{"id":537926,"date":"2026-07-12T16:15:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T16:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/537926\/"},"modified":"2026-07-12T16:15:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T16:15:08","slug":"gianni-infantino-hints-at-expansion-to-64-team-world-cup-before-2030-event-world-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/537926\/","title":{"rendered":"Gianni Infantino hints at expansion to 64-team World Cup before 2030 event | World Cup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">Fifa officials will look at the possibility of expanding the World Cup by another 16 teams before the \u20602030 event, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/gianni-infantino\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Gianni Infantino<\/a> said in an interview. The Fifa president told Bluewin, a Swiss media outlet, that growing from 48 to \u206064 teams could make \u2060sense.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">\u201cThat\u2019s definitely \u200ban issue that will be examined and discussed in the relevant committees after this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/world-cup-football\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">World Cup<\/a>,\u201d Infantino said. \u201cWhen organising \u2060a World Cup, it\u2019s important to organise it for the whole world \u2013 not just Europe and South America \u2013 but effectively the \u2060entire world.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">\u201cEvery nation should be allowed to dream of participating in the World Cup. \u200bYou can see that the quality \u200cof the teams is \u200cextremely high \u2013 and it\u2019s getting higher and higher, all over the world. If you \u200cdon\u2019t give smaller countries a chance to participate in the World Cup, they\u2019ll lack the incentive to keep improving.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">The World Cup field was 32 teams from 1998 to 2022. The 2026 edition is the first with 48 teams. Two semi-finals, a third-place playoff and the final are all that remain from the 104-match schedule.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">Infantino \u200bsaid he considered the 48-team field a \u201chuge success\u201d. He said: \u201cEvery team played at a high level. Teams from every continent scored goals and earned at least one point. Nine out of 10 African teams reached the knockout stage. At the last \u2060World Cup, there were only five teams from Africa. That just goes \u200bto show how \u200bimportant it is to include \u200ball teams \u2013 to give them this opportunity to participate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">The 2030 tournament \u200bwill be a \u200cmulti-continent effort. The first \u200bthree matches are \u200bscheduled to be played in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay \u2013 one per country \u2013 with the remaining games in Morocco, Portugal and Spain. An expansion to 64 teams could mean that the South American nations each could host one four-team group, rather than one match.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fifa officials will look at the possibility of expanding the World Cup by another 16 teams before the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537927,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":["post-537926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537926\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}