A 128-team World Cup? No problem...

A multi-host tournament and football fans’ loyalty would be the perfect combination

Success wipes everything away, covers everything up, and heals everything. And Spain’s triumphant World Cup campaign has erased—or at least pushed aside—the issues that dominated the conversation beforehand: ticket prices, the vast distances between host venues and their possible impact on team performance, the perceived drop in overall quality caused by expanding the tournament to 48 teams, and the challenges of staging a major event in Donald Trump’s America and the MAGA era: visa denials and the legal uncertainty they suggest, political influence over FIFA, and so on.

Whether those issues were genuine problems, and to what extent, is open to debate—and football thrives on debate. What was beyond doubt, however, was that when the tournament ended, FIFA would declare it the greatest World Cup ever held. Everything would be presented as a resounding success, money would have flowed freely, and we would be told we are living in the best of all possible worlds. Then attention would turn to making the next World Cup even bigger and better.

According to modern orthodox economic thinking—if something succeeds, you scale it up because growth cannot be allowed to stop—that leads to a practical conclusion: if a 48-team World Cup is a huge success, then a 64-team tournament would be an even greater one. The logic rests on another assumption: football fans will buy anything, at any price, under any circumstances.

A 64-team World Cup is not yet a concrete proposal, but trial balloons have already been floated. In truth, they are unnecessary. FIFA would not need broad consensus to make such a change, and fans would likely embrace the novelty enthusiastically. Concerns about the tournament’s “quality” being diluted by admitting teams that would not have qualified under the previous format are largely irrelevant because football is not measured by quality but by audience size and revenue generated.

From an organizational standpoint, a 64-team World Cup would not present any great challenge. Neither would one with 128 teams. After all, Grand Slam tennis tournaments routinely feature 128 players.

The key lies in a concept that elite sport—and football in particular—adopted long ago and has continued to develop: multi-country hosting. Today, many continental and global tournaments are spread across multiple nations. The World Cup began with 13 teams, later stabilized at 16 participants until 1978, expanded to 24 teams from 1982 to 1994, 32 from 1998 to 2022, and 48 in the most recent edition.

Now imagine a tournament with 128 teams. Divide them into eight groups of 16 teams, creating eight separate mini-World Cups, each hosted by a different country. Each tournament would feature a group stage followed by knockout rounds beginning in the quarterfinals. Stop those knockout rounds after the semifinals and you would be left with 16 teams advancing from the eight host nations.

Those 16 teams would then travel to a ninth host country for a final phase consisting of four groups of four teams, followed by semifinals and a final. Just like that, you would have a fully operational 128-team World Cup, complete with a champion, runner-up, third-place finisher, and fourth-place finisher.

How long would such a tournament take?

Not necessarily much longer than the current format. Mexico 1970, the last World Cup using the old 16-team format, lasted just 22 days, while the 2026 World Cup lasted 39 days. With matches every three days, each stage could be completed in roughly 15 days. Add a week for travel and preparation before the final phase, then include four more days for the final and the third-place match, plus another 19 days for the concluding stage.

The result? A total of 41 days—just two more than the 2026 World Cup. If that seems excessive, shorten the transition period to five days—we are no longer in the 1950s, when crossing the Atlantic by air could take two days—and the tournament would fit almost perfectly into the current 39-day schedule.

Naturally, qualification stages would still be necessary, since 120 teams would need to earn their place, with each first-phase host nation qualifying automatically, as hosts traditionally do.

So what are the drawbacks?

Would the tournament’s “quality” decline? But what does that abstract concept of quality matter compared to the prospect of bringing Italy back to the World Cup, attracting China, perhaps India and its market of more than a billion potential viewers, and allowing countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or Argentina to host stages of the competition at a lower cost than current mega-events?

Just imagine the value of the television rights that would be generated. Because, as mentioned before, football fans buy everything, every time, no matter what.

As for me, I see nothing but advantages.

If I were forced to place a bet—and I do not bet—a 128-team World Cup would be among my first choices.