Bigger, louder, forgettable? What the 64-team World Cup would actually change

The 2026 FIFA World Cup ended only days ago, and the conversation inside the governing body has already moved on. Within hours of the final whistle, FIFA was being asked, and asking itself, the obvious question that follows any successful tournament: could this be bigger? Sky Sports reported on 20 July 2026 that the 48-team format that defined this year's competition could itself be expanded, possibly to 64 nations, in time for the 2030 edition, which Spain, Portugal and Morocco are already preparing to host across three continents.

The argument is straightforward, if mercantile. More teams means more qualifiers, more broadcasts, more national federations with skin in the draw, and a longer tournament window for sponsors to inhabit. The argument against is just as straightforward, and it lives in the fixture list. After 48 teams produced the longest World Cup in the tournament's history, a further expansion would test whether the format can hold its shape.

What the 2026 tournament actually proved

For all the hand-wringing about bloat, the 48-team version of the World Cup delivered its own headline moment, the kind ESPN asked readers to weigh in the days after the final: every World Cup yields one enduring image, and 2026's competition is now being catalogued alongside Messi's 2022 lap of honour and Mbappé's 2018 emergence. The format change did not flatten the drama. It added group-stage padding, yes, but it also produced a deeper pool of knockout-stage storylines, with debutants and returning sides alike getting four matches to establish themselves before the round of 16 cuts the field.

The cost was time. Sky Sports framed the 48-team edition as a long tournament, noting that it ran noticeably longer than the 32-team format that had defined the competition since 1998. Players' unions have already flagged workload concerns. Club managers across the Premier League, La Liga and MLS have spent the post-tournament window complaining about the compressed calendar. Expansion to 64 would extend the calendar pressure another tier without any guarantee that the competitive density of the knockout rounds will improve.

Why 64 is on the table now

The 2030 World Cup is already an outlier: a tri-continental hosting arrangement built to honour Uruguay's 1930 centenary and to thread political symbolism through the schedule, with opening matches in Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Asunción before the bulk of the tournament moves to the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco. FIFA president Gianni Infantino has made expansion his default answer to every commercial question the federation faces. Infantino argued, in the run-up to 2026, that a larger World Cup was a more inclusive one, giving smaller federations a realistic route to the finals. That logic extends naturally to 64: every additional slot is a federation that can be told it has a chance.

The countervailing pressure is the broadcasters. The 48-team 2026 tournament sold advertising and rights at a scale FIFA will be eager to repeat, but advertisers are buying against a defined window. Stretching the tournament further risks diluting per-match value, the way a season with too many fixtures dilutes any single matchday. There is a version of this calculation in which 64 teams is too many even for FIFA's spreadsheet.

What a 64-team bracket would actually look like

Sky Sports sketched the geometry: sixteen groups of four, the top two advancing, and a knockout field that begins at the round of 32 rather than the round of 16. The headline consequence is five knockout matches per finalist instead of four, which is one more high-stakes game for the eventual champion and one more round of single-elimination television inventory for rights-holders. The cost is the group stage: with 16 groups, half as many meaningful second-placed finishes to track, and a longer gap between genuine elimination and a side's final whistle.

There are smaller consequences. Refereeing crews would be stretched across roughly 128 matches instead of the 104 played in 2026. Squad-size rules would face renewed pressure from federations that want to bring more players to a longer camp. Host cities would need to absorb more matches on shorter notice, which is a particular worry for the Iberian-Moroccan axis in 2030, where stadium supply is uneven across the three host countries. None of these are deal-breakers on their own. Cumulatively, they are the friction that 48 teams were meant to test and 64 would codify.

The political economy of more flags

The deeper pattern is administrative. FIFA's expansion logic treats the World Cup as a redistributive instrument: more slots, more federations with a stake, more political goodwill at the congress floor in Bangkok. The 2026 format was sold on inclusion. The 2030 edition was stitched together to honour Uruguay's centenary, and the 2034 edition, awarded to Saudi Arabia, was sold on similar logic. Each round of expansion orients the tournament further toward federations that historically could not host or qualify, and further away from the European-South American duopoly that defined the competition for its first ninety years.

There is a legitimate critique baked inside that frame. Critics inside the coaching and federation community, captured in the Sky Sports reporting, argue that FIFA is optimising for the number of national associations that participate in qualifying, not for the marginal entertainment value of the additional finalists. The result is a tournament weighted toward group-stage matches between sides that, on paper, have little chance of reaching the knockout rounds. Theournament grows in length while the average quality of any individual fixture declines.

What to watch before 2030

Two decisions sit between now and the 2030 kick-off. First, FIFA's council has to ratify any format change, and the political coalition around Infantino will determine whether 64 reaches a vote at all. Second, the confederations whose slots would expand will have to defend the allocation to their own member associations, and that is where the federation-level lobbying will be loudest.

The uncertainty worth naming is whether the competitive product holds. The 2026 tournament avoided the format's worst-case scenarios, producing a credible champion and a bracket that rewarded form. A 64-team edition offers fewer such guarantees: more matches between mismatched sides, more nights where the broadcast picture carries a contest no neutral viewer would have tuned in for. FIFA will weigh that against the commercial logic of a longer, more inclusive tournament. The history of the past three World Cups, 48's bumps included, suggests FIFA will pick inclusion and learn from the consequences later.

This publication framed 2026 as a stress test rather than a verdict. Theournament survived. Whether the next expansion merely extends it or actually delivers on the inclusivity pitch remains the live question.

Sources: Sky Sports, "What would a 64-team World Cup look like, and could it work in 2030?" (20 July 2026); ESPN, "How will the 2026 World Cup be remembered? Ranking…" (21 July 2026).