FIFA will reportedly approve further expansion of North America\u0027s 2026 World Cup.
FIFA had already planned to expand from the 32-team format that has been in place since 1998. Preliminary conversations had considered splitting the expanded 48-team field into 16 groups of three – a format that would have required 80 total games, up from 64 in the existing format – but FIFA has apparently reconsidered, choosing to go with 12 groups of four teams and 104 total games.
The further expansion would not come without controversy, because it would mean the tournament could run for 40 days, compared with the 28 days of the Qatar competition. That would contribute to an already heavy schedule for the game’s top stars. The sport’s smaller nations have welcomed expansion, hoping to make the kind of underdog run Morocco made in last year’s World Cup.
Victor Montagliani, the president of Concacaf, the North American confederation, recently expressed concern about an already crammed soccer calendar. One solution might be a shorter warm-up period, although not as short as Qatar’s seven-day lead-up, which was truncated because last year’s event was held in the fall during the sport’s club season.
“We do have to be responsible,” he said at the Financial Times’ Business of Football conference this month. “There was a footprint of days for 2014 and 2018 and we can’t go over that. We can’t have a three-month World Cup.”
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