I’m on my knees begging, here, FIFA.
To recap the first three in this series, the way the 2026 tournament was structured made the third round of the group stage mostly unwatchable, or at least mostly dull. If they structure the next one the same way – or if they follow through on the threat to expand it to 64 teams – I honestly don’t know if I’ll watch much more than the US in the early phases of the tournament (and my friends and I have watched almost every game since the 2006 tournament).
This chart makes my point; I won’t dig into it deeply here, since I discussed it in the third essay in this series. What it basically says is that the first phase of this tournament (the expanded group stage and the round of 32) had 89 games over 23 days with essentially no change in stakes. It became tedious.
Now, before I proceed, I think it’s important to revisit some language for a moment. In one of the first essays of this series, I noted the distinction between the “World Cup” and the “World Cup Finals” – when we think of the “World Cup,” we generally mean the finals: the last step in a multi-year process, global in scope but continental in practice. The cup actually starts next year when the various confederations begin the qualifying rounds for the 2030 World Cup Finals, to be held in Morocco, Spain, and Portugal. This distinction is usually more or less semantic, but here it matters. It matters when FIFA talks about “expanding the cup.” They are not expanding the cup – they can’t! FIFA recognizes more countries than the UN does, and the World Cup includes every one of them.
What “Expanding the Cup” actually means is that FIFA is redefining the last round of qualification, nothing more. And what the teams are qualifying for is the finals! All of those 16 extra teams had already participated in qualification for years within their continent. All that FIFA is proposing is to remove a layer from continental qualification and redefine it as part of the finals. And the way they chose to do so was to mix them directly into the existing format. This was the direct cause for all the problems described in the earlier essays. The big tournament simply should not have more than 32 teams. And yeah, that’s a hill I’ll die on.
Well, ok. But should we be paying attention to more teams during qualification? I think the attention those extra games got this year suggests we should! The quality of some of those guest stars warranted it. I’d have watched a bunch more games with Cape Verde in them. But I got more than my fill of Haiti, Iraq, Jordan, Panama, and Uzbekistan – all “Special Guest Stars,” with zero points between them. Did they really improve the cup?
Or, more directly, if we must redefine how the qualification rounds work, is the best way really to have a much larger field in the Finals? In case it’s not obvious by now, I’m pretty passionate about this competition, and found this to be a very disappointing iteration. And yes, I do think there are better ways.
So let me propose one, and it’s a blindingly obvious suggestion – but it would eliminate all the problems I’ve described. I think it would be more exciting than what preceded it in 2022 and earlier. And it would of course satisfy FIFA’s bottomless greed – perhaps not Infantino’s greed, and certainly not FIFA’s pervasive corruption, but it would at least result in a more satisfying tournament. It’s simple and obvious, though it does present a serious logistics problem.
If we must expand the field, let’s introduce the World Cup Prequel Gauntlet of Fringe Soccer Nations (ok, maybe the name needs work). Qualify 28 teams for the finals directly, like the 32 that qualified in 2022. Then invite the extra 16 to a prequel tournament. Collect those 16 fringe teams from across the globe; divide them into groups of four as usual. Each team participates in a full group stage, but only the winner of each group advances – so a total of four teams qualify by running this gauntlet. (Of course, if FIFA insists on expanding to a full 32 team prequel, then have a round of 16 and an elimination round of eight to winnow down to the top four. Or, hell, send only 16 directly to the finals, and have16 qualify by way of the WCPGFSN prequel tournament – but of course that wouldn’t satisfy FIFA’s desire to overcharge for tickets for an interminable and increasingly monotonous tournament. Which is why I like the smaller prequel.)
This seems reasonable and structurally sound from a tournament construction perspective. However, there are some logistical problems with this approach.
First, it requires organizing an entire tournament in addition to the existing one. That’s not trivial, but it’s certainly surmountable. In fact, I’d argue it’s less work than mixing those additional games into the finals. If we go with my proposal and have only a group stage, that’s only six games per group. Each group could be assigned to a pair of cities, anywhere in the world (independent of the finals – hey, this is small enough you could do it in Asia!); each city would host one game every three to four days, and only two teams would have to travel between rounds. Given FIFA’s appetite for American money, FIFA could just run it in the US every four years.
More challenging is the logistics for the countries involved. For those four teams that qualify, they have to arrange travel and staff and so on; but again, this is no worse than the current approach. Similarly, an argument can be made that the teams in the prequel are playing three extra games compared to the rest of the field. But this is not a new challenge.
Here’s the thing: this tournament kinda sorta happened already. There was what is effectively a mini-tournament in the spring of 2026. Sixteen UEFA teams played two single-elimination rounds, one on March 26 and one on March 31; four of the special guest stars (Bosnia and Herzogovina, Sweden, Turkey, and the Czech Republic) qualified for the finals. I ignored that when it was happening – it was just qualification, right? But expand that, invite teams from across the globe, make it an event with a real group stage, and we’re off to the races.
For the record, I would absolutely watch that tournament with great relish.
This is Part 4 of a four-part series discussing the 2026 World Cup
| Part 1 Methodology | Part 2 Performance | Part 3 Tournament Structure | Part 4 A Plea to FIFA |
