UEFA President Criticizes FIFA’s 64-Team World Cup as a ‘Poor Idea’.
UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin criticized FIFA’s proposal to expand the World Cup to 64 teams for the 2030 tournament, calling it “a bad idea” on Thursday.
The 2026 World Cup in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada will already see the tournament grow from 32 to 48 teams. However, Ignacio Alonso, head of the Uruguayan Football Federation, suggested further expanding the tournament at the FIFA Council meeting in March.
FIFA stated that it “had a duty to analyze” the proposal, but Ceferin strongly opposed it at UEFA’s congress in Belgrade.
“It’s maybe even more surprising to me than to you. I think it’s a bad idea,” Ceferin said. “It’s not good for the World Cup itself, and it’s also not good for our qualifiers.”
He added, “I’m not supporting that idea. I don’t know where it came from. It’s strange that we didn’t know anything about this proposal before the FIFA Council meeting.”
The 2030 World Cup will be hosted across three continents, with Portugal, Spain, and Morocco as the main hosts. To mark the centenary edition of the tournament, matches will also be played in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, the countries that hosted the first World Cup in 1930.
This decision set the stage for Saudi Arabia to host the 2034 World Cup.
