How Football Playoffs Should be Improved

I'm not big fan of playoffs to decide promotion.  Four teams who have played at a certain level all season have to play each other over the course of three games to hope that they win.

If they're going to stay, then I think they can be improved upon, at the very least to make them fairer.  By this I mean that the team who finished higher should have some kind of advantage or benefit for doing so.  

Teams finish in this placement (behind promoted teams) :-

A - 85pts

B - 80pts

C - 79pts

D - 76pts

Instead of having team A play D and B play C over two matches, why have team D play one match at team C's ground.  The winner goes to team B's ground.  The winner of that plays the final at team A's ground.  Team A has a single game to play, at their own ground.

To add more of an advantage, perhaps the number of points a team has over their opponents during the regular season could be converted to a number of goals start.  Better still, the team gets that many penalties at the start of the game which would add a certain edge to the game.

So if team A plays team B, they would get 5 penalties at the start of the match.  This has the potential to give a team an unassailable lead, but they've earned that over the season.  Image a game with just two penalties at the start where both are saved - surely a real event to fire up the crowd.

How to Improve The Referee System

Recently there have been a number of referees who have come under fire for decisions which may have changed a game and have later been proved to be incorrect.  I think there are some simple steps which would improve how referees are perceived and also how football clubs react to referees.

Firstly, being a referee is a difficult job, a fast-paced game with huge stakes means players will try to gain any advantage they can, including influencing the referee.

Clubs Should Choose the Referees

Not directly, but a system should be implemented whereby referees are rated after each game by a number of people from a club (not just the manager).  The ref could be scored from zero to ten.  These scores should be public and then referees can be ranked.  They can be promoted and relegated by the strength of their performances over a number of games.  Clearly, a referee who gives all decisions to one team may get a ten from them, but they would get a zero from the other team.  A ref who has managed a game may get seven or eight from each side, and therefore score higher than the biased ref.  When two teams meet, the referee they have both scored the highest should be prioritised for that match.

Referees Should Work With the Same Assistants

Just like a team who know how each other play, surely a referee working with the same assistants will perform better.  I don't quite understand why fourth official is usually a top referee.  Surely the role of managing substitutes and adding-on time is easy, so should be the most junior position.  A team of five should go to each top-flight match and they should work together and be scored together.

The Top Officials Should Get the Most Rewards

The top refereeing teams should be able to work at this full time.  Football has the resources to enable this, and it would encourage more people to go into refereeing, with knowledge that good performances, consistently voted for by clubs, would lead to success.

Changing How Substitutions Work

I get dismayed and annoyed when I see substitutions late on in a game which can take minutes to happen.  I think instead, that the game should not be stopped for substitutions and that a player should be signaled by his bench that he needs to come off.  The fourth official can manage the process, but the switch should take place at any time, without a break in play.

How to Re-vamp The European Football Cup Competitions

I think that the Champions League and UEFA Cups are starting to become ridiculous.  Why can a team that gets knocked-out of one, be pushed into the other?

Surely a better way to do this is to have a single competition that all clubs could potentially win.  Clubs who finish lower down the ranking order would start early in the season (as they do now), and as the competition progresses, clubs who are ranked higher would join later in the competition.  This would lead to the occasional wonder story of a minnow getting to the latter stages.

Clubs who do well should qualify for the next season - for example the club from each country who gets furthest would qualify for the following season, regardless of how well they do in their domestic competition.

European Championships - How it Should Be

Every two years, I'm dismayed to see the qualifying process for the World Cup, or the European Cup.  Countries who have part time players get beaten convincingly each game and cannot possibly improve.  Also different groups have differing numbers of teams which can sometimes result in skewed tables and differing numbers of games being played.

Instead, why not have the groups for qualification set at a sensible number of teams, with the top 2 or 3 teams going through with no knock out one-off games after.  The higher ranked FIFA teams will make up most of the numbers in each group.  However, the bottom places should be decided by pre-qualification with lower-ranked countries playing against each other in a league with the top 5 or 6 going into the main qualifiers.  This way, these teams will improve and play matches of a competitive nature.  The best will go through to the latter stages and provide better competition for "bigger" nations.

The bottom 2 or 3 from the main qualifying groups would have to qualify the next time around.