Unpacking Luis Figo’s FIFA presidency platform, including the 48-team World Cup

Sepp Blatter has been virtually unopposed during his reign as FIFA president, which started in 1998. Since then, FIFA’s reputation with football fans has gone down the toilet, even as Blatter has extolled the virtues of expanding the organization’s revenues and bringing the World Cup to new venues like South Africa, Russia and Qatar. He’s up for re-election again in 2015, and legendary Portuguese footballer Luis Figo will be one of his challengers.

We’ve heard some spitballing of ideas from a number of candidates since the last World Cup, but Thursday saw Figo outline some of the things he’ll be pushing as part of his candidacy.

It’s worth noting Figo isn’t making a big point of tackling corruption in FIFA. Perhaps that’s just because he hasn’t had enough time to put together his platform on that matter as it’s not his area of expertise, but it would also be a pretty bad way to get corrupt people to vote for him. Dutch FA president Michael van Praag is the candidate who’s been most serious about corruption as a centerpiece of their candidacy.

Without any further ado, here’s a rundown of Figo’s ideas, as presented by the BBC Thursday.

He only has one truly bad idea.

Reverting back to the previous interpretation of the offside rule, “where a player is judged offside whether directly involved in the play or not” - Oh, god, please no. What’s the point of this? That fans are confused? Passive offside rules, for two reasons. One, it’s an additional attacking tactic that can be used by really smart players, and marveling at Lionel Messi intentionally making use of the passive offside rule to screw with defenses is one of my favorite pastimes. Two, this would lead to more stoppages of play and fewer goals. No one wants more whistles and no one wants fewer goals. Everything about this idea sucks.

These aren’t horrible ideas, per se, but we’re going to need to know a lot more about the execution before we sign off.

A 48-team World Cup - Figo’s thrown out the idea that the tournament could be split into two 24-team tournaments, played on different continents. The top teams from each tournament would then come together in one country for the knockout stage.

There would be a lot of benefits from splitting up the World Cup. Two countries get the cultural and tourism benefits of hosting a cool global event, but they get to split up the infrastructure costs, reducing the likelihood of massive cost overruns and white elephants. It would also ensure that everyone gets to watch at least some of the World Cup, because inevitably, games will be played while people are at work or sleeping no matter where the tournament is placed right now. And it’ll be nice to give more teams a chance to qualify for the tournament, since everyone loves cool first-time Cinderella stories, and youth soccer in a given country should theoretically benefit from that nation making the World Cup.

But nobody wants quality to suffer, especially given that the World Cup can often produce some boring games at the moment, and it always features a small handful of teams that are not competitive at all. The gap between the 32nd and 48th best team in the world isn’t that big, but the quality of the average game would suffer even if the top teams wouldn’t be dishing out bigger beatings.

The expansion of the field also wouldn’t produce the same benefits as doing it for the Women’s World Cup will. There are already 60-odd teams with a realistic chance of making the finals and not embarrassing themselves in the men’s game, but about eight teams that make up an “Old Girl’s Club” of sorts in the women’s game. Expansion of the game to new places is cool, but it’s not at all necessary in men’s football.

Ultimately, this is unlikely to happen, mostly because people will scream about tradition. It’s not a completely insane idea, though.

Redistributing $1bn of FIFA’s $1.5bn cash reserves to the 209 national federations - This sounds like a good idea, but it would probably have to be done with serious restrictions. FIFA can’t just write checks because dudes like Chuck Blazer and Jack Warner exist. I have precisely zero confidence that most of this money wouldn’t just go into executives’ pockets if FIFA wasn’t really diligent about making sure they knew what was done with this money.

No one could possibly think these aren’t good things. Sepp Blatter might adopt them as part of his platform to squash opposition.

Spreading half of FIFA’s $2.5bn revenue over four years to associations to fund grassroots football - Like the above idea, except actually specific. Just make sure you’re auditing everyone, Luis.

Increased use of technology in the game - The argument against this is that top-level football shouldn’t use anything that grassroots football can’t afford, which is insane. When millions of dollars are on the line, we should use whatever technology is available to make sure the game is as fair as possible. A suggestion: Invest in offside technology so that we can stop relying on crappy linespeople. Or clone Sian Massey. That works, too.

Using sin-bins for unsporting behavior - HELL, YES. I’m all about the orange card/power play. When the referee isn’t sure if a foul is a yellow card offense or a straight red, how about a yellow card PLUS a power play? The power play is by far the best idea that ice hockey has ever come up with, and it should be adopted in some way, shape or form by all sports.