The 48-Team World Cup: More Football, or Diluted Drama?
Expanding to 48 teams opened the World Cup to more of the world than ever. It also raised hard questions about quality and jeopardy. My honest take on the trade-off.
I'll admit it: I was a sceptic. When the World Cup was confirmed to be growing to 48 teams, my first instinct was the same as a lot of fans' — that you cannot add sixteen more nations without watering down the thing that makes the tournament special. Now that we are actually watching it, I have landed somewhere more honest, and more conflicted.
The case for going bigger
Start with the obvious good. A 48-team World Cup is a more global World Cup. Continents and countries that spent decades on the outside looking in finally get a seat at the table. For a smaller nation, qualifying is not just a sporting achievement; it is a moment that can grow the game for a generation back home. That is not a marketing line — it is the actual point of a world cup.
There is also simply more of it. More matches, more first-time stories, more evenings where there is a game worth watching. If you love football, abundance is not a problem.
The case for the sceptics
And yet. The worry was never the idea of inclusion; it was jeopardy. Part of what made the old 32-team group stage so good was that almost every game mattered, and the gap between the best and the rest was narrow enough to make upsets feel possible rather than freakish. Stretch the field to 48 and you inevitably invite some mismatches — games where the result feels settled before kickoff.
The best-third system is a clever fix, and it does keep more sides alive. But it also adds a layer of group-stage arithmetic, where you find yourself watching one match while doing maths about three others. That is not always the cleanest kind of drama.
Where I land
Here is the honest middle. I do not think expansion has ruined anything — the best games at this tournament have been every bit as good as the ones I remember. But I also do not think the sceptics were wrong to worry. Both things are true at once: the World Cup is more inclusive than it has ever been, and a little of its old wall-to-wall intensity has been traded away to get there.
If you had forced me to vote beforehand, I would have voted to keep it at 32. Watching it now, I am not so sure that instinct was right. Maybe the real measure is not whether every single game is a classic, but whether the tournament still produces the moments we will be talking about for years. So far, it has.
