Lionel Scaloni received the news he had been waiting for: this Monday, the International Football Association Board (IFAB) confirmed that the bona fide list of the selected participants in the Qatar 2022 World Cup extends to 26 footballers, so the Argentine coach does not You will need to do without three players who are regulars in your calls.
As in the Copa América that Argentina won in Brazil last year, Scaloni will be able to take 26 soccer players instead of the 23 that made up the roster until Russia 2018. The decision that had been born in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and that served so that the campuses will be decimated in the face of an eventual outbreak will continue in the future based on what was resolved by the entity on Monday in Qatar.
In this way, the Argentine coach can maintain the base that participated in the Qualifiers, without the need to reduce a squad that comes almost from memory and that will only change after an injury or an unusual performance. With 24 fixed names, the remaining quotas will have more to do with solutions that the coach seeks from the positions (eight or nine defenders; eight or nine midfielders) than with names themselves.
The five changes will follow
The other important decision made by the IFAB was to confirm in time the validity of the rule of five changes in all matches instead of the three that existed until before the pandemic.
The principle that each team has the possibility of making five changes during a match, instead of three, was “definitively validated” by the IFAB, the guarantor body of football rules, which met this Monday in Doha at the framework of the 136th General Assembly. There, the regulations that will govern the 2022/23 season were made official.
The five changes had been introduced due to the Covid-19 pandemic when soccer calendars were redesigned due to the high number of games to be played after the first confinements.
In addition, the members of the IFAB “decided to increase the maximum number of substitutes in the match sheet from 12 to 15, according to the desire of the organizers of the competitions,” the body said in a statement.
In October 2021, those responsible for football regulations had given each competition the option to approve the five changes per team or not. As for the definitive validation of the five substitutions, only the English Premier League had returned to the three changes, although it had already approved moving to five for next season.