Infantino Opens Door to a 64-Team World Cup

Gianni Infantino has confirmed that FIFA will examine the possibility of a 64-team World Cup, with the idea set to be discussed in the organisation's relevant committees once the 2026 tournament in the United States, Canada and Mexico is finished. It is the clearest signal yet that an expansion beyond the current 48-team format, which has only just made its debut, is a live proposal rather than a passing thought. "That's definitely an issue that will be examined and discussed in the relevant committees after this World Cup," Infantino said, adding the sort of line that tends to accompany every FIFA expansion plan: "Every nation should be allowed to dream of participating in the World Cup."

Where the idea came from

The proposal is not Infantino's invention. It originated with CONMEBOL, South American football's governing body, which floated the expansion in March 2025 as a way of marking the 2030 World Cup's status as the tournament's centenary edition. That 2030 tournament is already an unusual one: Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay will host a handful of opening fixtures to honour the competition's first edition in Uruguay in 1930, before the bulk of the tournament shifts to Morocco, Portugal and Spain. The idea was first raised at a FIFA Council meeting in March 2025 by Uruguayan football official Ignacio Alonso, tied specifically to plans for a centenary celebration at Montevideo's Estadio Centenario, the stadium that hosted the first World Cup final in 1930, with matching fixtures pencilled in for Buenos Aires and Asuncion. It is the kind of anniversary gesture a family makes for a hundredth birthday: a special trip laid on, more places set at the table than the room comfortably holds. Infantino met CONMEBOL leadership alongside officials from Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay in September 2025 to discuss it further, so this has been moving through FIFA's corridors for well over a year before reaching the wider public in this form. The format under discussion would reportedly split the 64 teams into 16 groups of four, sending the top two from each into a straight 32-team knockout, which would do away with the current 48-team system's quirk of some third-placed sides advancing.

The case Infantino is making

Infantino's argument leans heavily on the 48-team tournament's own performance as evidence that a bigger field does not dilute the competition. He called the expanded format "a huge success" and said "every team played at a high level," pointing specifically to Africa's representation in the knockout rounds as proof: 9 of the confederation's 10 qualifiers made it through to the last 16. He also made the wider case for standards across the game generally, saying "the quality of the teams is extremely high, and it's getting higher and higher all over the world," which is the standard FIFA line whenever expansion is on the table. The underlying argument is one of incentive: shut smaller footballing nations out of realistic qualification and you remove the reason for them to invest in the game at all.

It is a case that plays well in the abstract and rather less well with anyone who has to build a calendar around it. Doubling the 32-team era's 64-match count to 128 fixtures is not a rounding error. It is 24 more matches than the one just played, layered on top of an international calendar that domestic leagues, players' unions and broadcasters already regard as saturated. Argentina's run to the last four and England's own progress have already shown that a 48-team tournament can produce a compelling knockout stage without needing to grow further. Whether it needs to be bigger still, rather than simply refined, is precisely the argument Infantino has now opened up.

The calendar nobody has solved yet

The case against expansion rarely disputes the romance of it. It disputes the maths. FIFPRO, the global players' union, has already described the football calendar as unsustainable in the context of the current 48-team format, without any further expansion added on top. The 2026 tournament itself runs 39 days, from 11 June to 19 July, compared with 29 days for Qatar 2022, and the eventual champion will have played eight matches rather than seven. That is the cost of going from 32 to 48 teams alone. A jump to 64 would stretch the tournament calendar again, on top of a club season that already asks the same players to turn out 50 or 60 times a year before a ball at the World Cup is even kicked. FIFA has heard versions of this complaint before and expanded anyway, but the union's position gives the confederation presidents' objections a practical foundation rather than just a political one.

Who is against it

The opposition is not hidden. Concacaf president Victor Montagliani said in April 2025 that he had concerns about the wider football ecosystem being squeezed by a bigger tournament, a notable objection given Concacaf co-hosted the very 48-team edition Infantino is using as his evidence. UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin has been more blunt, previously dismissing the 64-team idea as "a bad idea" outright. Between them, two of the six continental confederations that would need to sign off on any change have already gone on record against it, and neither is a minor voice in FIFA's decision-making structure.

That opposition matters because Infantino, for all his influence, does not get to wave this through alone. Any expansion would ultimately need the backing of the FIFA Council, the body that actually decides these things, and there is no indication that a vote is imminent or that consensus is anywhere close to being reached. Infantino's own language reflects that: this is something to be "examined and discussed," not something being announced. It is the language of an idea being tested rather than a decision being made.

Verdict: a live debate, not a done deal

Treat this as the opening of a debate rather than the confirmation of a change. FIFA has a clear financial incentive to keep growing the World Cup: more teams means more matches, more broadcast windows and more host-nation revenue, and Infantino's presidency has already delivered one expansion from 32 to 48 teams. But the 2030 centenary tournament is a genuinely unusual event that might justify a one-off format rather than a permanent template, and the loudest voices against a 64-team World Cup are not outsiders but two of the six confederations FIFA needs onside. Infantino has opened the door. Whether the FIFA Council walks through it depends on votes he does not fully control, with Čeferin and Montagliani already lined up against. World Soccer Talk has since reported that Infantino himself may privately be less keen on a further increase than his public comments suggest, which points to a one-off nod for CONMEBOL's centenary rather than a permanent switch to 64 teams.

Sources: Reporting from BBC Sport, corroborated by ESPN, Al Jazeera and Yahoo Sports.