On one level, that of pure sports theater, the Olympic soccer tournament once again delivered as expected.
    
Outstanding individual performers like Lionel Messi and the terrific women's final game between the Americans and Brazil stand proudly alongside all the other achievements in Beijing.
   
But if you are in the back corridors of FIFA, where the deals are made and future tournaments are constructed, President Sepp Blatter is going to be facing some hard questions in the next months.

Let's ignore the most obvious question for a second, and just talk about what happened on the field. On the pitch, this tournament once again showed that the game's global playing field is anything but level.

For the men:

-- Although held in China, not a single Asian entry -- there were four -- managed to get out of the first round.

-- New Zealand, which will almost always qualify for everything FIFA from an Oceania stripped to the bone, didn't show a thing in either tournament.

-- and CONCACAF must be wondering about its status after the USA missed the quarterfinals and Honduras didn't even score a goal. That just a year after Canada didn't score when host of the FIFA Youth World Cup.

Now if you're Michel Platini, whose UEFA Champions League is the biggest club show on earth and whose quadrennial UEFA Championship comes close to matching the World Cup in both quality and interest, would you going to suggest that Europe deserves at least two more spots in the Games? Or, wouldn't you suggest that the Games adopt the World Cup qualifying format wherin the Asians, CONCACAF and Oceania have to survive interzonal playoffs in order to secure the last few places on offer?

CONMEBOL has an even better argument; two of the four semifinalists in both the Games and the FIFA Youth World Cup were South American. Don't you think that a third CONMEBOL entry might have been stronger than Honduras or New Zealand?

This may be hard on the "developing" regions but FIFA's practice of automatically including them in numbers greater than one doesn't make much sense off the recent records. Only Africa -- largely because their talent pool is developed in European clubs -- has grabbed the opportunity and run with it.

All of this ignores that aforementioned obvious question: Can the Olympic men's soccer tournament survive?

The European clubs hate it, and have found an ally in the CAS. The European nations tolerate it, but it's the Africans, South Americans and North Americans who take it seriously. And despite the wishes of the IOC, FIFA isn't going to make it a top-level tournament that would compete against the World Cup.

Knowing that so few power players really care about it - and if you think Brazil would go to the mat for this tournament, you're nuts - what's the rationale for keeping it? It exhausts players, sticks in the craws of the big clubs and only helps the IOC. Now, Olympic men's soccer isn't going to disappear for 2012 in London, but I'd be wondering if it will stay in the mix for 2016.

In the case of the women's event, the picture may actually be even drearier. While FIFA may be hoping to see the women's game grow the evidence of performance suggests otherwise.
   
Not a single nation has emerged to challenge the old powers in the last decade; Brazil has been in three straight finals and lost them all; the United States has been in every Olympic final and won three of them; Germany and Norway are ever-presents in the last eight, usually going further than that. Maybe Japan showed some signs of greater life, but their best player, Homare Sawa, has been a star for a decade.
   
In fact, the greatest problem that both FIFA and the women's game face is the absence of emerging young stars. You can only hope that WPS attracts the world's best -- as WUSA did -- but even then how many of those players emerged from Beijing with any brand names to sell?
   
OK, Hope Solo could be a new Mia Hamm. She's photogenic, feisty and talented, and gives great quote. But will a country that still criticizes the sport for its lack of goals embrace a goalkeeper as an icon?
   
One huge plus for WPS, is that it's better suited to grow the game than either the Olympics or Women's World Cup. The new league, at least, can troll the world for talent and produce eight quality teams. Unfortunately, there aren't yet eight high quality women's national teams and that's a huge challenge both for FIFA and the Games.