World Cup 2026 - 48 teams

Fifa doing their best to ruin international football. Will make the qualification process fairly irrelevant and most of the tournament itself will consist of dead rubber games. Then again money talks so this was always going to happen.
 
Organisations like FIFA & UEFA are like King Midas in reverse. Everything they touch turns to dust. Hopefully with these fools in charge it will bring down the current form of international football. If the main countries broke away they would be finished.
 
Personally I don't really care, not a fan of international football anyway. But the World Cup is probably best left untampered with.
 
It should have been reduced not increased. Does this mean less qualifying games?
 
Shit idea. More useless teams/matches. Qualifications become pointless.
 
Eto'o said:
Do it for us poor people! Those who haven’t had the opportunity, at times, to play at a World Cup. Do it, we support you! I, personally, support you and all of Africa will support you in giving us the opportunity to play at the World Cup.
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Not an international fan really but, I think the changes to the euros were for the worst, everyone just had to play for 3 points to get through, led to some seriously boring second and third round games

Hopefully won't be the same here
 
Excellent for the number of teams. Not too excited about 16 x 3 groups. Lets see the details first.

Exciting times ahead!
 
The World Cup itself was fine, what they needed to change was qualifying.
 
Damn FIFA. They should think about all the money-grabbing whoring tours the big clubs have to do in the summer. Who is going to pay to see the B-Teams of Bayern, United and Madrid, when they can watch their countries in the World Cup.

Of course this is shit, but so is the commercialisation of club football.
 
I would've preferred if they reduced the number of teams to 24. This could still be a good thing if they just cut down the qualifying stages in half since most 'big' footballing nations will make it anyway plus the usual suspects from Africa and Asia.
 
Why didn't they just make it 12 groups of 4? One extra game played, big deal.
 
So they moved the dross out of qualifying and into the tournament. Good job Fifa
 
It won't make much of a difference to the European qualifying. Most of the extra places are going to Africa and Asia. We will probably only get one or two extra spots so our total places will go from 13-14 to 14-16. They almost certainly won't give Europe more than 16 places as then you would have groups of three with two European teams in it.
 
Grib said:
Not an international fan really but, I think the changes to the euros were for the worst, everyone just had to play for 3 points to get through, led to some seriously boring second and third round games

Hopefully won't be the same here
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How so?

In Euros third best placed team in a group could qualify.

Third best team here gets knocked out. You lose your first game and you screwed here.
 
Have to say I absolutely love the World Cup. Always look forward to it and the summer it comes around is always a lot of fun. Tried to watch every game at Brazil 2014 and I thought the entire tournament was great fun.

I like the idea of having more teams and I'm looking forward to seeing some new faces challenge the established footballing nations. Here's hoping they can make it work.
 
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The World Cup was fine with 32 teams. The European Championship was terrible and having 24 teams was a contributing factor. A big thumbs down from me.
 
One thing this plan has going for it is teams only play two group matches and then get into the more exciting knock outs.

The format - for those not clear - is 16 groups of 3 teams. Top two from each group go through into a knock out round of 32.
 
To be fair, a 16 group of 3 thing could actually be more sudden death type material than the current group stuff and if we could get into knock outs sooner.. it wouldn't be too bad.

If they followed this up with proper tweaks to the laborious qualifying campaigns, it would be gratefully received.
 
teague said:
It won't make much of a difference to the European qualifying. Most of the extra places are going to Africa and Asia. We will probably only get one or two extra spots so our total places will go from 13-14 to 14-16. They almost certainly won't give Europe more than 16 places as then you would have groups of three with two European teams in it.
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I think Europe will get more places than that, can't imagine there would be 32 non European spots.
 
Actually don't think it's as bad as made out to be. The short group stage means we get more ko rounds and even most group games are almost like ko rounds.

Not exactly a fan of international football but I always like to watch some ko ties.
 
Mitchell Nicholas said:
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The World Cup was fine with 32 teams. The European Championship was terrible and having 24 teams was a contributing factor. A big thumbs down from me.
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No it wasn't.

Euros were terrible due to the third placed team being able to qualify. Defeat meant nothing there.

If you lose a game here then it's pretty much you need to win your next game and have a better goal difference than the other teams.
 
I have no problem at all with more football on TV. Would also like to see more underdogs gain momentum.
 
Couldn't care less. It's international football...you can't polish a turd.
 
BBC:
With 80 matches instead of 64, Fifa forecasts the equivalent of $1 billion extra income at current rates from broadcasting and sponsor deals, plus ticket sales, compared to $5.5 billion revenue forecast for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
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...and there it is.
 
I like this idea

Gives more chance to nations who don't normally make it, which could do wonders for not only the nation in question, but also football in general.

Also, more football :)
 
The length of the tournament will remain the same (32 days) as will the number of matches (7) the four finalists (1st & 3rd place finals) will have to play. The difference is that instead of 3 group games we will have only 2 with one more knock out round added (round of 32).

We'll get one more knock out game instead of a group match which in my eyes is always good.

It will be interesting to see the details after the meeting and if FIFA's proposal for penalty shootouts at the end of group games that end in a draw will be accepted or not.
 
Bojan11 said:
How so?

In Euros third best placed team in a group could qualify.

Third best team here gets knocked out. You lose your first game and you screwed here.
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So the groups effectively over after the first game if a team loses by that comment?

Anyway I didn't mean it as a direct comparison, just that the euros were negatively affected by the expansion and I hope it's not the same with the world cup
 
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