Should FIFA expand to a 64 team World Cup?

By nearly all accounts FIFA’s first foray into a 48 team World Cup has been a success. The group stage may have lacked jeopardy but the games were good. The newly formed round of 32 opened the door for a whole bunch of countries to experience winning a knockout game.

The round of 32 wasn’t straightforward either. Germany got knocked out by one of those third place sides. Argentina were taken the brink by tiny Cabo Verde in what was truly a World Cup classic.

The matches being good doesn’t change the fact that eight of the 12 best third place teams advancing from the group stage is still a lousy format. It didn’t take long for rumors to start flying about expanding the tournament to 64 teams. Now FIFA President Gianni Infantino is talking about it, and when Infantino starts publicly talking about something it usually only goes one way.

For the public the jump to 64 teams makes sense for one reason: It’s cleaner. 64 teams divides into 16 groups of four. The top two teams from each group advance to the round of 32. No third place teams are advancing. Simple.

FIFA aren’t doing this for the benefit of the fans though. There’s only one thing on FIFA’s mind, money. FIFA are getting ready to sell the TV rights for the next round of tournaments. A 64 team tournament increases the total number of matches from 104 to 1281. That’s 24 additional matches they could make the TV companies pay for. The Men’s World Cup is FIFA’s breadwinner and they are trying to milk every cent from it they can.

That doesn’t mean a 16 team tournament is good for the masses. Let’s talk about why.

This is the one that everyone will focus on but personally I feel like it’s a little overblown, but it’s not nothing. I’m not worried about the bottom teams coming into the tournament and stinking. My concern is seeing actual good games in the group stage.

Going to a 64 team tournament increases pot 1 from 12 teams to 16 teams2. The 2030 tournament will have six hosts - four of which would be in Pot 1 anyway based on today’s FIFA rankings - so this doesn’t matter too much for the next tournament but it’ll come into play in 2034. A team like the USA, currently 16th in the FIFA rankings, would have a legitimate shot at being a Pot 1 team. That’s great for me, an American, but bad overall for the tournament. Uzbekistan were the 33rd ranked team in this years tournament, that would put them right outside Pot 2, not unreasonable for them to be able to climb over the next four years.

Suddenly those pots become very diluted. We love a group of death, and yea we all knew that France, Norway, and Senegal were all likely to go through this year, but spreading out the big teams this thinly will make getting a group of death rather difficult. There will be some drama for the second spot in each group, but the group stage will be just as much of a cake walk for the Pot 1 teams as it was this year.

This is the big one. How the hell would we jam a 64 team tournament into the calendar? Gianni Infantino loves to say the World Cup is for the whole world and not just Europe or South America but that’s a load of s**t. For the second straight tournament Europe claimed six of the eight quarterfinal spots. This year they make up three of the four semifinalists.

The world doesn’t revolve around Europe but the biggest football tournament in the world needs to. Europe is where all the best players play their club football and those are the players you want in your tournament. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is. The World Cup is when it is because that’s the only place it fits (cleanly) into the European club calendar.

From 2002 to 2018 every 32 team summer World Cup took 30 or 31 days. Other than 2002 when the tournament kicked off in May, the tournament has always began the somewhere between June 10-14, the second weekend of June and run until the second weekend of July. Since UEFA moved the Champions League final to Saturday in 2010, the World Cup has kicked off 19 or 20 days after the Champions League final.

On average the European season gets going about 31 days after the World Cup final3. This gives players who were eliminated in the quarterfinals or earlier to have a full four weeks off and ramp back up for the start of the season.

The 2026 World Cup started at the same time the previous summer editions did, but this year it was only 12 days removed from the Champions League final. That’s due to the Champions League expanding two years ago and adding another knockout round to push the final back.

This year the Premier League will kick off 34 days after the World Cup final, the same number as 2014 and 2010. But the season won’t start until August 21st, the latest a season has started since 20064! That’s going to push the season back a week, with the Champions League also being pushed back a week later.

That’s about as far back as you can go. The Champions League final will be moved up in 2028 because the Euros will get going that summer. The club season is already stretched about as far as it can go.

Now let’s talk about the actual World Cup.

The 48 team World Cup featured 40 more matches than it’s 32 team predecessor. Rather than the 30-31 days it took to play those tournaments, this one is spread out over 38 days. It’s pretty incredible to only add one another week, but they’ve done it by upping the amount of group games from what was typically three per day to four.

Four group games per day was first done in Qatar 2022 - a tournament that FIFA seemed more interested in getting out of the way than actually putting on a spectacle. What we saw in Qatar was an example of things to come. It was too much football per day, it was too much to keep up with. What ended up suffering was all of the other stuff that goes into the World Cup.

What makes the World Cup special isn’t just the matches but the stories behind them. It’s great that Jordan qualified for this tournament. What does the average fan who primarily follows European football know about Jordan? Nothing. But there are probably some great stories about Jordanian football and their players. Those stories are what is going to make us want to tune in for a match against Algeria that’s kicking off at midnight, 5am, or whenever.

Those stories get told in the hours of television coverage, in podcasts, and in written articles. Those things take time to make, and more importantly, you need time to consume them.

With the constant football, there’s no time for that. We saw it in Qatar and we’re seeing it again this year. Content creators are being stretched way too thin trying to cover all the matches. They don’t have enough time to watch, create, and sleep. They’re exhausted and as a result a lot of people who typically put out great content have been putting out pretty crappy stuff.

There’s no time to consume it either. It didn’t take long for me to fall behind on all the daily World Cup emails I receive - and I don’t even subscribe to much! Podcasts? Couldn’t keep up? New daily shows that were launched just for the tournament? Forget about it.

A few weeks ago someone in a group chat mentioned how the World Cup just seems to be passing them by because they don’t have the time to consume the podcasts and buildup to the match. World Cup matches are special but they’re special because of the buildup. The content outside of the match is a crucial component that buildup. Why else would you want to stay up late or wake up at crazy hours in the night to watch these games? I feel like I’ve watched so much football over the past month and yet I still feel like I missed so much of this tournament.

That brings us back to what a 64 team World Cup would mean on the schedule.

The group stage of this years World Cup took 17 days. The first two days of the tournament only had two games each, if we roll those into one day of four games, we could have done it in 16 days.

That number comes from four games per day over the first two rounds of group stage games (12 days), then six games per day for the final round of matches.

For a 64 team tournament under the same schedule a single round of matches would take eight days! Teams would have more than a week in between matches. It would take 16 days to play the first two rounds of games! Upping it to six games per day for the final round of games would still require another six days to complete, increasing the overall tournament by a week and pushing the final to the final week of July.

For the teams making deep runs in the tournament those players are going to be going full tilt for nearly 11 months5. That seems entirely too long. Won’t anyone ever think of the hamstrings?

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We can of course cut that extra week off the tournament and still wrap this thing up in about 38 days by simply increasing the number of group stage games per day. There are two ways we can do that (though each of them kinda suck).

The other option is, just play multiple games at once. Sounds pretty feasible but then I have to ask, what is the point of that? Isn’t the whole point of expanding the World Cup to give more countries exposure on the world stage? Introduce them to people who have never seen them play? Who is going to watch a match between a Pot 3 and Pot 4 team if there’s a Germany vs Senegal match on at the same time?

This would also reduce the value of each match for the TV companies. The value of the World Cup is, for nearly the entire tournament, everyone is tuned in to one match. When you have multiple matches at once you’re diluting the audience.

The other option is to increase the number of match slots on each day. The 2026 World Cup had group stage matches kick off at Noon, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm, and midnight (eastern time). You can do that every day and have five games.

However, games were able to kick off at these specific times because the 2026 World Cup spanned four different time zones. It still featured matches kicking off at 9pm local time, which is normal in some parts of the world and very much not in others.

If you need four time zones to play the tournament, that greatly limits who can host the tournament. You’re already limiting that with an expansion as you’ll need even more venues to host the sheer number of matches. Saudi Arabia is building nearly an entire tournament infrastructure from scratch, how would they be able to handle this many teams?

The 2030 tournament is going to be hosted by Spain, Morocco, and Portugal, with one game also being played in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. It’s a farce done to give Saudi Arabia a free run at the 2034 tournament, but expansion to 64 teams would mean that’s the future of the World Cup. The tournament would simply be too big for one or two nations to host, you’d need three, four, maybe even five nations - especially if you want those time zones.

Is that really what we want to do here? Is that really what’s best for the tournament? We tried a Pan-Europe European Championships and that tournament stunk (yes, COVID did play a role in that). That’s the road were going down but doesn’t that miss what the whole point of the World Cup is?

The World Cup is about bringing people from all over the world together. It’s about groups like the Tartan Army invading a city in the host country, bringing over their culture while also taking in the culture of the hosts. If you spread that out too much, you lose that.

At the end of the day FIFA will look at expansion and say “we can and we will.” They don’t care about the fans, they don’t care about the club season.

FIFA and UEFA have been in a cold war for years now. Neither is ever going to give an inch to the other and FIFA will have no problem taking even more and telling UEFA to just deal with it and figure it out for themselves.

As for the fans, they have us and they know it. It doesn’t matter what time they put the games on, people are going to watch.

That’s especially true of the participating nations. When Scotland kicked off at 2am, the pubs in Edinburgh were packed at 2am. Thousands of Jordanians turned up at an amphitheater in Amman for Jordan’s match that kicked off at Six AM local time. If an expanded format means Indonesia or Uganda qualify for the tournament do you think the people of those countries are going to care what time their match kicks off?

This is FIFA’s cow and they are going to milk it as much as they can. While too much of a good thing can lead to the cow drying up, that’s not FIFA’s concern.

If the cow is going to dry up it’s going to be a slow burn. We will watch the 64 team 2030 World Cup. It will be difficult to keep up with, and the content around the tournament will continue to get worse. With so much football, it’s only natural that we’ll miss more and more of the tournament - especially if you live somewhere where the time zones don’t align. As that happens the tournament will start to feel less special, especially as you get older and life keeps happening.

The question is will young people get as hooked the way my generation did in the 90s and 00s. We won’t know the answer to that in 2030, we won’t know in 2034. It’s going to take several tournaments for that to happen.

If that does happen, that’ll be a problem for FIFA. But at that point, all the people who made the decision to kill the golden goose expand the tournament will be long gone…

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As I was writing this I thought of one way to make a 64 team tournament work. Eliminate the group stage. Draw a 64 team knockout bracket with the caveat that the round of 64 will be two legged ties. That guarantees every team at least two matches - which was the original plan for the 48 team World Cup - and 32 teams the three matches that they got under the old format. Knockout football is great and this would bring it back down to the winner only having to play seven games. You can do this in a month.

Obviously this won’t happen because the whole point of expansion is MORE GAMES. This format would only get you 96 matches, eight fewer than the 48 team tournament. FIFA isn’t interested in making the matches worth more, or more interested, they’re just interested in having more of them.

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