KIGALI (dpa-AFX) – More games, more days, more money: The already gigantic World Cup 2026 will be even bigger. In the final round in the USA, Canada and Mexico with 48 nations for the first time, 104 games will be kicked off according to a FIFA decision on Tuesday, 40 more than at the previous World Cup since 1998. The mega World Cup will last a good 40 days: more than a month of football pure – or over a month of football ad nauseam, depending on how you look at it.
Representatives of the German Football Association were not at the table when the format was changed in Kigali. With the expansion plans, FIFA President Gianni Infantino is fulfilling the wishes and hopes of the many small world association members who are to elect him to a new term of office on Thursday.
During the meeting in Rwanda, the Council set the date for the 2026 World Cup final for July 19. The World Cup period (tournament plus preparation phase) estimated in the football calendar is 56 days in the range of the finals in 2010, 2014 and 2018. The date for the opening game has not yet been set, the preparation phase should be significantly shorter.
So far it had been expected that the 48 nations would play in 16 groups of three in the preliminary round in just under three and a half years. This format alone would have meant increasing the previous 64 World Cup games (with 32 participants) to 80 games. However, this mode has already been criticized several times because of the higher risk of collusion, because one nation in the group must be free of play.
The new format provides for twelve groups of four in the preliminary round, which alone accounts for 72 games. The first and second in the group as well as the eight best third in the group advance. This is followed by 32 more games. At the end of 2022, the last and compact finals in Qatar were held in 29 days, world champions Argentina needed seven games to win the title.
For the individual teams, the format change means that there is only a maximum of one game added – for World Cup fans there are 24 more games compared to the three-player mode. According to the proponents, the fact that each nation is guaranteed to experience the kick-off of a World Cup game on the pitch three times instead of just twice also speaks in favor of the four-group mode.
From an economic point of view, FIFA should expect significantly more money due to the higher number of TV broadcasts. For the World Cup cycle from 2023 to 2026, a total of eleven billion US dollars had been calculated. From 2019 to 2022, the total revenue was 7.568 billion US dollars, as officially announced by FIFA.
The 2026 World Cup was awarded to the three organizers in 2018, the increase from 32 to 48 nations was decided in January 2017. Infantino, who is running for another term unopposed at the congress in Kigali on Thursday, had already praised the format with groups of four as a great success in Qatar. “Here the groups of four were absolutely unbelievable, in the sense that until the last minute of the last game it was not clear who would go through,” said the Swiss. An example was the German group, the DFB selection was eliminated in the last game despite a win against Costa Rica./mj/DP/jha