When the whistle blows on June 11 and the 2026 Fifa World Cup kicks off across the United States, Mexico and Canada, it will inaugurate not just a tournament but a transformation.
For the first time, 48 nations will compete for football’s ultimate prize — up from 32 — in a tournament stretching across 16 host cities and 39 days. And if Fifa president Gianni Infantino has his way, this is only the beginning.
Expansion to 64 teams, possibly as early as 2030, is already being discussed in Zurich’s corridors. Some within Fifa go further still, floating the idea of abolishing the tournament’s traditional Finals structure altogether and replacing it with something unrecognisable.
Change, as always, has its enthusiasts.
The arithmetic of the 2026 edition alone is staggering. The expanded format generates 104 matches, up from 64 — not expansion, but multiplication. Twelve groups of four teams, with the top two from each group plus the eight best third-placed sides advancing to a round of 32. The World Cup winner will now need to survive five knockout rounds after the group stage.
“That’s tricky,” says Oscar Bruzon, the Spanish coach of Emami East Bengal.
The official argument is inclusion. More nations, more dreams, more representation. The unofficial argument — barely concealed — is commercial. More matches mean more broadcast windows, more sponsorship inventory and more ticketed events.
Under Infantino, Fifa has become more comfortable saying so out loud. “This will be the biggest ever World Cup,” the Fifa president declared, pointing to three host nations, 16 cities and billions of viewers worldwide. He was not wrong about
the scale.
But whether scale and quality are the same thing is a different question entirely.
Boost for newcomers
For the uninitiated, consider Cape Verde in Africa — the smallest nation by land area ever to qualify for a World Cup — or Curacao, a Caribbean island of just over 1,50,000 people that earned its place through the Concacaf qualification process. Add Jordan and Uzbekistan from Asia. For these nations, a World Cup berth is not symbolic. It rewires football economies.
Governments invest in infrastructure. Youth programmes gain legitimacy. Sponsorships follow visibility. A first World Cup can fundamentally alter how a nation imagines itself within the sport. With the United States, Mexico and Canada exempted from Concacaf qualifying as co-hosts, the door opened wider for the region’s underdogs. Panama, Curacao and Haiti stepped through it.
“I’m all for inclusivity,” says Ishfaq Ahmed, coach of Real Kashmir FC and a former India international. “As I come from a country that has been dreaming of playing in the World Cup for a very long time. If an expanded format increases those chances, however small, then why not? Let’s do away with this elitist idea and be more democratic.”
There is also the matter of upsets, and history offers plenty of ammunition for optimists. Sceptics who worry about foregone conclusions in the early rounds would do well to remember the 1990 World Cup in Italy, when defending champions Argentina lost their opener to debutants Cameroon; 2002, when reigning champions France fell to Senegal; or 2022, when Lionel Messi’s Argentina were stunned by Saudi Arabia.
The intensity of a World Cup stage has a habit of levelling differences that look vast on paper. “I’m sure there will be big upsets,” says East Bengal’s Bruzon. “Some of the favourites will fail in the first stage.”
Antonio Lopez Habas, the former Mohun Bagan Super Giant coach, draws on personal experience to make the same point. “I was part of Bolivia’s coaching staff at the 1994 World Cup. We played Germany, the reigning champions, in the opener in Chicago, and they only managed to beat us 1-0, with a goal in the closing minutes.”
The motivation of smaller nations, Habas acknowledges, should never be underestimated on the day.
Cost of big
Yet the expansion has real costs and they are not trivial. The most glaring is the survival rate: 32 of 48 group-stage teams advance — a two-thirds pass rate that bleeds tension from early matches. When elimination feels distant, the edge that makes group-stage football so compelling is harder to sustain. “The technical level required to qualify has been diluted,” argues Habas. “Better teams are left out while others qualify because of the quota system assigned to each confederation and continent.”
Brazil are the cautionary tale. The five-time champions — the only team to have defended a World Cup post World War II, winning back-to-back Jules Rimet Trophies in 1958 and 1962 — endured their worst qualifying campaign in history. They finished fifth in the South American standings, collecting just 28 points from 18 matches, suffering six defeats, losing at home in ways that would once have been unthinkable, and posting a meagre goal difference of plus seven. Only the expansion of
direct qualifying berths from four to six saved them from the play-offs.
Italy, meanwhile, failed to qualify for the third successive World Cup, falling in the play-offs again. For a four-time world champion, it is a humiliation the expanded format cannot disguise.
There is also the question of geopolitical awkwardness. Iran, caught in the fallout of its conflict with the United States and Israel, finds itself sleeping in Mexico while playing matches on American soil. Mexican fans have voiced discontent at the distribution of fixtures — only 13 of the tournament’s 104 matches will be played in their country. The logistics of co-hosting across a continent are rarely as clean as the brochure suggests.
Burden of players
Perhaps the most serious concern is player welfare. The modern football calendar is already punishing, moving elite players from demanding club seasons almost directly into international tournaments with barely a breath in between.
The World Cup, Copa America, the European Championship and the remodelled Fifa Club World Cup now form a near-unbroken cycle. Adding 40 matches to the sport’s flagship event, across a vast North American geography with all the travel and logistical strain that it entails, compounds the problem significantly.
Maheta Molango, chief executive of England’s Professional Footballers’ Association, has been among the loudest voices sounding the alarm. Considering the greater global reach of football, the sport needs to think about the quality of its output, he said. “We target China, the US, India,” he told the Associated Press. “This should make us reflect on the value of scarcity — sometimes more is not more.” It is a phrase that cuts to the heart of the debate.
“Fatigue will be a big issue,” says Bruzon of Emami East Bengal. “Teams that manage it well will go the distance.” Habas, the former Mohun Bagan coach, adds another variable that no amount of squad rotation can solve: “Heat will add to the problem.” Real Kashmir’s Ahmed, ever the pragmatist, has a simpler suggestion, “They could have allowed more players in the squad.”
The tournament will run for roughly 39 days — more than a week longer than the familiar format. Sustaining global intensity across that span, in an era of fragmented attention and ever-multiplying entertainment choices, is a genuine challenge. Casual audiences consume sport differently now, dipping in and out rather than committing to weeks of sustained engagement. Broadcaster fatigue is as real a risk as player fatigue.
Beautiful game
Expansions in other sports offer mixed lessons. Cricket’s World Cups have swung awkwardly between exclusivity and excess. Rugby has wrestled with the competitiveness gap between elite and emerging nations. The NBA expanded its playoff television inventory but diluted the urgency of the regular season in the process. More rarely arrives without compromise, and the World Cup will be
no exception.
The debate, then, is genuine and unresolved — does magic lie in scarcity, or does the spectacle grow with inclusivity?
Fifa has placed its bet and placed it loudly. Whether football gains or loses something essential in the process, only the tournament itself will answer.
The 2026 edition will be watched, analysed and argued over long after the final whistle. Its legacy — whether it is remembered as the moment football truly went global, or the moment it began to lose its edge — will take years to assess fully.
As Habas puts it, with the weary wisdom of a man who has been around long enough to know, “Nobody will remember any of this once the World Cup begins.”
He is probably right. Football, as always, will have the last word.