I've not read the Tom Wigmore article before but in general I am in agreement with those proposals. Trying to have a dedicated time for international football would be beneficial to domestic leagues and to the international game.
However, I think the biggest change that is necessary in international football is to cut down the number of meaningless and uncompetitive matches that take place.
For example, England's recent World Cup qualifying group saw them play 4 of their 10 matches against San Marino and Andorra. These are nations of approximately 30,000 and 70,000 people going up against a country with a population of nearly 50million! It's amateur players vs some of the top professionals in the world. The aggregate score for these 4 games was 24 - 0 to England.
There is no reason for England to have to play these matches and I can't believe that it helps the development of football in either of the other 2 countries.
As for where to stage the games, well the advantage of neutral venues would be that you could further cut down the number of fixtures by not having to play every opponent twice as you do now with the home and away schedule.
I disagree that a single country couldn't host it, the developed nations could. For example the UK has over 60 sports stadiums with a 20,000+ capacity and over 20 with a 40,000+ capacity. Equally, as we saw with this summers Euro's it's pretty easy to schedule games across multiple countries.
In general I'm against the idea of having the World Cup every 2 years. You can have too much of a good thing and FIFA trying to push it will likely result in clubs and players taking matters into their own hands i.e. break away Super Leagues and/or early retirements from international football.
That's actually the issue. I actually find his suggestion to be very good, but it is being taken somewhere else.
I actually agree with that. I even covered it in a previous post
It is once you take a look at the full scale of it. Qualifiers Have many more countries than in the Euros. It is not just stadiums and capacity. You have to take into consideration the thousands of people who will travel per country, bearing in mind those stadiums would serve as neutral ground therefore the 40K capacity stadium also means 40K people to be hosted in a city. And that's just one match. In Europe for example, there are 55 European teams, even if we talk about 20K people coming per team, that's a total of 1.08 million people (excluding the host country fans). And that's the lowest estimate.
Also, like, I said. Many supporters will be deprived of seeing their team playing at home. FAs, ministries, and governments have developed stadiums for these games. Local advertisements and revenues are reasons why governments would build a stadium.
As for the rest, I am trying to go through everything as thoroughly as possible rather. When I started I was expecting a quick run down, but it proved to be much more complicated than just one or two points. You would be surprised by how many developing countries/countries not that good at football currently would benefit from this in the long run. Arab/African players increasing presence in top teams started from similar exposure to that a World Cup every 2 years could provide.
Simply put, it opens up possibilities, some might be bad, but some might be good as well. My point in this series is to look at the whole picture subjectively.