Bloated World Cup the latest example of elite football’s expanding schedule

Welcome to a footballing world of safety nets and second chances. The Championship play-off positions will extend to one-third of the way down the table in the coming campaign, with those in seventh and eighth now joining the post-season pursuit of a Premier League place. The top flight itself, from 2024-25 onwards, had its Champions League quota upped to five teams – one quarter of its members – while in 2024, Europe’s senior club competition adopted a system where two-thirds of sides, rather than half, progressed from the league phase (24 of 36), albeit to different rounds.  

On the international front, England and their continental rivals can still reach European Championships or World Cups despite a failure to negotiate qualifying groups if their Nations League results are good enough for a play-off place. Furthermore, the tournaments themselves are increasingly bloated.

The 23% of entrants who have reached this World Cup (48 of 209 nations) compares with 15% last time and is the highest proportion since 1962. As many as 44% of entrants made it to Euro 2024 (24 of 54), whereas the rate was only one-third at the tournament’s expansion to 16 teams in 1996 and one-quarter during the eight-team events of the 1980s. 

And for those who qualify for these international tournaments, it has become harder to get knocked out at the first hurdle. The past three Euros, starting in 2016, have given knockout-stage places to two-thirds of nations playing in the group phase (16 of 24), and now the World Cup has adopted the same principle while using double those figures, waving through 32 of the 48 entrants to the knockout phase. In North America, we have needed 72 games just to return to the number of teams that started last time in Qatar.

Footballing bodies know that clubs or national associations will generally relish the prospect of greater certainty over qualification for tournaments, and lengthier stays in those competitions, but at some point this safety-net expansion starts to erode football fans’ enjoyment of the spectacle. The introduction of a 48-team World Cup is arguably the tipping point.

For the first time at a World Cup, it seems impossible to keep a proper check on the progress of every team. The event has the feel of a full league season as much as a tournament – the 104 games are, after all, more than one-third of the number of fixtures in an entire Bundesliga campaign. Watching every last group match has no longer felt compulsory.

The increase to 48 teams also complicates the route to a suitable quota for the knockout phase, which must be a power of two, realistically in this case either 16 or 32 (naturally Fifa chose the larger figure). The same number of teams cannot advance from each group to meet this requirement, hence the allocation of knockout-phase places for the best eight of the 12 third-placed sides.  

It means that the leading nations, having already enjoyed a generally non-pressured qualifying campaign, have faced less jeopardy on their path to the knockout phase. True, some jeopardy has still existed, but only further down each table, which is less appealing: Brazil or Spain being at risk of elimination in their final group game would be a more compelling storyline then the same fate threatening Ecuador or Czechia.

The allocation of qualification slots for some third-placed teams creates other problems. Firstly, those in the later-finishing groups have the advantage of greater clarity over the result they require to end among the best eight teams in third position. Secondly, a small footballing nation’s historic qualification in third place might only be confirmed days after their last group game, thereby depriving us of the sight of their post-match celebrations on the pitch.

It seems inconceivable that Fifa will acknowledge a mistake and return to a World Cup of 32 countries, a system used in the previous seven editions. The extra revenue that a larger tournament brings, and the greater support from national associations that it provides for Fifa president Gianni Infantino, will see to that. Those two factors, combined with mathematical considerations, raises an alarming prospect in the near future: a 64-team World Cup. 

Photograph by Abdulhamid Hosbas/Anadolu via Getty Images