What We Did in ’48: FIFA’s Circus Kicks Off

Much more football, but not necessarily more surprises or goals. That is how Gianni Infantino’s bloated World Cup is expected to look. And there are those who want to expand the tournament to 64 teams.

In every four-year cycle, the World Cup brings new challenges, and there seems to be no tournament that will be scrutinized by fans, journalists and football professionals in so many ways, for better and worse, as the 2026 World Cup, which got underway tonight (Thursday) in Mexico City. Challenges range from the inflated ticket prices and visa issues to the new format, possible weather damage, the game times spread across our evenings, nights and mornings, the huge 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 passed the controversial and unpopular decision to expand the current World Cup from 32 national teams to 48. The proposal passed unanimously by representatives of the various federations around the world and was Gianni Infantino’s first major move before he had even completed a year as FIFA president, after succeeding Sepp Blatter, who had become embroiled in corruption and was suspended from the organization.

On the face of it, Infantino cleaned out the Zurich offices of the corruption associated with the organization, especially in the Qatar World Cup hosting affair, but with his other hand he plunged deep into the sewer of politics to gain 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 perspective everyone won except the Europeans who opposed the move.

The smaller national teams would get proper representation in the world’s biggest football tournament, especially from those geographic regions, and the organization he heads would make more money, because more games mean more money. Just to give a sense of scale, at the current World Cup there will be more matches, 72, in the group stage than in the previous entire World Cup, 64, and 40 more matches overall, 104.

The biggest winner, of course, is 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 federations, 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 “homo” on the eve of the World Cup opening in Qatar, can also be “proud” that he has put himself forward again for the presidency next year, and trust me, there is no chance he will not be re-elected.

That plan, which was stitched together nearly a decade ago, angered many football fans, but they do not matter to FIFA. The cynicism of the game’s power brokers apparently knows no bounds if CONMEBOL leaders, the South American federation, have been trying for nearly a year to advance through FIFA corridors a proposal to further expand the next World Cup, in 2030, to 64 national teams, apparently as a one-off, without even discussing whether this 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 national teams.

What the expansion means

Not many people know this, but FIFA originally considered holding a World Cup with 16 groups of three teams, with the top two advancing to the next round. However, because of the lack of sporting fairness, where one team would finish its group stage before two others, the decision was made to switch to the familiar format of three qualifiers from groups of four teams. 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 to do to advance as one of the best third-placed teams (8 of 12).

In defense of the format designers, this problem is also familiar from the Euros and from every tournament in which more than 50 percent of the teams advance.

Will there be many more goals per match at the 2026 World Cup? One might imagine one-sided games such as Germany against Curaçao, Brazil against Haiti or France against Iraq. On the face of it, we may even see an eight-goal or nine-goal thrashing in one match, but on the other hand, expanding the tournament does not necessarily mean more goals.

Between the 1954 and 1978 World Cups, an average of 3.25 goals per match was scored in the 16-team tournament. Since football became professionalized and the gap between teams narrowed, and since it is now easier to coach defense and play a bunker style, the average between 1982 and 1994 stood at 2.57 goals, even as the tournament expanded to 24 teams. The average was almost maintained, at 2.54, between 1998 and 2022 in the 32-team era.

What is more likely to be seen is that, in inverse proportion to the number of smaller teams honoring us with their sensational presence, their chances of going much further are significantly smaller. To explain: unlike recent tournaments that have accustomed us to big teams being eliminated already in the group stage, the possibility that the third-place team also advances almost completely destroys the chance of seeing Germany knocked out for the third consecutive time in the groups or Argentina saying goodbye to the World Cup after just three matches and continuing the “champions’ curse” tradition.

Moreover, FIFA has also created a new stage between the groups and the round of 16, the round of 32. So each team has to work through one more stage, and in total play 8 matches, not 7, to touch the holy grail. In addition, FIFA has spread the tournament over more than five weeks, so the next world champion will play on average every 4 or 4.5 days, more than half a day longer on average than Argentina and France, the finalists of the 2022 final.

Another common assumption is that most of the favorites for the title will throw away their third group match, resting their stars, so they will reach the knockout stages fresher than the smaller teams and be much better equipped to avoid surprises.

All in all, it is likely that the quality of the tournament will suffer, at least in the first part of the group stage, where two thirds of the teams are already confident of themselves, while the second part is expected to look exactly as we remember from previous World Cups, tight, nerve-racking knockout rounds that generate the stories everyone waits for. Infantino and FIFA have not yet managed to ruin that, and thankfully so.

World Cup 2026