The first-ever 48-team World Cup has only just concluded, but FIFA president Gianni Infantino is already looking ahead and signalling the possibility of another expansion.

Infantino has left the door open to increasing the tournament to 64 teams after describing this year’s enlarged edition as a major success, with FIFA vice-president Alejandro Dominguez among those backing the idea and even urging it to happen as soon as the 2030 tournament.

Infantino had successfully driven through the expansion of the World Cup to 48 teams when the FIFA Council approved it in 2017, but his attempt to take it even further is expected to face stronger opposition, with UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin among those who believe the proposal is a “bad idea”.

There is also a feeling that any further expansion is now linked in some way to Infantino’s plan to sell stakes in the World Cup to private investors, a proposal that has attracted heavy criticism and even prompted UEFA to threaten a boycott of the World Cup and other FIFA competitions. If European countries were missing from a 64-team World Cup, the standard of the event would not only drop, but filling every qualifying slot would also become more complicated.

In any event, a World Cup expanded to 64 teams would mean the number of participating nations had doubled in just two editions and over the course of eight years. Before this year’s competition, the 32-team World Cup had been the standard format since 1998.

But if a 64-team World Cup were approved in time for the 2030 edition, which is due to be staged across six countries and three continents, how exactly would it operate? Let’s examine it, assuming there is no boycott from UEFA or any other confederation.

Major reform would be needed if FIFA increased the World Cup to 64 teams by 2030, just as significant changes were required for this year’s tournament, unless the entire process were redesigned to fit a more globalised qualification structure.

The first step would be to divide additional qualification places among the confederations. For the 2026 World Cup, the Confederation of African Football (CAF), the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and Concacaf, which governs football in North and Central America and the Caribbean, gained the most from expansion, with their allocations effectively doubling if the play-off route is also taken into account.

UEFA, by contrast, received only three extra spots, an increase of just 23 per cent, which angered European nations.

When Infantino speaks about World Cup expansion, he emphasises inclusivity, so Europe, already the best-represented continent at the tournament, would again be unlikely to emerge as one of the biggest winners from a 64-team World Cup. Even so, given the scale of this expansion, its allocation would be expected to rise to at least 20 places.

Elsewhere, the Oceania Football Confederation would probably receive another automatic slot, despite New Zealand being the only nation from the region inside the top 150, let alone the top 100. The AFC, CAF and Concacaf would also be in line for another substantial increase, opening the way for much smaller nations such as Curacao, Uzbekistan and Jordan to qualify.

There is not much room for movement for CONMEBOL, however. South America already has six direct qualification places plus a play-off path despite the confederation containing only 10 teams, so FIFA cannot hand too many more berths to the region without making qualification there almost meaningless.

There could also be changes to the qualification formats used by the confederations. The AFC and Concacaf both made major alterations for the 2026 World Cup: Concacaf moved away from a single “Octagonal” league to a multi-round group format, while the AFC expanded to five qualifying rounds to accommodate its eight direct places. Similar reforms may be needed again, and FIFA’s play-off structure would also require another rethink.

From a financial perspective, expanding qualifying could shift the balance even more in FIFA’s favour. A less competitive qualification process, in which leading nations reach the finals with little difficulty, could reduce the value broadcasters place on qualifying tournaments and make regional bodies more dependent on the money they receive from the world governing body.

The 2030 World Cup would be even more difficult from a logistical point of view than the 2026 tournament because it is set to have six host nations instead of three.

Spain, Portugal and Morocco are currently scheduled to host the bulk of the matches, but one game each will also be staged in Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina to mark the centenary of the World Cup.

That would make it the first World Cup to be hosted across more than one confederation, creating even greater logistical complications.

Teams would have to cover huge distances and log even more air travel than in 2026, which stretched across North America, while also dealing with sharply contrasting conditions and temperatures in different hemispheres. Sides would move from the South American winter to the summer of Europe and North Africa.

The head of South American football, Alejandro Dominguez, was so enthusiastic about the idea that he posted the day after the final: “The next one is at home! In 2030, the World Cup is coming to Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay. It will be a great opportunity for football, to celebrate the World Cup's centenary with a 64-team tournament.”

He later told Sky News after the 2026 tournament that he supported expansion, saying: “The World Cup belongs to the people, and [for] 100 years, a century, we have to give the opportunity to more countries. I think that this has shown that 48 teams was totally successful.”

He added another layer of uncertainty by saying “I hope so, for sure,” when asked whether he wanted South America to host more than the three matches currently planned for 2030.

If that were to happen, it would raise further questions: how many matches would South America receive, and when and where would they be played? Which teams would be involved in those fixtures and put at a disadvantage by additional travel and adaptation to different conditions? How could FIFA ensure fairness between teams? And how effectively would each country, or even each city, cope with the pressure on resources caused by hosting more teams? At present, none of those questions has an answer.

FIFA could choose to completely reshape the World Cup format, perhaps moving in a direction similar to UEFA’s switch from a group stage to a league phase in its continental competitions.

But as things stand, a 64-team World Cup would simply mean more groups — four more, to be precise, in addition to the 12 used this year.

In that scenario, the key adjustment would be the removal of third-placed qualifiers from the tournament. At the 2026 World Cup, a round of 32 was introduced to accommodate the increase to 48 teams, meaning eight teams that finished third in their groups also advanced — a break from the familiar all-or-nothing system of “top two or out”.

However, FIFA would need to revert to that older model if the World Cup expanded to 64 teams, because the top two teams from each group would be enough to fill a round of 32.

This would be the only major change to the finals if FIFA retained the existing structure of four-team groups followed by knockout rounds. If it enlarged the groups, or scrapped them entirely, then additional knockout rounds might be introduced. One possible example of such an extra stage would be a knockout play-off similar to the one used in the Champions League.

Increasing the finals to 64 teams would raise the number of matches from 104 to 128, which would probably extend what is already a five-week tournament by at least another week, unless FIFA chose to compress the schedule further or stage more matches simultaneously. Given the importance of viewing figures and lucrative broadcast income, that appears unlikely.

It would also intensify concerns around player welfare, with even more matches being added to an already crowded calendar and the tournament occupying an even bigger share of it.

With FIFA, little can be ruled out if there is a commercial or financial upside, and that would certainly be the case with a 64-team World Cup. But for now, this expansion is far from certain.

With the volume of criticism Infantino is currently facing, he may not even remain in office as FIFA president. That backlash is tied not only to his proposal to sell stakes in the World Cup, but also to his handling of Folarin Balogun’s overturned World Cup ban — a development that came after US president Donald Trump intervened, allowing the USA striker to play in the country’s final knockout match.

FIFA may struggle to get this proposal approved in time for the 2030 World Cup, even though Infantino has attempted to speed up the process, and he may not stay in power long enough to carry the plan through to the 2034 edition in Saudi Arabia.

And while South American confederation CONMEBOL formally proposed this exact expansion in April 2025, many other football leaders have rejected it. AFC president Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa said any further expansion would bring “chaos”, while Concacaf chief Victor Montagliani warned that such a move would damage “the broader football ecosystem”. That is notable given that these are two of the confederations that would stand to benefit most from an expanded World Cup.

The final decision will rest with the FIFA Council, so only time will tell whether the world governing body pushes harder on this proposal in the aftermath of the 2026 World Cup.