's three teams automatically there, which prevents another 3 team to participate in it as well. I can't really say that it's going to be different or anything but after all we are talking about a situation where too many hosts would mean terrible for other teams.