The best analogy I can come up with is the women's Olympic hockey tournament. Canada and the U.S. are so far beyond everyone else that it's downright embarrassing. It really is. You can pretty much predict that the gold medal game will be between those two countries.
It got to the point this year that the IOC is openly contemplating pulling the plug on the sport. Of course, the argument in support of keeping the sport in the Olympics is that eventually the rest of the world will catch up.
Well, yes and no. The main issue is that outside of North America, national federations simply do not spend the requisite amount of money to advance the quality of the sport. And as a consequence, the quality of competition will suffer, as any gains they make over time will dwarf the leaps and bounds that teams in North America will make.
I want to argue this from the other side - what people don't see (but was discussed during the Olympics) is that the Cdn program is helping other countries by bringing them over for camps and training and so forth.. Finland was recently given an award for the country to grow their game most in the past few years - they have an equivalent of Hockey Day in Canada going there now to get more girls exposed to the game, give them a chance to play, and it's grown something like 30% in the last year or two.
Another thing that people are missing when they talk about women's hockey (aside from forgetting that the men's side was like for years and years too, and no one talked about pulling the plug on them *
before she can get on a soapbox about sexism*) is that the women in other countries have to fight for ice time so much more than women do here, fight for funding, for training, equipment... Some of the women's teams are already starting to catch up, and if the *several deleted swear words* will look past their pants and pay attention they'll see that 2014 is going to be really exciting in women's hockey! (But again, not getting on that sexism soapbox about the 'old boys club' that the IOC seems to be...)
In the first game Canada played all most people saw was the shellacking (goal differential tiebreakers are a whole other discussion) - I saw a goalie that despite being overmatched, never quit, held her head high (and so did her team), and with some more experience will be a force to reckoned with in future years. The Scandanavian teams are starting to come on too, I'm looking forward to seeing them really make the jump soon
Getting back to soccer, saying some of these smaller countries shouldn't be there because they can't compete with the "big boys" is like saying warm weather countries like Pakistan, India and Mexico shouldn't have teams in the Winter Olympics because they don't have a winter and can't possibly compete - you can't improve if you don't have something to strive for, and being on the world stage is that something
(Sorry about the sidetracking, but the whole "women's sports should be pulled because only a couple teams are powers despite the fact that we'd NEVER do that to men" pisses me off to NO FUCKING END.)
). They might not all be as good but that's normal. The thing I like about it is that every country has a football team and that it's a big sport (almost) everywhere.
