There is a photograph taken in Montevideo in July 1930 that shows the entire field of competitors for the first World Cup. Thirteen nations. Delegates in suits and ties, standing on the grass of the Estadio Centenario before the tournament began. The United States are there. France. Argentina. Uruguay, the hosts, who would win the whole thing. Belgium, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Romania, Yugoslavia. Thirteen nations invited by Jules Rimet, FIFA’s president, to come to South America and play football for a gold trophy that was worth rather less, in commercial terms, than the stamp on a modern replica.
That photograph, if you know what comes after it, has the quality of a beginning that could not have known how large it would become. Those thirteen nations had no idea that what they were standing inside was a founding edition of a tournament that would expand, and expand again, and then expand again, until it reached 2026 and forty-eight of them, playing a hundred and four matches across three countries and a summer. The photograph from 1930 and the MetLife Stadium final in July 2026 are separated by ninety-six years and thirty-five additional participants. Both are, technically, the same competition.
How the World Cup grew from one to the other — from the intimate, politically fraught gathering in Montevideo to the vast commercial and sporting organism of the modern era — is a story about football, but it is also a story about money, confederation politics, colonial history, and the recurring tension between the purity of a tournament and the appetite of the institution that runs it. Every expansion in World Cup history has been announced as progress. Every expansion has been contested. And the arguments made in 1982, in 1998, and in 2017 are versions of arguments that were implicit even in 1930, when Rimet first had to decide who deserved an invitation and who did not.
The founding tournament was not, strictly speaking, a competition at all — not in the modern sense. There was no qualification. Jules Rimet invited nations personally, and nations accepted or declined based on whether they could afford the voyage, whether the politics of their confederation permitted it, and whether their football associations were on good enough terms with FIFA to receive an invitation in the first place. Several European nations declined entirely. England had withdrawn from FIFA over disputes about the definition of amateurism. Italy and Spain, two of the strongest footballing nations in Europe, stayed home because a return voyage to South America felt, at the time, like an unreasonable demand.
The result was a field that was not the best thirteen footballing nations in the world but rather thirteen nations that were willing, able, and available. Uruguay won, as hosts and as by far the most technically advanced side in the tournament. The United States reached the semi-finals. France lost to Argentina in the group stage in front of a small crowd. The whole event lasted less than three weeks.
Rimet’s vision had been explicitly universalist — he believed that football could serve as a kind of international diplomacy, that bringing nations together on a pitch would soften the harder edges of the politics between them. This vision was genuine, but it existed within institutional structures that were anything but neutral. FIFA in 1930 was a European-dominated body governing a sport that was, in many of the regions it sought to reach, still entangled with the specific forms of European colonial administration. The teams at the first World Cup came from Europe and the Americas. Africa, Asia, and Oceania were absent — not because football did not exist there, but because their football associations were either not yet affiliated or not yet considered worth the invitation.
From 1934 through 1978, the World Cup settled at sixteen teams. The expansion from thirteen to sixteen was implicit in the shift from an invited field to a qualified one: the 1934 tournament in Italy introduced a formal qualification process for the first time, and the field settled at sixteen as a round number that permitted a clean knockout bracket. The format was elegant in its logic — sixteen teams, four rounds, one champion. Every match mattered because every match could end your tournament. The single-elimination structure from the round of sixteen was unforgiving, which was part of its appeal.
Those four decades of the sixteen-team tournament produced some of the most celebrated moments in football history. Brazil’s 1958 side in Sweden, with Pelé at seventeen. Hungary’s great team of 1954, which lost a final it should have won to West Germany. England’s 1966 victory at Wembley, still the only time the nation that invented the sport has lifted the trophy. Brazil’s 1970 side in Mexico — Pelé, Jairzinho, Tostão, Rivelino — which remains, by most accounts, the finest international team ever assembled. The sixteen-team format was, in retrospect, the World Cup at its most concentrated: every nation that qualified was a serious footballing country by the standards of the time, and the knockout pressure began from the first game.
It was also, during this era, a tournament with severe limits on who could participate. UEFA and CONMEBOL were allocated the majority of places. Africa and Asia shared a single playoff spot for much of the period, meaning that an entire continent — a continent producing technically gifted footballers in increasing numbers — sent one team, if it sent any at all. The sixteen-team format kept the tournament clean, but cleanliness came at the cost of representation. FIFA’s membership was growing. The world’s footballing geography was changing. The format was not keeping pace.
The first major expansion came in 1982, when the tournament in Spain moved from sixteen teams to twenty-four. The decision had been made by João Havelange, the Brazilian who had taken over from Sir Stanley Rous as FIFA president in 1974. Havelange had campaigned for the FIFA presidency on a platform of expansion — more nations, more continents, more of the world at the World Cup — and he had received the votes he needed from African and Asian federations who understood that his promises carried weight. Havelange delivered. Africa received more guaranteed spots. Asia received more spots. CONCACAF received more spots. The tournament grew.
The twenty-four team format introduced in 1982 was, in footballing terms, a more complicated creature than the sixteen-team version it replaced. Six groups of four teams each advanced their top two sides to a second group stage — not a knockout round, but another round-robin, in which the three group winners would advance to the semi-finals. The design was unusual, and the consequences were serious. When two teams in the second group stage know exactly what result they need, and when that result would eliminate a third team that cannot influence the game, the incentives align in a way that can produce precisely the collusion the format invites.
This is what happened in the Group 2 second-round game between West Germany and Austria in Gijón on the twenty-fifth of June, 1982. Algeria had already played their game and knew they needed West Germany to win by fewer than two goals — any margin larger than that would send Austria through on goal difference instead of Algeria. West Germany scored after eleven minutes. Both teams then played out the remaining seventy-nine minutes without making a serious attempt to change the score. The 1-0 result sent West Germany and Austria through and eliminated Algeria, who had earlier beaten West Germany in one of the most celebrated upsets in World Cup history. The game became known as the Disgrace of Gijón, a phrase that entered the football lexicon as shorthand for what happens when a competition’s format creates incentives that override sporting integrity.
FIFA’s response was to change the format for 1986 — dropping the second group stage and returning to a straightforward knockout round, with the top two from each group plus the four best third-placed teams advancing to a round of sixteen. The format rescued the drama that the 1982 version had threatened to drain. The twenty-four team World Cup of 1986 in Mexico — which produced Diego Maradona at the absolute height of his powers — is remembered as a great tournament. The lesson was clear: the number of teams mattered less than the structure they competed within.
The twenty-four team format ran for four tournaments — 1982, 1986, 1990, 1994 — before the next expansion. By the early 1990s, Havelange’s successor-in-waiting, the Swiss administrator Sepp Blatter, was already building the political architecture for a thirty-two team World Cup. The case for expansion, as it was made publicly, rested on football’s claim to be a genuinely global sport: if the game was played across every continent, why should Africa be limited to three or four teams? Why should Asia, with more than half the world’s population, send four? The argument had moral force, and it was not wrong. Football had grown to places the sixteen-team format had never imagined. The qualification process in Africa and Asia had produced fierce, technically sophisticated football that deserved a larger stage.
But the argument had another dimension that received less public emphasis. Television rights, in the early 1990s, were becoming the dominant financial force in global football. More teams meant more nations with a stake in the tournament. More nations with a stake meant more domestic broadcasters willing to pay for rights. More domestic broadcasters paying for rights meant more money flowing into FIFA — and into the confederation officials whose political support Blatter needed to consolidate his position. The expansion to thirty-two was good for football in the broadest sense. It was also very good for FIFA’s balance sheet, and for the specific human beings inside FIFA who had votes to trade.
Blatter became FIFA president in 1998, the same year the thirty-two team tournament began in France. The timing was not coincidental — the expansion was, among other things, his calling card, the evidence that his presidency would deliver what Havelange’s had promised and what the African and Asian federations wanted. France 1998 became the template against which all subsequent World Cups were measured. Eight groups of four teams, clean knockout rounds from the round of sixteen, a tournament structure so logically coherent that it could be grasped immediately by a casual viewer. The thirty-two team format did not just work — it worked beautifully, in the sense that every stage had weight, every result had consequences, and the knockout rounds produced matches of the highest quality.
The teams that arrived in France in 1998 included, for the first time, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, Jamaica, and Croatia. These were not merely names added to a list — they represented football communities that had been building toward this moment across decades. South Africa’s presence at a World Cup, just four years after the end of apartheid, carried a weight that went beyond football. Japan’s arrival signalled the growing sophistication of East Asian football, a process that would culminate in Japan and South Korea co-hosting the tournament four years later. The thirty-two team format had room for these stories in a way that the twenty-four team version had not.
It also produced, almost immediately, evidence of a structural consideration that would become familiar in subsequent tournaments. With thirty-two teams divided into eight groups, the gap in quality between the strongest and the weakest sides was sometimes extreme. There were group-stage matches that looked less like competitive football and more like demonstrations of the distance between different footballing traditions. The format’s logic demanded that these mismatches happen — if you include thirty-two teams, some of them will be significantly weaker than others — and the question of how much mismatch was acceptable would follow the tournament into every subsequent edition.
The answer, over twenty-five years, proved to be: enough that the tournament survived, but not enough that the debate went away. The eight-group format produced consistently competitive knockouts. The group stage, with its three-game format for each team, gave weaker nations enough matches to build momentum or suffer elimination with some dignity. The 2002 tournament, co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, produced the greatest series of upsets the World Cup had ever seen — South Korea reached the semi-finals, Senegal reached the quarter-finals, the United States reached the quarter-finals, Turkey reached the semi-finals. All of this happened within the thirty-two team structure. The format was not producing bad football. For twenty-five years, it was producing very good football.
Which makes what happened next worth examining carefully. In January 2017, FIFA’s council voted to approve an expansion of the World Cup from thirty-two teams to forty-eight, beginning with the 2026 tournament to be co-hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The decision was announced by Gianni Infantino, who had succeeded Blatter as FIFA president following the corruption scandal that had consumed much of the Blatter-era leadership. Infantino had campaigned, as both Havelange and Blatter had before him, on a platform of expansion and inclusion. The forty-eight team World Cup was his signature project.
The original format proposed for 2026 was sixteen groups of three teams — a structure that would have given each nation only two group-stage games, reducing the drama of the group stage and increasing the likelihood of a draw being agreed between two nations who knew they could both advance at the expense of the third. The logic was, at some level, impeccable: more teams, more nations included, more of the world at the World Cup. But the format was widely criticised, on the grounds that two games per group-stage team was insufficient to determine merit, that the incentive structures were dangerous, and that the memory of Gijón had not faded.
After sustained pressure from fans, coaches, and a significant portion of the football world, FIFA revised the format. The forty-eight team tournament would instead be played in twelve groups of four — each team playing three group-stage games, the top two from each group advancing automatically, eight of the twelve third-placed teams advancing to a round of thirty-two. The revision addressed the most serious structural concerns. It also created a tournament of one hundred and four matches, a number that will test the logistical capacity of three host nations and the physical limits of players who will also be finishing a European club season before it begins.
The confederation allocations for 2026 reveal, as clearly as any document, what the expansion is actually about. UEFA, the European confederation, moves from thirteen places to sixteen — a modest increase for the largest and most commercially significant bloc. CONMEBOL, South American football, moves from four and a half places to six and a half. CAF, African football, moves from five places to nine — the largest proportional increase of any confederation, nearly doubling Africa’s representation. The Asian Football Confederation moves from four and a half places to eight. CONCACAF, the North and Central American and Caribbean confederation, which is hosting the tournament, receives six and a half places, up from three and a half. The Oceania Football Confederation receives one guaranteed place for the first time in decades.
These numbers are, in one sense, a correction of long-standing imbalance. African football has been underrepresented at the World Cup for most of its history — the talent was there before the places were allocated to find it. The 1982 expansion gave Africa three spots. The 1998 expansion gave Africa five. The 2026 expansion gives Africa nine. Whether nine African nations qualify for the same World Cup changes what that World Cup looks like, sounds like, and feels like in a way that is genuinely significant. The same is true of eight Asian nations, and of six and a half CONCACAF nations.
But the allocations also reflect the political arithmetic that has governed FIFA since Havelange’s presidency. CAF has forty-six member associations. AFC has forty-seven. Together, they hold ninety-three votes in FIFA’s congress. In a body where the presidency is decided by votes and where votes are traded for institutional favour — for hosting rights, for development funds, for places at the World Cup — the allocation of spots to Africa and Asia is simultaneously a matter of sporting justice and a matter of political calculation. Both things can be true. They have been true at every expansion since 1982.
There is a question that runs through the entire history of expansion, from Rimet’s thirteen invited nations to Infantino’s forty-eight qualified ones, and it is this: what is the World Cup for? One answer — the answer that Rimet gave, and that every FIFA president since has given in public — is that it is for the world. It is a tournament that aspires to represent the full global community of football, to give every nation that plays the game a path to the largest stage, to tell the story of football as a genuinely universal story. On this reading, expansion is always good, and the direction of travel from thirteen to forty-eight is the direction of moral progress.
Another answer is that the World Cup is, above all, a sporting competition — a contest to determine the best footballing nation on the planet, conducted under conditions that reward merit and punish weakness, in which the drama and quality of the football are the primary measure of success. On this reading, expansion has a ceiling, and the ceiling is reached when the addition of more teams reduces the quality of the matches, dilutes the significance of qualification, or creates structural incentives for the kind of collusion that Gijón demonstrated. The arguments about the forty-eight team format are, at their core, arguments about which of these answers takes priority. They are ongoing, they are serious, and they will not be resolved before the first ball is kicked in June.
What history suggests, however, is that the format matters as much as the number. The twenty-four team tournament produced the Disgrace of Gijón when the format was wrong and Diego Maradona’s finest hour when the format was corrected. The thirty-two team tournament produced twenty-five years of largely excellent football across eight tournaments in eight countries on four continents. The forty-eight team tournament, in its revised twelve-group form, has the structural ingredients to work — three-game group stages, clear advancement criteria, a round of thirty-two that preserves knockout tension from relatively early in the competition. Whether it will produce football as good as the best thirty-two team editions depends on factors that cannot be determined until the tournament begins.
What can be said, with confidence, is that the forty-eight team World Cup will produce stories that would not have existed in a thirty-two team version. Some of those stories will come from nations that have never been to a World Cup before. Others will come from nations that have qualified before but infrequently — nations where a single qualification was a generation-defining event, where the football infrastructure was built precisely toward the possibility of a World Cup appearance. The additional nine African places mean that several nations currently ranked in the middle tier of African football will be in the United States, Canada, and Mexico in the summer of 2026 — playing their first games in the tournament’s ninety-six-year history, or their second, or their third, watched by populations for whom this is among the most significant collective experiences imaginable.
That is not nothing. It is, in some ways, precisely what Rimet intended when he organised thirteen nations in Montevideo and handed out invitations based on little more than willingness to make the journey. The logic of inclusion — the argument that the World Cup should represent the world — is not naive. Football does exist everywhere. The stories that exist everywhere are real. And the expansion of the tournament, from thirteen to sixteen to twenty-four to thirty-two to forty-eight, has consistently been accompanied by moments that justified it: Algeria beating West Germany in 1982, Cameroon reaching the quarter-finals in 1990, Senegal’s run to the last eight in 2002, Ghana reaching the last eight in 2010. These moments happened because expansion created the conditions for them to happen.
The criticism of the forty-eight team format is not that expansion is wrong in principle — it is that this particular expansion may have gone further than the competition’s structure can absorb without cost to the quality that defines the tournament’s value. That is a legitimate argument, and it is worth having. But it is worth having with a full understanding of the history it sits inside — a history in which expansion has been predicted to be fatal to the World Cup multiple times, and in which the World Cup has, each time, survived.
The photograph from 1930 shows thirteen nations. The tournament that begins in 2026 will include forty-eight. In between those two moments there are five expansions, each driven by a mixture of idealism and institutional self-interest, each contested at the time and defended afterwards. The sixteen-team era produced the most concentrated and, by some measures, the most purely excellent football the tournament has ever seen. The twenty-four team era demonstrated that the format matters as much as the number of participants. The thirty-two team era found, for a quarter-century, a structure that balanced quality, inclusion, and drama in a way that felt close to optimal.
What the forty-eight team era will produce is, as of this writing, unknown. The structural framework has been revised to address the most serious criticisms. The confederation allocations reflect, however imperfectly, the actual geography of football’s global development. The tournament will be enormous — in scale, in logistical complexity, in commercial value, in the number of nations whose supporters will travel to North America and whose domestic broadcasters will pay for the rights. Whether it will be excellent football depends on the teams that qualify, the format that governs them, and the margin between quality and quantity that has always defined the central tension in the history of World Cup expansion.
That tension was present in Montevideo in 1930. It will be present in East Rutherford in July 2026. The World Cup has always been too large for some and too small for others. That is part of what it is — a tournament that is, at its best, larger than football, and at its worst, smaller than the game deserves.