Dear Footballgolf Family,

The general registration for the World Championship is now two days in past, and considering the technical issues and the painful waiting time for some of you, no wonder that still a lot of emotions are circulating throughout the channels… including critic, new propsals, ultimate solutions and also some (surely deserved) anger about the server overload.

WFGA is aware that players have different expectations about the World Championships. While one group strictly demands that ALL spots are given according to world ranking and/or national rankings, a lot of other player are missing the „Good Old times“ when every player was - certainly - able to play wherever he wanted. Not few of them who call our modified approach a „shame“ and are condemning WFGA for serving only the „Elites“…

So facing criticism from both sides in compareable numbers… maybe a sign that we found a reasonable solution in our burden of „squaring the circle“.

Looking to the current situation we currently find 56 players on the waiting list.Now some players came up with the „obvious“ solution to simply use the 75 wild card places for these players.

Two clear reasons why WFGA will NOT do this:

1. So from a neutral perspective one look at the current waiting list should be enough to see that this suggestion is completely inacceptable: we have 31 Germans there in comparison to only 7 Czech players for example and similar few from other nations! So no way that we allow such an imbalance!

2. The block of (75-80) Wild Cards is one out of three basic parts in the new registration procedure which was published on both WFGA Homepage and FB site together with reasons why and how wild cards are necessary for associations to bring in additional top players, Juniors who are certainly good enough for WC but were probably not able to play international tournaments due to family reasons for example. And yes, of course the associations should provide wildcards also for certain players who were unlucky in the server lottery and find themselves now on the waiting list !

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Apart from World Championship - believe it or not - there are also other tournament fields to be filled.

Yesterday evening we had the doodle deciders for Danish and German Open.

And while it was pretty relaxed in Denmark (it took - and NOT due to technical reasons one has to add in these days - 23 minutes until the 30 spots were booked), players in Germany were more keen to get in. 39 of the 45 places were occupied within 70 seconds, and the last one was gone after seven minutes.

All successful home players afterwards were put into the registration and received their paying instructions until midnight.

As also all top ranking players are into every registration for the tournaments they have signed up, we gladly can say that the doodle workaround (credit to Reini for this idea) was very effective - around 500 players were put in successfully - and „Doodle“ should get at least a nomination for the „Footballgolf Word of the Year“ 😄

And don‘t forget: Next Sunday (15th) at 20:00 the rest of the tournaments will open in gScore. All fingers crossed that everybody can sign up here successfully and without longer waiting periods🤞

Best regards, WFGA Board