Editor’s note: This article has been updated given the 2026 World Cup is set to feature four-team groups
When FIFA president Gianni Infantino is not empathising with minority groups, lecturing on postcolonial theory and sitting next to heads of state, he comes up with ideas to improve/ruin football (delete as applicable).
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Biennial World Cups, a global Nations League… the ideas come spitting out of his head like tracer bullets.
His fans love him for it. They say standing still is going backwards, doing nothing is cowardice, Gianni is being Gianni. His critics roll their eyes, pray the cold light of day will kill off his latest wheeze and wish Gianni would stop being Gianni.
And for the ideas mentioned above, his critics have — so far — been right to hunker down and wait for Infantino’s flights of fancy to fail. But he did get one big idea across the line early in his presidency: expanding the World Cup finals from 32 competing teams to 48.
When the FIFA Council, the governing body’s executive board, approved that idea in January 2017, it meant Infantino had delivered on the two main promises he made on the campaign trail a year before: more money for each federation and more World Cup berths, with a bigger tournament helping to pay for the increased funding. One hand washes the other.
But after four days of drama to complete the group phase at what you’d imagine was the last 32-team men’s World Cup in Qatar, the fans, that forgotten stakeholder group, realised the implications of that vote: no more wild group-stage finales. And they did not like it.
So, what was wrong with the proposed 48-team format, what were potential solutions and what has FIFA decided to do?
But before we get to those three-pipe problems, let us back up a bit and set the scene.
Why didn’t FIFA just leave things the way we like them?
Well, we would say that, wouldn’t we?
Us lot, in Europe, where we get to watch the world’s best players in our domestic leagues and continental cups every week. Europe, with our lucrative Champions League, European Championship and Nations League competitions. Europe, the confederation that has provided the winning team at the last four World Cups, 13 of the past 16 World Cup semi-finalists and the last nine winners of the Club World Cup.
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Yeah, the status quo suits us just fine. Why would anyone want to change the rules of a game we are winning?
Infantino, of course, used to be UEFA’s secretary general — the chief executive, if you like — so he knows how well its 55 member associations are doing, relatively speaking.
But he is now in charge of FIFA, which has 211 member associations and many of them utterly depend on the money FIFA gives them via development grants.
And FIFA makes more than 90 per cent of its money from the men’s World Cup. Its business cycle is based around one financial feast, followed by four years of carefully-managed famine. The bigger the feast, the easier the famine gets.
So, in November, when Infantino told his global constituency that the organisation made $7.5billion (£6.14bn) in the Qatar 2022 four-year cycle, $1bn more than it made from Russia 2018, everybody clapped. And remember, FIFA is a one-member-one-vote organisation where 211th-ranked San Marino have as big a say as top-ranked Brazil. The minnows matter.
When he told the member associations that FIFA’s four-year haul should hit $10bn by 2026, when Canada, Mexico and the USA host that first expanded 48-team World Cup, some jumped up like they were celebrating a last-minute winner. Because, as Infantino keeps telling them, this is their money.
Forty-eight teams taking part means more games, more inventory to sell to broadcasters and sponsors, more tickets, more merchandise. But it also gives 16 more countries the opportunity to get to the World Cup, with all the commercial and sporting benefits that entails.
When making his pitch for a bigger World Cup, Infantino was always careful to say the financial case for it was a slam dunk but that money is not the only reason to do it. It was important, he said, to spread World Cup fever, to let more fans and players experience its joys, to take its healing powers to all corners of the globe. And then he would remind them about the money again.
FIFA are considering introducing penalty shootouts 𝑏𝑒𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒 group stage games at the next World Cup.
Here's @mjshrimper on why the new 48-team format could cause problems… pic.twitter.com/5vkDhvy2zl
— The Athletic | Football (@TheAthleticFC) December 2, 2022
OK, fair enough, I guess — what was the plan for 2026, then?
To be fair to Infantino, it was actually his former boss at UEFA, Michel Platini, who first talked publicly about expanding the World Cup in 2013. The Frenchman was thinking of going from 32 teams, the number it’s been since 1998, to 40.
But by the time Infantino had moved out from Platini’s shadow in 2016, eight extra spots were not going to be enough to satisfy his new friends in Africa and Asia.
So, when it was time to give the FIFA Council some options to pick from, it was given five choices:
- 48 teams: 16 groups of three, top two sides going through to the knockout rounds, 80 games over 32 days
- 48 teams: 16 seeds advance to a group stage where they would be joined by winners of play-off round between the remaining 32 teams, then proceed as current format, 80 games over 39 days
- 40 teams: 10 groups of four, the winners plus six best runners-up proceed to knockout rounds, 76 games over 32 days
- 40 teams: eight groups of five, top two advance to knockout rounds, 88 games over 39 days
- 32 teams: eight groups of four, top two to the knockout rounds, 64 games over 28 to 32 days — in other words, the status quo.
With Infantino having dropped as many hints as he could that he really wanted the council to vote for option No 1 — cough, cough — it did. Unanimously.
The main advantages of the 16×3 format were that it gave Infantino the extra games/teams he wanted, broadcasters liked the added content and new round-of-32 knockout stage, and the final four teams would still only have to play seven games in total, which meant the clubs could not complain too much.
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There were a few grumbles from European voices about diluting the quality of the tournament, tiring out more players and reducing the value of the various confederations’ regional qualifying competitions, but nobody made much noise about the format’s biggest weakness: the risk of collusion in the final match of the group stage.
For those not seeing the danger — and do not beat yourselves up, the game’s guardians on the FIFA Council apparently missed it, too — if you have groups of three, one team is left watching while the others play. That means the two teams in the group’s third and final fixture will both know what they need to do to proceed, and there is a chance that there could be a mutually-beneficial result that sees them both go through, while the watching side goes home.
This is what infamously occurred at the 1982 World Cup when West Germany and Austria engineered a 1-0 win for the former that sent them both through to the next round at the expense of Algeria, who also had two wins and a draw but an inferior goal difference.
Known as the “Disgrace of Gijon”, this shameful episode was entirely avoidable as it was the last game of a four-team group. There was a simple fix — just play the last round of games at the same time.
Thankfully, FIFA cottoned on and made this change for 1986, giving us 36 years of often thrilling, prayer-inducing, yellow-card-counting excitement as those simultaneous kick-offs played out.
Why did nobody spot this massive problem?
Good question. The short answer is Infantino wanted 48 teams and how he got them was not really that important. As we have seen with other FIFA decisions, there was an element of making the big call first and then worrying about the details later.
But it is also worth pointing out that FIFA was still in a state of shock in 2016 and early 2017. The memories of those dawn raids at the Baur au Lac Hotel and near-implosion of the organisation were still fresh and there had also been a huge turnover in personalities at the top of the game. Bringing more money in, legitimately, was vital. Critical thinking less so.
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The other factor to consider is that the rest of the world was fed up with Europe/UEFA, so if Europe/UEFA was complaining about something, the other confederations were definitely going to support it.
But once the sugar rush of annoying UEFA passed, some started to worry about what they had decided. This really began after it was confirmed in 2018 that the first 48-team World Cup would be jointly hosted in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
Senior figures at CONCACAF, the confederation that represents those three and the other North and Central American football associations, began to wonder if there was a way to keep the jeopardy of four-team groups and concurrent final games, without “ruining the bracket” by having to work out who are the best-placed runners-up.
As the host confederation in 2026, some at CONCACAF also feared it would get the blame if the 16×3 format resulted in group-stage stitch-ups, as it might feed a (lazy and unfair) Ted Lasso-inspired narrative of the bloody Yanks spoiling soccerball again.
But then COVID-19 came along and everyone got distracted, and Infantino moved on to championing biennial World Cups and that created a new row, and then everyone had to focus on Qatar 2022.
There was always something else to worry about.
In the meantime, the case against three-team groups was growing.
At the 2018 World Cup, Denmark and France played out a 0-0 bore draw to complete Group C as it suited both of them and, at the same tournament, Poland and Japan called a truce with 15 minutes to play because the European side’s 1-0 lead was good enough to see Japan proceed at the expense of a Senegal side who were losing to Colombia by the same score. And these examples happened in four-team groups!
A 2021 paper published by the Journal of Sports Analytics looked at the likelihood of these situations occurring in a 16×3 format and its findings were alarming.
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“Our arguments show that the introduction of groups of three is a terrible step back in the history of the World Cup,” wrote its lead author Julien Guyon, a mathematician from New York’s Columbia University.
“Not only (does) it make the ‘Disgrace of Gijon’ possible again but it makes the risk of its repetition very high. Of course, not all teams would collude if given the opportunity, but even risk of match-fixing may seriously tarnish the World Cup, as unpredictability of the outcome is fundamental to its popularity, and to sport’s popularity in general.”
That seems pretty clear-cut — so did FIFA listen?
Here’s the good news: yes.
Even before the rollercoaster ride in Group E (Costa Rica, Germany, Japan and Spain) in Qatar and those few minutes where it seemed their respective number of yellow cards in the three group games would have to separate Poland and Mexico in Group C, talks had started about reconsidering the 16×3 format.
When we say “talks”, we mean informal, unminuted conversations between senior administrators in cars, hotel lobbies, restaurants, and VIP boxes. The sort of talks the FIFA press office could credibly deny.
But once journalists get to hear about this type of conversation, we are usually not far off the topic of these conversations appearing on a FIFA Council meeting agenda, which is what has transpired.
On the plus side, with four-team groups, you avoid the collusion risk and keep the drama of concurrent kick-offs to complete the group stage; on the negative side, you stretch the tournament out to 104 games. Just let that settle in: a 104-game World Cup.
OK, you could scrap the round-of-32 idea — instantly removing 16 matches from the schedule — but you would still have the sub-optimal situation of four group-stage winners having the advantage of playing the four best-placed runners-up while the eight other group-stage winners have to play each other.
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That, of course, is still a problem with the 48-into-32 scenario, as you will have eight winners playing third-placed teams and four playing runners-up.
Splitting the tournament into two halves (two sections of 24 teams) at the outset — the “conference” approach — would mitigate this particular source of potential unfairness but it would add a much bigger one with the inevitable “hard/easy” side-of-the-bracket debate.
When FIFA made its 16×3 choice, it claimed to have run thousands of simulations to work out which of those five original options was the best in terms of sporting merit and commercial impact. But presumably FIFA have run the numbers again and its 37 members will change their minds, with the decision due to be approved at a meeting of the FIFA Council in Rwanda’s capital Kigali.
If that means 104 games, and an extra week of competition, so be it.
The 2026 World Cup is going to make so much money there will be enough to placate the clubs with increased player-release compensation cheques, the broadcasters and sponsors invested in football’s coming of age in North America will be delighted, and there will be no shortage of US cities and stadiums ready to take on the burden of those 24 additional games.
The players? When has anyone ever asked them what they think?
The fans? Which fans?
More games means more complimentary tickets, more hospitality packages, more friends and family, more VIPs and VVIPs.
Gianni is all ears when it comes to those guys.
(Top image: Getty Images; design by Eamonn Dalton)
