SYDNEY – Players at this year’s World Cup had some concerns about the competition, including the compact schedule and schedule of the tournament, and the women took their complaints all the way to the top.
FIBA Secretary General Andreas Zagklis spoke to many players during the recently played tournament. He offered a quick fix for the other issues, but changing the date will take more work.
The next World Cup in 2026 will once again feature 16 teams instead of the 12 in this year’s tournament – and players will have more time to recover between the final stages.
“We won’t play three days in a row, it won’t happen again,” Zagklis said. “It’s not something we want to see repeated. It’s too heavy for the players.
At this year’s tournament, the quarter-finals, semi-finals and medal matches took place over three consecutive days. Overall, the teams that reached the gold medal game would have played eight games in 10 days. The 2018 World Cup saw a hiatus between the quarterfinals and the medal round.
While the schedule change is a welcome positive step for players, there is still the issue of timing. The WNBA attempted to work with FIBA by shortening its season. Yet the league playoffs continued until the start of the World Cup, requiring a dozen players to travel a few thousand miles, get off a plane, and start playing for their national teams.
Many European leagues announce shortly after the end of the World Cup, so it is difficult to move it to a later start date.
Zagklis said FIBA will work with stakeholders to provide the best possible solution for players, while indicating that change will likely have to come from the WNBA or other professional leagues.
“The World Cup turns 70 next year, the women’s world existed long before virtually any women’s league in the world and it’s the best women’s competition,” Zagklis said. “So the calendar starts again with the World Cup.”
USA Basketball President Martin Dempsey said it was urgent for FIBA to resolve the scheduling issue, especially with the WNBA expanding over the next few years.
“The time to have this conversation is before it happens, not after,” Dempsey said. “So we really have to figure out with the ‘W’, the NBA and FIBA how to keep all of these businesses viable, because we don’t want to run the risk of creating a very diluted World Cup.
“We need to have a very serious ongoing conversation about how to keep things in sync so they don’t collide.”
Five of the American players appeared in the WNBA Finals which ended three days before the start of the World Cup. Chelsea Gray, Kelsey Plum and Tournament MVP A’ja Wilson missed the first two games for USA
Before the announcement of the schedule change, the players made their positions clear.
“I don’t know if FIBA cared about anyone,” Plum said.
“Rest would be good,” Wilson said. “Having some time in between would definitely help.”
The venue for the 2026 World Cup has yet to be announced and getting to Australia may have been the toughest place for everyone due to its location.
Serbia coach Marina Maljkovi? noticed how tired many players were. She coaches in Turkey in the winter and said players from all leagues need a break.
“You see a lot of players who lacked freshness. You can see, any team going from club season to WNBA, from WNBA to national team,” Maljkovi? said. “This year, it is very, very complicated. … Talking to the players, they have really suffered this season because of the tight schedule everywhere. I guess there will be some smart people sitting around the table and seeing what we can do about it.
Logistical issues aside, the World Cup was a huge success in Australia. The total attendance of 145,519 people was the highest in the history of the competition. There were nearly 16,000 fans in the gold medal game between the United States and China, which was the biggest since the 1953 league game played in Chile in a stadium that had 35,000 fans.
“By all metrics, we’ve seen tremendous effort from the hosts,” Zagklis said. “Record merchandise sales, record attendance, fantastic atmosphere in the games, so it’s hard to argue with the conclusion that we got to experience the best World Cup ever.”