The teams are there. I agree that 32 out of 55 doesn’t make a ton of sense but it’s still half of the field gets eliminated in qualifying.
Iceland, Northern Ireland, Serbia, Georgia were the teams that lost the play in games.
And Ireland, Norway, Greece, Northern Ireland are in the top 50 of fifa world rankings.
I’m not sure adding & teams like that takes away from the overall quality of the tournament, and you’d probably get a better final 16.
That or remove 4 teams and go with 4 groups of 5, and top 2 from each group make it. That would probably make for a really fun group stage with some great matches.
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