Football fans tend to identify with the sport at one or both of two levels: club and national team. However, the utterly global nature of the game makes it possible to identify at a third level: continental. It seems bizarre that we could categorize entire continents into buckets that we could then compare, discuss, and argue. What ties say Ireland and Bulgaria together, or South Korea and Qatar, beyond geological boundaries of continents? ((Geological boundaries which football’s governing bodies have cheerfully ignored with the likes of Israel, Georgia, Armenia, and Kazakhstan plying away in “Europe” and Australia a recent member of the Asians.))
| Continent | # of 2014 Participants |
| Africa | 5 |
| Asia | 4 |
| Europe | 13 |
| N America | 4 |
| S America | 6 |
Regardless, continental policy matters. It is how FIFA decides on the number of teams that a given continent can provide to the World Cup. One of the narratives of the current World Cup ponders whether global football power is shifting away from the Old World. ((http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/football/28117029 and http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jun/28/continental-shift-world-cup)) A relatively miniscule cadre of six European teams survived the group stages and many have disdained even that number as supposed lightweights Switzerland and Greece had also snuck in. So is the rest of the world catching up to Europe?