FIFA will tell you that expansion is about football’s global growth. About giving Haiti their World Cup. About making the game truly universal. All of this is true, and all of it is beside the point.
The point is that the 32-team World Cup produced some of the greatest sporting drama in human history. The 48-team version, beginning in June 2026 across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, will produce 104 matches — and the law of averages suggests a significant number of them will be entirely forgettable. The question is whether the genuine moments of magic, which still exist and still matter, are diluted beyond recovery.
I think they are. I have thought about this since the format was confirmed in 2017. Nine years of thinking has not softened the conclusion. The 48-team World Cup is a worse tournament than the 32-team World Cup it replaces, and the football establishment’s collective unwillingness to say so is one of the more depressing intellectual silences in the modern game.
This is the case against, in detail.
What 32 Teams Got Right
The 32-team format that ran from 1998 to 2022 was the closest football has ever come to a tournament structure that reconciled three competing demands: meaningful global representation, dramatic compression, and the preservation of a path through which only genuinely elite teams could win.
Eight groups of four. Top two through. Sixteen-team knockout. Every group-stage match mattered, because two-from-four meant a single defeat was potentially fatal. The maths were tight enough to produce — every four years, without fail — at least one televisual moment of national catastrophe and at least one televisual moment of national delirium that lived for the next four. France in 1998. Senegal in 2002. South Korea throughout 2002. Greece on the periphery in 2004 (a Euro, not a World Cup, but the same compression principle). Argentina–Germany in 2014. Croatia in 2018.
These were not accidents. They were the structural product of a tournament that compressed enough nations into enough scarcity that single moments could rewrite four-year arcs.
The knockout rounds, in turn, produced a one-or-two-game-per-day rhythm that let every single fixture be the day’s main event. A round of sixteen tie was treated, in the global consciousness, as a self-contained drama. Not a stage, not a fixture, not a phase — a story, with characters and stakes and a verdict.
This is the texture the format is about to lose.
What 48 Teams Will Get Wrong
The 48-team format that begins in June 2026 distributes the additional 16 nations across a structure that nobody — not the federations, not the broadcasters, not the most loyal World Cup viewers — finds elegant.
Twelve groups of four. The top two from each, plus the eight best third-placed sides, advance to a 32-team knockout round. Yes: a 32-team knockout round, which is what the previous tournament concluded with. The new tournament’s group stage exists, in scheduling terms, to eliminate sixteen of the worst sides and produce a knockout bracket that has the same scale as the old tournament’s main draw.
The first consequence is mathematical. A team can lose its opening match, draw its second, scrape a 1-0 in its third, finish on four points, and very plausibly still advance as a third-placed qualifier. The single defeat is no longer fatal. The drama of the do-or-die group-stage final is, structurally, eliminated.
The second consequence is competitive. The eight best third-placed sides will, in most simulations, be the eight giants who have struggled in their group — Brazil after a defeat to a debutant, France after an early scare, Germany after Cthe kind of performance that has cost them three of the last four tournaments. The structure has been engineered to protect the established powers from the sort of group-stage exit that, historically, has been the World Cup’s greatest narrative gift.
The third consequence is the broadcaster’s. 104 matches across roughly five weeks compresses to an average of three matches per day in the group stage, and four on some days. This sounds tolerable until you do the maths on time-zone-adjusted attention. A British viewer, awake and engaged, can watch perhaps two matches a day. A casual American viewer perhaps one. The remaining matches will play to an audience smaller than the audience of an old Champions League group-stage tie. They are filler. The tournament has become, structurally, a thing that contains filler.
The Federation Argument I Have to Acknowledge
The case for expansion is not zero. CONMEBOL, CAF, and AFC have all benefited from the additional slots — South America gets six places, Africa gets nine, Asia gets eight (plus a play-off route). For nations like Mali, Cape Verde, and Uzbekistan, qualification is a national event of historic significance. For their players, it is the chance of a lifetime. For their domestic football economies, it is a marketing event that buys, in genuine terms, decades of grass-roots growth.
I do not dismiss this. I have been in two African capital cities during World Cup qualification campaigns. I know what it looks like when a country qualifies for the first time. The expansion is not, in the case of those nations, costless to oppose.
But the case for expansion has been argued in those terms — think of the smaller nations — to occlude the parallel set of arguments that nobody in football’s institutional class wants to engage with.
The first parallel argument is that the smaller nations, in the new format, will mostly arrive, lose two matches by three goals, and exit. The promotional argument — Mali at the World Cup! — does not survive the on-field reality of Mali 0, France 4 — Mali 0, Argentina 5. The tournament is not actually delivering smaller nations the showcase the rhetoric implies. It is delivering them the experience of being beaten convincingly, on television, by teams whose B-string would have been favourites against them.
The second parallel argument is that the genuine integration of smaller nations into elite football happens through club competition, not international tournaments. CAF Champions League, AFC Champions League, the World Club Cup. Investing in those structures, rather than diluting the World Cup, is the path that produces lasting growth without compromising football’s signature event.
The third parallel argument is the inconvenient one: FIFA’s expansion decision was driven primarily by revenue-share politics with the federations, not by sporting principles. More slots equals more federation-level votes for the FIFA presidency. More matches equals more broadcasting fees, which equals more federation-level money to distribute. The 48-team World Cup is, structurally, an electoral payoff dressed in growth-of-the-game rhetoric.
To say so out loud is, in football’s institutional rooms, considered impolite. So nobody says it. But the documents from the 2017 FIFA Congress are public; the federation-by-federation lobbying is on record; the maths trace cleanly. Anyone who pretends otherwise is performing.
The Three-Country Problem
The other elephant in the 2026 tournament is the geography. The United States, Canada, and Mexico together cover roughly 21 million square kilometres. Group-stage matches are scheduled at venues from Vancouver to Mexico City, with single travel days requiring teams and their travelling supporters to cross multiple time zones.
Past World Cups have been hosted in single countries, with travel between matches measured in hours rather than days. The intimacy of the 1990 Italy tournament, the compactness of the 1998 France tournament, the easy geography of the 2014 Brazil World Cup (notwithstanding the country’s vastness, the venues were largely on the Atlantic coast) — these were structural goods that the new format dispenses with.
The supporters who travel across continents to follow their team in the group stage will find themselves committing to flight schedules more demanding than most international club tours. The atmosphere in stadiums will, accordingly, be patchier. The supporters who don’t travel will watch on television, in time zones not their own, fixtures whose stakes have been engineered downward by the qualification structure I described earlier.
The three-country format also produces stadium ecosystems with no shared character. The Hard Rock Stadium in Miami plays a different football to the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City; the Estadio BBVA in Monterrey plays differently again to BMO Field in Toronto. A single tournament should produce a coherent televisual identity. The 2026 World Cup, watched on TV, will look like a sequence of unrelated competitions in unrelated continents that happen to share a logo.
The Specific Match Nobody Is Excited About
Take, as an arbitrary example, a Group H match-day-three fixture. Group H, in the current draw, contains Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Cape Verde, and Costa Rica. The match in question is Cape Verde versus Costa Rica, scheduled for Vancouver on June 20th, with both sides going in already eliminated from the knockout rounds.
I want to be specific about what this match is. It is the seventy-third match of the tournament. Both teams have played twice and lost twice. The mathematical possibility of advancement is gone for both. The travelling supporter pools are small; the local Vancouver interest is minimal; the broadcaster is required, by FIFA contract, to dedicate full coverage to a fixture that, in a 32-team tournament, would not exist.
This is not Cape Verde’s fault. This is not Costa Rica’s fault. This is the tournament structure FIFA has engineered, in which two-thirds of all group-stage matches will, by the time they are played, have stakes too low to justify the broadcast slot. The genuine drama of the World Cup — the moments that have made it the cultural event it has been — happens in roughly the final quarter of the tournament. The structural choice has been to dilute the first three quarters into a glorified qualifying round, played in front of an audience that has been told, repeatedly, that this is the greatest sporting event on earth.
It is no longer the greatest sporting event on earth. It is a longer, less compressed, less intimate, less competitive cousin of the event it replaces. The fact that it generates more revenue than the previous format is real and beside the point.
The Euro 2016 Lesson Nobody Wants to Discuss
The European Championship expanded from 16 to 24 teams in 2016. The expansion was sold with the same rhetoric the World Cup expansion is being sold with — opportunity for smaller nations, the growth of the game, more competitive football across the continent. Eight years later, the verdict is in.
Iceland’s run in 2016 was, narratively, the gift the expansion advocates pointed to as proof of concept. Wales reaching the semi-final was the second. Both stories were genuine; neither has been repeated in the two subsequent expanded tournaments. Euro 2020 (held in 2021) and Euro 2024 produced exactly zero comparable underdog runs. The 24-team structure has settled into a tournament where eight or nine of the giants advance from groups they should advance from, and four to six of the smaller nations exit having played three matches in three different countries against opposition above their weight class.
The 16-team Euros that ran from 1996 to 2012 are, by every measure of quality football journalism applies — match-quality, drama-density, knockout-round intensity — the better tournaments. The expansion has been silently treated as a fait accompli that nobody argues against because the federations whose income depends on it would be embarrassed to be argued at.
The World Cup’s expansion to 48 teams is, in scale, three times as severe as the Euro expansion. The structural costs will be three times as severe. The fact that this argument is not being made loudly, from inside football’s institutions, is itself evidence of how thoroughly the politics of federation revenue have captured the discourse.
What Should Have Happened
I have a counter-proposal that I do not expect FIFA to seriously consider, but which I think is correct on sporting grounds.
40 teams. Eight groups of five. Top two advance. The format produces ten group-stage matches per group rather than six, distributes the extra fixtures cleanly, gives an additional eight teams (relative to the 32-team structure) the showcase the expansion advocates wanted, and keeps the do-or-die compression that the 32-team format had.
The maths work. The schedule works. The drama works. The growth-of-the-game argument is significantly satisfied without the dilution.
The reason this format was rejected — and it was, formally, considered and rejected by FIFA in 2016 — is that it produced fewer matches and therefore fewer broadcast slots and therefore less revenue than the 48-team version. The decision was financial. Everything else is, at the institutional level, post-hoc justification.
The Loss the Tournament Cannot Recover
What the 48-team World Cup loses is not just the structural compression of the old format. It loses the cultural compression — the fact that, every four years for almost a century, the entire planet sat down to watch the same thing at the same time, and the thing was tight enough that single moments could become global memory.
Pelé’s hat-trick in 1958. Maradona’s goals in 1986. Italy 1990’s Schillaci tournament. Roger Milla’s dance in 1990. Bergkamp against Argentina. Zidane’s headbutt. Ghana’s elimination on penalties in 2010. Italy’s defeat in 2018 qualifying. Argentina’s 2022 final.
These memories are the World Cup. The tournament’s value is not the matches themselves. It is the way the matches accumulate, against the compression of time and stakes, into something the human brain stores as cultural shorthand.
The new format will produce its own memories — the human capacity for narrative is patient — but they will be memories of a different texture, attached to a tournament that the older audience will, increasingly, recognise as not quite the thing it used to be.
That is the loss I am writing about. It is real. It is structural. It is the price of an institutional decision made nine years ago in a room no journalist was allowed into, by people whose interests were not in producing the best possible football tournament. The tournament begins in June. Watch it. Enjoy what is enjoyable about it. But do not let yourself be told that this is a better World Cup than the one it replaces. It is not. The case against is overwhelming. The case for has been made by people whose credibility on the matter is, at this point, somewhere between non-existent and actively dishonest.
Some of us will keep watching anyway. We will keep watching because the alternative — not watching — is worse, and because moments of football’s old magic will still happen, in matches we will remember despite the structure rather than because of it.
But we will know. The people watching the 1986 World Cup did not have to perform optimism about the format to enjoy the tournament. We do. That, too, is something the new World Cup has cost us — the simple capacity to enjoy the event without the constant low-level critical apparatus that this writer, and many others like him, have had to develop just to make sense of what FIFA has produced. A tournament that requires its admirers to defend it against the structural argument is not, by definition, a tournament at peace with itself.
In four years’ time, we will go through this conversation again, ahead of the 2030 tournament shared between Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay — six host nations across two continents, an even more dispersed footprint, and the same 48-team structure. The institutional momentum is in one direction. The sporting argument is in another. They will not, before the next several FIFA presidential cycles, meet in the middle. The most we can do is name the loss honestly while there are still people who remember what was lost.