Too much soccer? Too many games? There’s a strong argument that answers “yes” to those questions. Look at the situation in Europe: Barely a month after the climax of the World Cup final in Germany, club soccer is in full stride, with the domestic leagues playing their weekly, sometimes twice-weekly, games.

Nor is there any respite for the national teams. While the qualifying rounds for the next World Cup (scheduled to be staged in South Africa in 2010) are two years away, the preliminary games for the 2008 European Championship have started.

Second only to the World Cup as a major international soccer event, the Euro championship will be joint-hosted by Austria and Switzerland in June 2008. Both host nations are automatic qualifiers for the final 16, leaving 14 places to be decided from among 50 nations.

Those nations have been drawn into six groups of seven teams, and one group of eight. Over the next 14 months each country will play home-and-home games against all the others in their group, a total of 308 games. For most of the countries, this means playing 12 games (those in the eight team group will play 14).

There are plenty of critics of this setup who believe that the number of games should be reduced by introducing a seeding system. As things stand, all of FIFA’s 52 European member-nations (minus the hosts) go into the hat when the initial draw is made.

You’re wondering where FIFA gets 52 European nations from? It works like this: Israel, excluded from the Asian region for political reasons, is accepted as European; Kazakhstan, logically more of an Asian country as well, can hardly be excluded when it is surrounded by Russia, which is a European country; then comes a bunch of small countries that most people would have trouble locating on a map — Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Faroe Islands, plus the not-quite-sosmall Malta, Cyprus, and Luxembourg.

Surely, common sense dictates that a preliminary round of games be staged among the lesser teams, before the big powers like England and Germany and Italy join in? After all, Andorra, situated on the France-Spain border, has a total population of only 67,000.Which actually looks pretty good when set alongside the Faroe Islands, 47,000, or San Marino, an enclave in northeastern Italy whose entire population of about 28,000 wouldn’t even half-fill a major soccer stadium.

How on earth can such minuscule nations give the big soccer nations a real game? Obviously, they can’t. In the past month, we’ve seen scores of England 5, Andorra 0, and Scotland 6, Faroe Islands 0. And Slovakia, hardly a soccer powerhouse, thumped Cyprus 6-1.

Even those results are deceiving, for there is always an air of embarrassment hovering over the proceedings, a feeling among the victors that the humiliation should not be too appalling. But last week the Germans, obviously harboring no such sentiments, traveled south and crushed San Marino by a score of 13–0.

The 13-goal blitz is a record for the tournament, and if the Germans persist with this realpolitik, one shudders to think what the score will be next May when the return game is played in Germany.

The lopsided scores have rekindled the argument in favor of seeding. For Euro 2008 (slightly unusual because it has two automatic qualifiers) a preliminary 16-team tournament to eliminate eight teams would have allowed a qualifying round consisting of seven groups of six teams. The total number of games would have been reduced to 210, down nearly 100, with each nation playing only 10 games.

The seeding — it’s really a sort of anti-seeding to decide which are the 16 worst of Europe’s 52 teams — would be based on a country’s previous record in the tournament.

Such a scheme would surely put an end to the hilarious England-Andorra and San Marino-Germany mismatches. But forgetting the hilarity, the argument in favor of allowing every nation an equal shot at qualifying is a respectable one.

In an age that frowns on elitism, the European soccer authority, UEFA, is not too keen to lay down regulations that clearly favor the continent’s rich nations. Plus there is the perverse fact that the small countries have made it clear that they can put up with the mismatches and the crushing defeats … because the games against the powerhouse nations give them rare occasions to make money.

Without the requirements of a major tournament, neither Germany nor any other top country would ever consider playing San Marino. Later in the qualifiers, San Marino will host the Czech Republic and Ireland, games that can be expected to draw crowds similar to the 5,000 fans who turned out in Serravalle for the Germany game. A tiny crowd for sure, but nearly one-fifth of the country’s entire population.

Andorra makes the most of its opportunity by playing its home games at FC Barcelona. Not in the vast 98,000-seat Nou Camp, but in the adjacent 15,000-capacity mini-stadium. Should San Marino and Andorra and the other minor countries be barred from cashing in on the multimillion dollar tournament?

If UEFA does decide to introduce a preliminary stage to its qualifiers, it would merely be doing what the Asian and North and Central American confederations already do for the qualifying rounds for their own championships, and for the World Cup. There are no qualifying rounds necessary in the Copa America — all 10 South American countries qualify automatically.The problem here is not too many teams but too few — the Copa is now rounded off at a 12-team tournament by inviting in two guest countries (one of these is usually Mexico; the United States participated in 1995, finishing fourth).

The general trend in international soccer competitions is thus to exempt major teams from the first round of qualifying games, but to increase participation in the final round. Looking at the FIFA-run competitions, the final round of the World Cup has gone from 16 teams in 1978 to the current 32 teams. The under-20 World Cup moved up from 16 to 24 teams in 1997. Next year, the under-17 World Cup — which has played 11 editions with 16 teams — will also enlarge to 24 teams.

But the European championship remains faithful to the 16-team finalround format, along with a single qualifying round. For the moment then, the likes of San Marino and Andorra can look forward to further heavy losses on the field compensated by moderate profits at the turnstiles.

pgardner@nysun.com