Football World Cup quota distribution with pairwise comparisons

Abstract

Qualifications for the FIFA World Cup are organised separately by the six regional confederations of FIFA, the governing body of international football, such that each continent has a predetermined number of slots. We propose a quota allocation method based on the historical performances of the confederations. Our methodology extends the official FIFA World Ranking to evaluate a set of national teams. Several challenges are addressed, and some reasonable model variants are presented. The results suggest that the official quota allocation proposed for the 2026 FIFA World Cup does not reflect the strengths of continents well. In particular, more European and South American teams should participate in future tournaments, while the North, Central American and Caribbean region deserves a higher quota than Asia. This highlights the need for transparent quota allocation, which at least partially depends on historical performances.