Infantino's bigger World Cup is already here. The next stop is 64 teams.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup closed on 19 July 2026 with a tournament that ran across 16 venues, fielded 1,039 players from 48 nations, and produced 308 goals, according to FIFA's official summary reported by Al Jazeera on 21 July. That is the largest men's World Cup in the competition's 96-year history. It is, by Gianni Infantino's own logic, also insufficient.

Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA since 2016, has spent a decade answering every governance question with the same answer: scale up. The 2026 edition is the proof of concept. The next ask, floated seriously in FIFA corridors and treated seriously by BBC Sport on 20 July, is a 64-team men's World Cup. The pattern is what matters. Bigger tournament, more matches, more broadcast inventory, more tickets, more associate federations on the hook for development funding that flows from FIFA's central kitty.

What 48 actually delivered

The numbers from the just-finished tournament are the argument. Forty-eight nations. Sixteen host cities spread across the United States, Mexico and Canada. One thousand and thirty-nine players registered. Three hundred and eight goals scored. Al Jazeera's wrap-up, published 21 July at 10:25 UTC, also confirmed the on-pitch extremes: the golden boot went to the tournament's top scorer, the golden glove to its best goalkeeper, and the most-booked player collected the most yellow cards. The format produced the highest single-edition goal total in World Cup history.

That is the case Infantino will make publicly. More games meant more moments, more storylines, more advertising inventory, and more federations that can claim to have played on the biggest stage. The 2026 field included debutants and minnows that, under the previous 32-team format, would have stayed home.

The 64-team question

BBC Sport's 20 July analysis asked, on the record, whether Infantino could realistically push the next men's World Cup to 64 teams. The mechanics are familiar by now. FIFA's council can approve a format change; the congress ratifies; the host bid is re-cut. The political lift is harder. UEFA, Conmebol and the established powers have so far tolerated expansion because the marginal cost to them is small. Sixty-four teams is a different ask: it requires diluting the qualifying spots of confederations that already feel under-served, lengthening a tournament that already runs a month, and convincing broadcasters that a group stage padded with mismatches still commands prime-time rights fees.

Infantino's leverage is the development money. FIFA's centralised revenue grew sharply across the 2026 cycle, and a meaningful share is redistributed to all 211 member associations through the Forward development programme. That redistribution is the quiet reason small federations rarely vote against expansion. It is also the reason the dominant critique, from coaching staff and from fans, is that the football gets worse before it gets better.

Why this is also a financial story

A World Cup is no longer primarily a sporting event. It is a content-rights asset sold into a global broadcast market, a sponsorship inventory for partners paying nine-figure sums, and a tourism lever for host cities. Every additional eight teams adds roughly fifteen matches to the schedule. At FIFA's per-match broadcast pricing on the 2026 cycle, fifteen matches is not a rounding error; it is a material revenue line. The corollary is that FIFA's incentive to expand no longer tracks the quality of the football. It tracks the size of the broadcast cheque.

This is also where the politics get uncomfortable. Host federations in 2026 spent public money on stadium builds, security, and transit. A 64-team edition would push the tournament toward needing five host countries at once, or toward a single host absorbing infrastructure costs that have already drawn political backlash in cities that built and cities that did not.

What the critics inside the game say

Coaches and confederation officials have made the case against further expansion in plain terms. More group-stage matches between mismatched opponents produce the wrong kind of spectacle: predictable scorelines, dead rubbers, injuries in low-stakes games. The on-pitch evidence from 2026 is mixed. The expanded field produced the highest goal tally in the tournament's history, but it also produced a longer schedule, more travel for players already at the limit of a club season, and a knockout bracket that took longer to settle.

The structural objection runs deeper. FIFA's centralisation of revenue and decision-making has, in the same decade, hollowed out the autonomy of continental confederations on commercial questions. Expansion accelerates that shift. Each new team is a new vote in favour of the incumbent leadership, and each new team is a new reason for the next host to negotiate directly with Zurich rather than through a regional body.

What to watch next

FIFA's council meets next in the autumn; a formal 64-team proposal would need to land before any 2030 host conversations harden. The 2030 edition is already unusual: the centenary tournament will open in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay before shifting to Spain, Portugal and Morocco. Sixty-four teams would compound the logistical strain. The likeliest path is a phased expansion: 48 in 2026, a quiet ratification of 56 for 2034, and 64 thereafter.

Infantino has learned, over ten years, that the football world will absorb almost any format change if it is packaged as inclusion and paid for with redistribution. Whether that arithmetic still holds once the matches themselves start to feel like filler is the open question the 2026 tournament has not yet answered.

The 2026 World Cup's expanded format delivered record goals and record reach. The case for 64 teams will be made in the language of inclusion; the case against it will be made on the pitch.