48 teams and every 2 years: the World Cup could change forever

The 2026 FIFA World Cup will take place in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. However, football’s leading tournament will be a bit different.

The biggest change so far? 48 teams will be playing in the tournament instead of 32, divided into 16 groups of three teams.

British newspaper The Guardian explains that the top two teams of these 16 groups would move on to a new knock-out phase of 32 while 16 teams would go home just after playing two matches.

The 48-team tournament format would also expand the number of final places available for each confederation and would ensure that a team from Oceania would always make the cut.

Asia’s AFC would be one of the football federations that would benefit the most. The new system would raise the number of slots from 4,5 to 9.

Meanwhile, Africa’s CAF would get nine spots, instead of the current five.

Concacaf, which includes countries from North and Central America, would get six spots, up from 3.5.

However, three of these would go to Canada, Mexico, and the United States, since they are the World Cup hosts.

CONMEBOL from South America, home of legendary teams such as Argentina and Brazil, would go from 4,5 to 6.

Oceania would get one place. Before that, the OFC only had 0,5 spots.

Finally, Europe’s EUFA would get three more slots, getting a total of 16 teams into the next World Cup tournaments.

The Guardian highlights that many critics point out certain unfairness in the three-team format: Instead of having all the nations starting out from zero, there would always be one fresh team playing against one rival that had recently played.

However, the British newspaper comments that there have been “corridor chats” with an ongoing “informal conversation” about switching to a more balanced and traditional 12 groups made up of four teams.

This would increase the number of total matches to 104, 40 more games than those played in Qatar 2022.

The New York Times reported that the new format was originally proposed for the Qatar 2022 World Cup, however, it was ultimately rejected because the Doha government refused to be a co-host with its neighbors.

Expanding the number of teams in the tournament isn’t the only grand reform that FIFA has been in the talks about in the past years.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino pushed for changing the football tournament from every four years to every two.

The proposal proved to be controversial, as reported by the sports news website The Athletic. The approval came from some football stars such as Portuguese striker Cristiano Ronaldo.

Arsène Wenger, former Arsenal manager and FIFA’s chief of global football development, was supportive of the idea, envisioning the World Cup and the confederation championships playing in alternate summers.

Among the critics, there was UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin, who stated that a two-year tournament would ‘dilute’ the prestige and quality of the game, as quoted per The Athletic.

The head of UEFA was not alone. South America’s CONMEBOL promised that it would join the UEFA in boycotting FIFA if the biennial scheme was approved.

The New York Times tells that despite all the money and effort Infantino invested to promote the idea of a World Cup every other year, the proposal was quietly retired.

Let’s see if the 48-group three-team format will end up working or suffers a similar fate.