What We Did in 48: FIFA’s Circus Gets Under Way

Much more football, but not necessarily more surprises or goals. That is what Gianni Infantino’s overblown World Cup is expected to look like. And some want to expand the tournament to 64 teams.

Sport 5 Published: 11.06.26, 17:34 Photo: Sport 5

Every four summers, the World Cup brings new challenges, and there seems to be no tournament that will be examined under such a microscope by fans, journalists and football figures in so many ways, for better and worse, as the 2026 World Cup, which got under way tonight (Thursday) in Mexico City.

The challenges include the inflated ticket prices, visa permits, the new format, possible weather damage, the game times spread across our evenings, nights and mornings, the enormous distances between Miami and Vancouver, all under the umbrella of the biggest World Cup in history.

The mechanism for expanding the tournament, power, money and prestige

In January 2017, FIFA’s congress approved the controversial and unpopular decision to expand the current World Cup from 32 teams to 48. The proposal passed unanimously by representatives of the various associations around the world and was Gianni Infantino’s first major move even before he had completed a year as FIFA president, succeeding Sepp Blatter, who had become embroiled in corruption and was suspended from the organization.

On the face of it, with one hand Infantino cleaned the offices in Zurich of the corruption tied to the organization, especially in the Qatar World Cup hosting affair, but with the other he plunged deep into the sewer of politics to obtain power, prestige and money.

Infantino chose to carry out the reform by first relying on the votes of the confederations from Asia, Africa and North America, from his point of view everyone wins except the Europeans, who oppose the move.

The smaller national teams will receive proper representation in the world’s biggest football tournament, especially from those geographic regions, and the organization he heads will make more money, because more matches mean more money.

Just to put it in perspective, in the current World Cup there will be more matches, 72, in the group stage than in the entire previous World Cup, 64, and 40 more matches overall, 104.

The big winner is of course Infantino himself, who quickly understood that the best way to stay in power for a very long time is to “buy” the representatives of the various associations, who are the ones who elect the FIFA president every four years, not with Qatari money, but in a more sophisticated way, such as improving the chances of reaching the World Cup.

Thanks to Infantino, Curaçao, Jordan, Uzbekistan and Cape Verde can also play in the final tournament. Fact. The incumbent president, who declared that he felt “homosexual” on the eve of the World Cup opening in Qatar, can also be “proud” that he has put forward his candidacy again for the presidency next year, and trust me, there is no chance he will not be re-elected.

That move, which was put together nearly a decade ago, infuriated many football fans, but they do not matter to FIFA. The cynicism of the game’s power brokers apparently has no limits if the leaders of CONMEBOL, the South American confederation, have been trying for nearly a year to promote in FIFA’s corridors a further expansion of the next World Cup, in 2030, to 64 teams, apparently on a one-time basis, without even discussing whether it is good or bad for the sport, the players, the fans and the teams.

No one has yet examined the implications of the biggest World Cup in history. So if 64 sounds really excessive to you, let us go back and try to understand the possible consequences of a World Cup with 48 teams.

The meaning of expanding the tournament

Not many people know this, but originally FIFA considered holding a World Cup with 16 groups of three teams, with the top two advancing. However, due to the lack of sporting fairness, where one team would finish playing in its group before two others, it was decided to switch to the familiar format of three teams advancing from groups of four.

Of course, there is also a fair-play problem here, since the teams from the Portugal and England groups, groups 11 and 12, will already know what they need in order to advance as one of the best third-place teams, 8 of 12.

In defense of the format’s architects, this problem is also known from the Euros and from any tournament in which more than 50 percent of the teams advance.

Will there be many more goals per match on average at the 2026 World Cup? One might think so, with one-sided matches such as Germany against Curaçao, Brazil against Haiti or France against Iraq. On paper, we may even see an eight-goal or nine-goal margin in one match, but on the other hand, expanding the tournament does not necessarily mean more goals.

Between the 1954 and 1978 World Cups, the 16-team tournament produced an average of 3.25 goals. Since football became more professional and teams narrowed the gap, and today it is easier to coach defense and play the bunker, between 1982 and 1994 the average stood at 2.57 goals, even as the tournament grew to 24 teams. The average was maintained almost exactly, at 2.54, between 1998 and 2022 in the era of a 32-team tournament.

What is likely to be seen, though, is that inversely proportional to the number of smaller teams gracing us with their sensational presence, their chances of going much further diminish significantly.

To explain: unlike recent tournaments that have accustomed us to big teams being eliminated already in the group stage, the possibility that even third place advances almost completely destroys the chance of seeing Germany eliminated for a third straight time in the groups, or Argentina say goodbye to the World Cup after only three matches and continue the tradition of the “curse of the champions.”

Moreover, FIFA also created a new stage between the groups and the round of 16, the round of 32. So every team has to go through one more round, and in total eight matches, not seven, to touch the Holy Grail.

In addition, FIFA spread the tournament over more than five weeks, so the next world champion will play on average every four or four and a half days, more than half a day on average more than Argentina and France, the finalists of the 2022 final.

Another common assumption is that most of the title contenders will throw away their third group match, giving the stars a rest, so they will reach the knockout stages fresher than the smaller teams and know how to handle matters much better in order to avoid surprises.

In the final analysis, it is likely that the quality of the tournament will suffer, at least in its first part, in the group stage, where two-thirds of the teams are confident, while the second part is expected to look exactly as we remember and know from previous World Cups, tight, nerve-racking knockout rounds that produce the stories everyone is waiting for.

Infantino and FIFA have still not managed to ruin that, and that is a good thing.

World Cup 2026

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