The 2026 FIFA World Cup has set group-stage attendance records and produced the most-watched English-language soccer broadcast in American television history, and FIFA president Gianni Infantino has already signaled the format will expand again beyond 48 teams. The complication: a 64-team tournament, at the scale FIFA envisions, fits comfortably in only one country.
The expansion case, as FIFA makes it
Speaking to Swiss broadcaster Blue Sport during the tournament, Infantino said the relevant committees will examine a potential 64-team format after this World Cup concludes. His argument is developmental. Smaller nations that reach the tournament gain an incentive to keep improving; those that never qualify lose it. Cape Verde, which advanced past the group stage and pushed Argentina to the brink in 2026, is the clearest evidence he can point to.
The financial logic runs the same direction. More teams mean more matches. More matches mean higher broadcast fees and more tickets sold. FIFA has never been reluctant to grow into both.
What a 64-team format actually requires
The 2026 tournament runs 104 matches across 16 venues. A 64-team field, if FIFA keeps a 32-team second round, produces 128 matches. Compressed into the same 38-day window, that pushes the venue requirement to approximately 20 large stadiums.
Europe, the loudest critic of the 48-team expansion, cannot clear that bar alone. The United Kingdom has 11 stadiums above 60,000 seats. Spain has five, Germany has four, and Italy and France have two each. Reaching 20 requires combining the UK, Spain, and Germany across separate land masses and multiple governing jurisdictions.
The United States has roughly 75 stadiums at that capacity, spread across a single country. Most require no significant infrastructure investment.
The counterargument
The case against a permanent US host deserves its due. Other confederations would object, on principle and on precedent. The World Cup's continental rotation carries real symbolic weight for global development, the same argument Infantino invokes when defending expansion. A permanent American home concentrates economic benefit in one market and, over time, removes the incentive for other countries to build the kind of infrastructure the tournament nominally encourages. The qualifying cycle also becomes harder to defend: a 64-team field would make meaningful jeopardy a rarity for established footballing nations, reducing two years of competition to something approaching a formality.
On balance
The infrastructure arithmetic is not close. No single country outside the United States can host 128 matches without a multinational arrangement of a kind FIFA has historically preferred to avoid. Whether that arithmetic overrides the political and developmental objections is the question Infantino's committees will now face. The US men's national team lost to Belgium during the tournament, but the country has roughly 75 large stadiums that did not.