Omar Comin'
Peter Fenwicke (45)
Expanding would be more palatable to the tier 1 unions, but with 16 the format would get a bit messier. I don't think you could do groups of 4 with semi finals because that's too similar to the world cup. If you did 2 groups of 8, you don't have enough of a window for everyone to play each other. I suppose each team could play 6 of the 8 and there'd be some luck of the draw.
Another option would be to make the divisions smaller (3 divisions of 8 teams - 4 Europe, 4 rest of world) so that the 2nd division is still high level and commercially valuable and it's not such a fall to go from 1 to 2. Then if you had automatic promotion/relegation most teams would yoyo between them occasionally.