How to make the World Cup Qualifiers interesting

"International break" they call it.  The weeks when the club teams take a break from their leagues, cups, drama, and routine and the international stage is alight with awful, tedious, abysmal Qualifiers for the next big international tournament.  The weeks I dread, when I’ve just gotten back into the rhythm of seeing my team play once or twice a week, just gotten used to early mornings at the pub again, just gotten used to remembering to set my fantasy team before the first game of the week; this is when the international breaks strike.

Don’t get me wrong, I love watching national teams play, any time the U.S. plays Mexico or Germany takes down England I’m a happy guy.  But when it interferes with the club football rhythm five or six times a season it’s just annoying.  So here are a couple of ways to make it tolerable.

1. Just take a month and figure it out.  What if February every year is dedicated to international tournaments?  You could fit a lot of games into that time period, the teams would have time to gel together, and it would create a tournament like atmosphere where people would be more likely to pay attention.  Do you know who your national team is playing this week?
2. Do it in the summer months.  Summers when the Euros and the World Cup are on are way better than summers without them, but the summers without them would be a lot better if it was full of qualifiers.  The common thread with idea number 1 being that if the qualifiers all happened at once it would be easier to follow and you’d be much more likely to pay attention.  The problem with this idea is that players need time to relax and rest once a year, you can tell when players haven’t had their proper time off during the summers months as they look languid and tired at the start of a new season.
3. Don’t stop the club fixtures when the qualifiers are happening.  I know I know, it sounds ludicrous but hear me out.  Do they stop the club season when the African Cup of Nations is going on?  No, it’s a nice twist in the plot every other season.  Clubs would have to plan ahead for when their star players would be missing, thus forcing them to field a B team and/or develop a [gasp] serious youth system to fill in the gaps.  The big problem would be players who don’t really care about their national team retiring from the international stage really early because they like their club team and its money better.  But how cool would it be to see all the B-squad players in club matches that really count?  There would be a lot more potential unearthed in those games than is currently happening at the club level.