DUFFERS DIARIES: A 64-team World Cup? Don't be ridiculous

An official proposal to expand the men's 2030 World Cup to 64 teams has been put forward by South American governing body Conmebol.

That tournament will mark 100 years since the very first World Cup was held in Uruguay and, of course, that needs a degree of acknowledgement.

But having 64 teams battle it out for the top prize? Pull the other one.

The tournament is already going to be a bit weird, with the opening games being played in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay as a nod to that first ever event, but the rest then going ahead thousands of miles away in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.

The logistics of all of that for fans, players and whoever else may be affected remain to be seen, depending on who plays who and when, but it seems that there could be the scenario where at least one team could play group matches on entirely different continents, which is bizarre.

The World Cup is about to grow anyway, we know that, and whilst I’m all for allowing more teams to ‘have a go’ within reason, the reality is that it’s all been about money and capitalising as much as possible on the continued globalisation of the game.

Having the tournament once every four years continues its ‘special’ feel in terms of the prestige of winning it, and calls to make it every two years should rightly fall on deaf ears to at least maintain the integrity of not only the World Cup itself but also other tournaments that happen worldwide in the meantime.

But the 2026 World Cup is arguably going to be too big as it is, with next year’s showpiece consisting of 48 teams and, with that, 104 matches for us all to try and watch at what, for us, could well be strange times of the day or night, many between countries we’ve no interest in but which we’ll watch anyway ‘because it’s the World Cup.’ We all do it.

So throw in another 16 teams and that number of games will grow to 128 matches – that’s as many as two World Cups put together in the ‘old money’ of the 32-team events of which we saw the last in 2022.

Even for the most avid football fan that’s mind-boggling and in such a relatively short space of time, surely we’d be hitting saturation point before the first round of group games have even been completed.

With the 2026 tournament including a new ‘round of 32’ stage, one assumes they’d have to rethink it all again come 2030 if 64 teams are involved and potentially be looking at either inserting further knockout stages or perhaps introducing play-offs to see who progresses in order to get the right numbers, thus adding more games into the mix.

A 64-team tournament would need 16 four-team groups – they’d nearly be running out of letters with which to name those groups. Dead rubber in Group P, anyone?

Maybe even a Champions League-type ‘mega table’ will come into play – even if it might need two separate ones to cope with all the teams.

The finer points of all of that will no doubt become clear if this idea gets the thumbs up from the powers that be but I can’t help but think it’s a bad idea.

I get the need for sentiment with regard to the centenary of the World Cup, and the involvement of South America in terms of hosting games already does that satisfactorily.

But surely having 64 teams involved will take away a lot of the prestige and achievement sometimes attached to qualifying in the first place – even though six of the countries involved won’t even have to do that if all of those hosting games are given a pass. Being one of the other 58 to qualify won’t, for many, be a tricky task. Heck, maybe even San Marino might be in with a shout.

It should be said that UEFA, among others, aren’t big fans of the proposal and it’s not yet clear where FIFA stand. Making the centenary event special should absolutely happen and extra incentives could perhaps be attached for those who qualify, but to lump them in with 63 other teams just so, in the words of Conmebol president Alejandro Dominguez ‘nobody on the planet is left out of the party’, seems to me a bit excessive.