FIFA boss says World Cup could expand to 48 teams

PanARMENIAN.Net - FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, is expected to decide in January whether to expand the World Cup finals from a 32-team tournament to include as many as 48 countries, the organization’s president, Gianni Infantino, said Thursday, October 13, according to The New York Times.

Infantino, elected to the post in February to replace Sepp Blatter, said the governing FIFA Council had been “rather positive” in a meeting Thursday about a possible expansion. “The level of quality of football is increasing all over the world,” he said. A vote will be taken when the council meets again in Zurich in January, he said.

The new format would almost certainly extend the monthlong tournament to five weeks or more, and would most likely be introduced for the 2026 tournament, which the United States, Canada and Mexico have all expressed an interest in hosting.

Infantino pledged during his campaign for the presidency to expand the World Cup to 40 nations, but he proposed in a speech in Colombia this month that the number rise to 48. In a tournament that size, a preliminary playoff round would be created and would include 16 elimination games. The winners of those games would join 16 seeded teams in a 32-team competition like the one that exists now. Infantino is thought to favor spreading the added spaces around FIFA’s confederations, rather than simply adding more places for established soccer centers like Europe.

Infantino’s desire to “optimize” the structure of the World Cup was part of his vision for a so-called FIFA 2.0 plan that was unveiled Thursday by the organization, which has spent much of the last six years mired in scandal.

Infantino has insisted that the future bidding processes for tournaments will be made significantly more transparent, vowing that the FIFA administration — the president and the team of executives he has chosen to work with him — would be empowered to exclude any bidders who did not meet the technical criteria. Qatar’s bid for 2022, for example, was successful even though the technical report flagged concerns about the heat in the Persian Gulf during the summer. The tournament has since been moved to the winter.