A bigger World Cup good for business not football

Every expansion of the World Cup has been justified by the same promise: football should belong to everyone.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s latest suggestion that FIFA could expand the 2030 World Cup from 48 to 64 teams follows precisely that logic. More places, he argues, mean more dreams. More nations gain the possibility of qualification. Smaller footballing countries have greater incentive to improve.

Yet football history suggests that inclusion and inflation are not the same thing.

The World Cup has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past century. It began as an exclusive tournament of 13 teams,expanded to 16, then 24, then 32, and now 48. At every stage, FIFA has presented expansion as evidence of football’s global appeal. But it has also steadily altered the nature of the competition.

What was once a month-long examination of the world’s finest national teams increasingly resembles two tournaments stitched together: a sprawling commercial festival in the group stage, followed by the elite competition that truly determines the champion, though increasingly this has shown the influence of football politics.

The first 48-team World Cup this year illustrated both sides of that contradiction. The tournament produced more goals than any edition in decades, but many came in one-sided contests that exposed the gulf between football’s established powers and its emerging nations. Heavy victories inflated statistics while doing little to improve the spectacle.

A 64-team World Cup risks magnifying precisely that imbalance. The strongest nations will inevitably conserve their energy during the expanded opening phase, treating it less as the World Cup proper than as exhibition matches. The genuine contest will begin only once the weaker sides have been eliminated.

Football has always contained mismatches, but if they become the defining feature of the opening weeks, the tournament risks sacrificing competitive intensity in pursuit of commercial revenue.

This is perhaps the clearest reflection of FIFA under Infantino: More matches, more broadcasting rights, more sponsorship inventory and more host cities. The rhetoric is one of opportunity; the economic benefits for FIFA are unmistakable.

For China, the arithmetic appears encouraging. If qualification places for Asia rise from the current eight or nine to perhaps 10 or more, the national team — currently hovering around the middle of Asia's second tier — would enjoy its greatest opportunity in decades to reach the finals. Yet that possibility should not obscure a more uncomfortable reality.

Qualification is not the real problem. Competitiveness is.

China’s only World Cup appearance, in 2002, came under uniquely favorable circumstances. Japan and the Republic of Korea qualified automatically as hosts, effectively removing two of Asia’s strongest teams from the qualification process. Even then, China lost all three matches in the group stage, failed to score a goal and conceded nine goals. Two decades later, the global game has evolved far more rapidly than Chinese football. The gap separating Asia from Europe and South America — and separating China's national team from Asia's leading sides — has, if anything, become wider rather than narrower.

The 2026 World Cup demonstrated that uncomfortable truth. Although Asian football continues to develop, the tournament exposed an increasingly polarized global landscape. Japan and Australia remained competitive because they have built generations of players in Europe's highest-level leagues. Elsewhere, the limitations became painfully obvious.

Modern football is played at extraordinary speed, defined by relentless pressing, rapid vertical transitions and intelligent movement into space. Technical quality remains essential, but without tactical sophistication, physical intensity and years of elite competition, possession becomes sterile and defending eventually collapses.

This is where Chinese football should draw its lesson.

Football does not permit technological leapfrogging. There is no equivalent of building a faster railway or developing a more powerful artificial-intelligence model. Progress depends on players developing within competitive environments, learning habits that cannot be acquired through short-term campaigns or policy initiatives alone.

That is why Japan's long-term planning has proved so effective. It is why the ROK’s export of players to Europe transformed its football. It is why Morocco, whose squad was shaped by players developed in European academies, has become one of the world's most tactically sophisticated national teams. Successful football nations export their young talent to demanding environments rather than insulating them within comfortable domestic systems.

More qualification places may increase the odds of participation, but participation alone changes nothing. If merely reaching the finals becomes the objective, qualification risks becoming another illusion — one that evaporates after three embarrassing group-stage defeats.

The World Cup’s allure has never rested on the number of flags in the opening ceremony. It has rested on the extraordinary standard of football on display. FIFA may yet succeed in making the tournament larger. Whether it remains the game’s highest expression is a more complicated question.