Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of countries that have never qualified for a major football tournament


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.  

The result was delete. --Oxymoron83 09:21, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

List of countries that have never qualified for a major football tournament

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A good example of WP:NOT, no WP:V or WP:RS provided, and, extrapolating, an article that will eventually never exist. The Rambling Man (talk) 00:03, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Peanut4 (talk) 00:21, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete, though I don't endorse the nominator's arguments. It would be easy if tedious to take the list of all FIFA members and lists of all qualifiers for major championships, already in other articles, and work out the difference; though this arguably reaches WP:OR. And Bhutan may well never qualify till Doomsday. However, this list is trivial as it groups countries with something tenuous in common. One clearly cannot argue that these are the worst teams in the world; even FIFA's ridiculous ranking system is more accurate.
 * Is there a comparison between :
 * Luxembourg, which has tried and failed at every major tournament since 1934,
 * East Timor, which hasn't existed for most of that,
 * Slovakia, which was part of Czechoslovakia in multiple tournaments?
 * Montenegro, both too young and formerly part of qualifier Yugoslavia
 * Venezuela gets in by virtue of the fact that there is no qualifying round for the South american Championships.
 * The European Championships have varied between 4 and 16 finalists; Luxembourg reached the last 8 in 1964 but didn't qualify for the 4-team "Finals".
 * The World Cup qualification is regional, as is qualification for some continental cups (e.g. CONCACAF), so being a big fish in a small pond gets you out of the list.
 * FIFA has denied caps for Olympics since 1960 and is undecided over 1956 and 1952, so these are not "major" tournaments. If you include later Olympics, why not include Youth World Cups, or Women's World Cups?
 * Why are defunct nonqualifiers like Saar not listed?
 * Incidentally, the current article is incomplete: I reckon there are a lot more CONCACAF teams; certainly USVI for one. jnestorius(talk) 00:34, 24 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Strong Delete Pointless article. Hammer1980 ·talk 00:41, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete: Per NOT, an indiscriminate collection of information. Not for Wikipedia. - Rjd0060 (talk) 01:08, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete solely on WP:OR grounds. Ref (chew) (do) 01:38, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete WP:NOT and OR. Chris!  c t 02:55, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete - should be a category, if even that. GiantSnowman (talk) 03:17, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete It could have been a good article (especially if Jnestorius had written it). For now, it's the indiscriminate list of blue links.  If the idea comes up again, the better approach might be to list how close a team got to qualifying for something, particularly since the information is available (hence the article).  You'd figure that Nicaragua would have made it to the next round at least once in the past 100 years.  Suggestion to author-- save it to your computer, figure out how to add to it to make it worthwhile. Mandsford (talk) 03:34, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: as outlined above, there are a few issues with this list. What are major tournaments, for instance? The World Cup, the continental tournaments, the Olympic Games, yes. But what about subcontinental tournaments, such as the South Asian Football Federation Cup, the UNCAF Nations Cup and the CECAFA Cup? Then there's the difference between the never-come-close (e.g. Andorra) and the how-come-they've-never-made-it, as Mandsford indicates. I do believe this list is fixable though, so I recommend userfying it. A  ecis Brievenbus 12:26, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment and uphold my delete vote. I'm not at all convinced. Userfying this list would still class it as WP:OR as well as WP:NOT. Wikipedia is not a place to discuss why certains countries won't ever make it to major tournaments or why others have failed to yet do so. Peanut4 (talk) 12:29, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't think the list would be OR if we define the criteria accurately. Sorting by tournament instead of by confederation might also improve the verifiability of the list (Countries that have never qualified for the FIFA World Cup, Countries that have never qualified for the UEFA European Football Championship, etc.). It would take the confederation change of a number of national teams (Australia, Kazakhstan, Israel) into consideration, and it would give us the opportunity to indicate when they've tried to qualify, and how close they came to qualifying or how distant the tournament remained. Israel, for instance, has qualified for the FIFA World Cup (1970) and the AFC Asian Cup (1956, 1960, 1964, 1968), but hasn't qualified for the UEFA European Football Championship yet. Listing the have-nots of football would be worthwhile and wouldn't constitute original research or listcruft. A  ecis Brievenbus 12:47, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment More useful than the present article would be a sortable table with all (current and past) FIFA members as the rows, all "major" tournaments as the columns, and their best result in each cell. The info in the list would be fairly easily seen within that. jnestorius(talk) 17:07, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment The sortable table of all FIFA members past and present looks like a good idea, I would definately support its creation. I don't believe it would be OR because the results and achievements are already documented, the creation of the table would just involve the compilation of pre-existing statistics into a more comprehensive format than say hundreds of rsssf pages. This article itself should be deleted due to the numerous inaccuracies and omissions and the lack of clear definition of "major" King of the  North  East  00:26, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
 * In that case, splitting it by tournament or confederation would be recommendable as well. There's no need to have a column for the African Nations Coup and the AFC Asian Cup next to the Netherlands, Nicaragua and Norway, etcetera. If the name of the tournament were put in the header, it could be followed by a table of the countries that have attempted to qualify for that tournament, with the number of qualification attempts, the number of qualifications and the best result given for each country. The table might also be split by confederation, so we can have two topics for each confederation: World Cup qualification through the confederation and qualification for the continental championships of the confederation. That would allow us to add Israel to OFC, AFC and UEFA, Kazakhstan to both AFC and UEFA, Australia to both AFC and OFC, etcetera. A  ecis Brievenbus 00:57, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete. There's clealy something out there which this article can fetch up being the basis for, but as other users have explained there's a considerable amount of grey about what a "major football tournament" constitutes, and also on precisely where the cutoffs need to go in some cases. There's also the problem of combining perennial cellar-dwellers like San Marino and Liechtenstein (and Mongolia, who are absent from this list) with teams which have only come into existence recently. As I said, though, there's an article out there which this can be used as the basis for. Precisely what that is, I don't know. BigHaz - Schreit mich an 02:06, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete. More pointless listcruft. Axl (talk) 18:16, 26 November 2007 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.