The World Cup is supposed to be the best of the best.
Not the best of everyone who showed up.
For decades, qualification meant something. It was brutal, cut-throat, and unforgiving — exactly how the pinnacle of international football should be. If you weren’t good enough to qualify, tough luck. No second chances. No consolation prizes.
Now? FIFA are turning the World Cup into football’s version of a participation award.
The 2026 World Cup will expand from 32 teams to 48, and let’s be honest — this has less to do with “growing the game” and more to do with making sure everyone gets a ribbon at the end of the season. It feels eerily similar to junior sport back in the day. There used to be a couple of awards: best player, most improved. You earned them. They mattered.
Fast forward to today and every kid gets a trophy because we don’t want to upset a soft-arse parent. That’s what this expansion feels like. Everyone gets a prize. Everyone gets in. Standards quietly slip while FIFA smiles and counts the broadcast revenue.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s great seeing first-time qualifiers like Curaçao, Cape Verde, or Jordan on the world stage. Those stories are genuinely special. But when qualification becomes easier, those moments stop feeling earned. The more you widen the gate, the less meaningful it is to walk through it. The magic of the World Cup has always been scarcity — not accessibility.
And let’s not pretend this is about football purity. We know better. FIFA’s history tells us exactly what this is about: money. More teams mean more matches. More matches mean more TV deals, more sponsors, more “global reach”. The sport is secondary. The spreadsheet comes first.
What’s even more absurd is that this apparently isn’t enough. There’s already talk of 64 teams for 2030, and even more laughably, FIFA have seriously explored the idea of a biennial World Cup — every two years.
At that point, it’s no longer special. It’s content.
How exactly are Europe’s biggest clubs supposed to react to this? Seasons already stretched to breaking point, players flogged across domestic leagues, Champions League campaigns, international breaks — and now potentially a World Cup every two years? Who’s adjusting their calendar? Who’s paying the price?
The players will. They always do.
Fifty-plus club games a season, constant travel, compressed recovery windows — and FIFA want to pile on another diluted World Cup cycle without blinking. There’s a lot of talk about “player welfare” in modern football, but it conveniently disappears when another billion dollars is on the table.
FIFA don’t care about the product. They don’t care about the players. And they certainly don’t care about fans who value quality over quantity. Their interest is singular: maximising revenue, even if it means turning the greatest tournament in sport into a bloated, watered-down spectacle.
The World Cup should be ruthless. Exclusive. Unforgiving.
If you’re not good enough to qualify — tough. That’s the point.
Anything else isn’t growth.
It’s greed.
