A vice president’s proposal to nearly guarantee his own confederation a place at the table, a rollback of anti-corruption reforms, and a president whose expansion instincts have always tracked his own vote count — the centenary World Cup is exposing how little has actually changed since 2015.
The Navarro Report | World | The Navarro Report | July 22, 2026
Nine days before this year’s World Cup final was played, FIFA was already fighting over the next one. At the center of the dispute is a proposal to expand the 2030 tournament from 48 teams to 64 — nearly doubling the current format a second time in less than a decade — and the way that idea reached FIFA’s agenda has become almost as controversial as the number itself. It was introduced, according to reporting in the New York Times, by a Uruguayan delegate reading a prepared speech during the miscellaneous agenda item at the tail end of a FIFA council meeting, catching several attendees off guard. FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who has built much of his decade in power on expanding the tournament, took an immediate interest and said the idea should be studied further.
What makes the proposal more than a scheduling curiosity is who is pushing it hardest, and what they stand to gain.
A Vice President’s Proposal, and His Own Confederation’s Stake in It
The formal push came from Alejandro Domínguez, president of CONMEBOL, South America’s governing body, who also sits on FIFA’s council as a vice president. Domínguez unveiled the plan at CONMEBOL’s own congress, framing it as a once-in-a-century opportunity. “We are convinced that the centennial celebration will be unique because 100 years are celebrated only once,” he told delegates, according to ESPN’s coverage of the congress. “That is why we are proposing, for the first time, to hold this anniversary with 64 teams, on three continents simultaneously,” he said, adding that the change would ensure “nobody on the planet is left out of the party.”
The practical effect of that framing is worth spelling out plainly: expanding to 64 teams would very likely guarantee automatic qualification for all ten of CONMEBOL’s member nations, including Venezuela, the only South American country that has never reached a World Cup. A sitting FIFA vice president, from the confederation co-hosting three centenary matches in 2030, is proposing a rule change that all but assures every member of his own bloc a place in the tournament. Nothing about that arrangement has been described by any reporting as improper or investigated as such — but it is precisely the kind of self-interested proposal that FIFA’s post-2015 reforms were designed to flag and slow down, and instead it moved from an offhand remark in a council meeting to a formal continental endorsement within months.
The Pushback: ‘A Bad Idea,’ ‘Chaos,’ and Worse
The response from football’s other power centers has been unusually blunt, cutting across confederations that rarely agree on anything. UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin called the plan simply “a bad idea.” Asian Football Confederation president Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al-Khalifa went further, warning it would cause “chaos.” CONCACAF president Victor Montagliani told ESPN he does not believe expanding the men’s World Cup to 64 teams “is the right move for the tournament itself and the broader football ecosystem, from national teams to club competitions, leagues and players,” adding pointedly, “We haven’t even kicked off the new 48-team World Cup yet, so personally, I don’t think that expanding to 64 teams should even be on the table.”
La Liga president Javier Tebas, never shy about criticizing FIFA, was the most direct of all. “Increasing the number of national teams makes no sense,” he told Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport, arguing that a bloated international calendar threatens the club game that generates most of football’s actual revenue. “The football industry is not just the World Cup, which is the most important event,” he said, but one competition among many that FIFA’s expansionism keeps squeezing.
A 64-team field would produce 128 matches, double the 64-game format used from 1998 through 2022 and 24 more than the 104 played at this year’s tournament. Critics argue that scale alone risks diluting both the competitive quality of the group stage and the meaning of qualification itself for confederations where a place is no longer earned so much as assumed.
The Pattern Behind the Pattern: Expansion as Infantino’s Electoral Currency
None of this is happening in a vacuum, and it isn’t the first time a World Cup expansion has doubled as a political instrument inside FIFA. Infantino’s original path to the presidency in February 2016 ran directly through this same playbook. Arriving in the aftermath of the U.S. Justice Department’s 2015 indictments of more than 40 FIFA and soccer marketing officials, which forced out longtime president Sepp Blatter, Infantino promised to “clean house” and refocus the organization on the game itself. Central to his pitch was expanding the World Cup from 32 to 48 teams, a plan he had made part of his election manifesto. “We have to be more inclusive,” he told a sports conference in Dubai in 2016, describing a 48-team format as the most financially appealing option and noting that federation summits had been “overwhelmingly in favour.”
FIFA’s own reporting on that election cycle later acknowledged how directly the strategy paid off. Coverage of Infantino’s current, fourth-term maneuvering noted that the original 2016 expansion “played a heavy hand in Infantino’s electoral victory,” as he built support from smaller federations “eager to set foot on the big stage,” a coalition he had cemented months ahead of the vote with promises of long-term inclusion. The arithmetic behind that strategy is simple and largely fixed: FIFA has 211 member associations, each with one vote for president, and 106 votes are needed to win. The large majority of that electorate is small and mid-tier footballing nations, not the traditional powers whose leagues generate the sport’s revenue.
The same coalition has kept Infantino unopposed at every re-election since. He won a second term in Paris in 2019 without a rival candidate, telling delegates, “Nobody talks about crisis at Fifa any more or rebuilding it from scratch… we talk about football.” He was re-elected a third time in Kigali in 2023, again unopposed, greeting delegates with a characteristically unfiltered line: “To all those who love me, and I know there are so many, and also those who hate me, I know there are a few: I love you all.” Even that vote carried friction beneath the surface — Norwegian federation president Lise Klaveness withheld her support over FIFA’s handling of Qatar’s human rights record, and German FA president Bernd Neuendorf declined to back Infantino as well, citing “a lack of transparency from Fifa and insufficient explanations of why certain decisions are made and who was involved in them.”
Reporting on Infantino’s expected fourth-term bid in 2027 has drawn an explicit line back to the current expansion fight, suggesting the 64-team proposal functions as a fresh version of the same electoral tool — a way to shore up support from the same small-nation bloc at a moment when Infantino faces unusually public friction with several major European federations over an unrelated controversy: his intervention, at the request of President Trump, in reversing a suspension handed to American forward Folarin Balogun during this year’s tournament. A group of European Parliament members has separately called for a formal investigation into that decision, questioning whether outside political pressure improperly influenced FIFA’s disciplinary process.
The Reforms That Were Supposed to Prevent This
FIFA did overhaul its governance structure after 2015, at least on paper. Domenico Scala, then chairman of FIFA’s audit and compliance committee, produced an early reform blueprint that year calling for term limits, direct election of executive members by the FIFA Congress, and full disclosure of compensation. “The reform process at FIFA is essential to the future of the organization and it must be guided by broad public discussion of all reform ideas,” Scala said at the time. The reforms that eventually passed replaced FIFA’s old executive committee with a FIFA Council and introduced term limits for senior officials, changes then-acting president Issa Hayatou said would “send a strong message that we have listened and that we are taking the action necessary to regain trust.”
Nearly a decade later, independent researchers say much of that structure has quietly eroded. A 174-page investigative report published in late 2024 by the advocacy group FairSquare, titled Substitute: The case for the external reform of FIFA, found that FIFA reversed key elements of its 2016 governance reforms, significantly increasing the number of standing committees and allowing regional confederations to loosen or scrap presidential term limits altogether. The report’s central conclusion is stark: FIFA “cannot reform from within,” because, as former members of FIFA’s own Governance Committee told the report’s authors, “those responsible for leading such reform are politically dependent on the associations and officials they need to reform.”
That finding lands with particular weight on the current expansion dispute. The exact mechanism that might have flagged a FIFA vice president proposing a format change disproportionately benefiting his own confederation — term limits, independent committee oversight, structural separation between political and administrative power — is the same mechanism the FairSquare report says has been rolled back since 2016. The reforms were built in response to a criminal case; they are being unwound in an environment with no comparable external pressure currently forcing FIFA’s hand.
No Real Alternative Exists — Which Is Part of the Problem
The obvious question is whether football has any institutional check on FIFA left at all, given that self-reform has failed twice by FIFA’s own former governance officials’ account. The honest answer is that no rival global governing body exists, or realistically could exist, because FIFA’s recognition is what makes a World Cup a World Cup; a breakaway federation’s members would simply be locked out of the competition and the Olympics alongside it. The closest real test of that idea came from club football rather than national federations, when twelve major European clubs announced a breakaway Super League in April 2021, only for the plan to collapse within days under fan and political backlash — Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Juventus remained attached longer than the rest, but even they could not sustain it against the football pyramid’s ecosystem.
In the wake of that collapse, FIFPro, the global players’ union, and the European Leagues organization jointly called for greater stakeholder influence over decisions shaping the sport’s future. “The current system of government is no longer capable of dealing with the decisions that need to be taken,” FIFPro general secretary Jonas Baer-Hoffmann said at the time, adding that key governing bodies had been notably absent from the room during the discussions that mattered. That absence has become something of a running theme: UEFA and the European Club Association were reported absent from at least one major reform forum even as the players’ union pressed for a seat at the table.
What exists instead of an alternative to FIFA is a patchwork of pressure points — confederation presidents publicly breaking ranks, players’ unions demanding influence, advocacy groups like FairSquare publishing detailed governance indictments, and, historically, criminal prosecutions brought by national law enforcement rather than football’s own institutions. The 2015 U.S. case remains the only intervention that has ever actually restructured FIFA’s leadership. Everything since — the 2016 reforms, the audit committee, the term limits — has been an attempt by FIFA to demonstrate it could regulate itself in that case’s aftermath, and the FairSquare findings suggest that attempt has already begun to unwind.
What It Means for 2030
None of this proves the 64-team proposal will be adopted, or that it reflects anything beyond ordinary confederation politics dressed up in centenary sentiment. Infantino himself has left the decision open rather than final, telling Swiss broadcaster Blue Sport only that the idea is now officially on FIFA’s agenda for study after this year’s tournament concluded. But the shape of the dispute — a FIFA vice president proposing a format change that conveniently serves his own confederation’s interests, introduced informally rather than through a structured process, arriving inside an organization whose own former governance officials say has stripped back the safeguards meant to catch exactly this kind of conflict — is precisely the pattern that has defined FIFA’s credibility problem for a decade. Whether or not 2030 ends up with 48 teams or 64, the process by which that number gets decided will say more about FIFA’s institutional health than the number itself ever could.
Human-Directed AI Journalism — this article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under the full editorial direction, review, and final approval of Jose E. Navarro, The Navarro Report.