There are World Cups that widen football and World Cups that widen the world. The 2026 edition will do both, and perhaps for this reason it will be the most political, the most global and the most contemporary ever staged. For the first time, 48 national teams will take part. For the first time, the host countries will be three — the United States, Canada and Mexico — spread across an entire continent. For the first time, above all, the World Cup will attempt to resemble the planet it claims to represent.
It is the most democratic World Cup in history, because no other tournament has opened its doors so widely. More Africa, more Asia, more North America, more Oceania. More chances to enter the narrative. More flags in the frame. More national anthems before matches. More football peripheries inside football’s centre.
For decades, the World Cup functioned as a kind of sporting aristocracy: Europe and South America at the main table, the rest of the world only occasionally invited. It was not a question of intent, but of the geography of footballing power. Yet every time football has truly globalised, the World Cup has had to change shape.
In 1930, there were 13 teams. From 1934 to 1978, there were 16. From 1982, the tournament moved to 24. In 1998, it expanded to 32. Today, the step to 48 is the natural consequence of a game that no longer belongs solely to the North Atlantic of football.
To understand the 2026 World Cup, it is necessary to stop thinking of it only as a sporting event. It is a vast geopolitical update. When Gianni Infantino won the FIFA presidency in 2016, he brought with him a clear idea: expand football to expand consensus. The World Cup reform was his political manifesto before being a sporting one. More places meant more federations involved, more international alliances, more weight for continents that had historically carried less influence within FIFA’s balance of power.
Infantino explained the reform by saying that “football is global” and that the World Cup should reflect this reality. At the time, the decision was met with scepticism. Many read it as a purely commercial operation: more matches, more sponsors, more broadcast rights, more tickets. And that element was certainly present. Wired noted that FIFA would significantly increase its revenues through the expansion of the tournament. But reducing everything to business means missing the political core of the transformation.
Behind Infantino’s words was more than a slogan. There was an awareness that the economic, cultural and demographic future of football would no longer be exclusively European. Africa moves from five to nine direct places. Asia from 4.5 to eight. Oceania finally receives a guaranteed slot. These are numbers that appear technical, but in reality describe a structural shift.
For years, entire continents experienced the World Cup as an almost impossible lottery: one bad match and you disappeared from the map. Now that changes. An African or Asian national team will no longer arrive at the World Cup as a folkloric exception or an exotic supporting role. It will arrive as a stable part of the system.
And this also changes the way those countries think about football: more investment, more infrastructure, more political attention, more children starting to play with the idea that the World Cup is not a distant fantasy but a realistic objective.
The point is that global football already works like this. Europe’s major academies recruit talent everywhere. Arab leagues are reshaping the market. The Premier League is a planetary product. Players are transnational icons. The 48-team World Cup does not create this transformation; it certifies it.
Naturally, there is another side to the expansion. Every enlargement brings a loss of exclusivity. Many observers fear the new format will produce more uneven matches, less competitive tension, a more dispersed tournament. Who is right, and who is not? The question remains open, because this is, in truth, a natural evolution — inevitable even. Contemporary football is this: idealism and market forces coexisting in the same space, without even pretending to be separate anymore.
So the question is not whether a 48-team World Cup is “purer” or not. Perhaps the point is accepting that 21st-century football can no longer be a matter for the few. The 2026 World Cup will be enormous because football itself has become enormous. It will be dispersed because the world has become dispersed.
The choice of three host nations reflects this transformation perfectly. The United States, Canada and Mexico are not simply neighbouring countries. They are three different worlds sharing the same geographical space. Three ideas of border. Three economies. Three cultural identities. And, ultimately, three distinct ways of interpreting the relationship between sport, politics and spectacle.
In the 1990s, the World Cup still carried the almost romantic idea of a single host nation: Italy in 1990, France in 1998, Germany in 2006. Today, the tournament appears designed to move beyond the very concept of a border. FIFA has understood that events of this scale no longer belong to one nation, but to entire geopolitical regions.
The 2026 World Cup will feature 104 matches, millions of travelling supporters, vast distances, and infrastructure spread across thousands of kilometres. It is an event conceived as a continental platform rather than a traditional tournament. And it is difficult not to see, in this, a reflection of the present.
We live in an era obsessed with borders and simultaneously unable to stop globalisation. Goods move across the planet; people, much less so. Walls multiply, yet so do connections. Politics speaks constantly of national identity, while economics and culture operate on a global scale.
The 2026 World Cup will unfold within this contradiction. In recent years, North America has been marked by intense debates on immigration, borders, protectionism and cultural identity. Yet it will also host the most multicultural tournament in football history. Victor Montagliani, president of CONCACAF, described 2026 as “a multicultural and global World Cup.” It is difficult to find a more precise formulation.
For one month, millions of people will cross borders to follow a match. Diasporic communities will fill stadiums. Los Angeles, Toronto, Mexico City, New York and Vancouver will become places where the notion of belonging is constantly shifting. Supporting a national team will often mean narrating a double identity: that of the country of birth and that of the country of residence.
In this sense, football still holds a function no other cultural industry truly possesses. It produces emotional simultaneity. It forces billions of people to watch the same images at the same time. It creates a common language between populations that share almost nothing else. A minimal form of emotional diplomacy.
And given the scale of the 2026 edition, this World Cup will play an enormous role in that respect: it is estimated that around six billion people will be, in some way, emotionally or directly involved in the event.
It would be naïve, of course, to think football can truly “pacify” the world. It never has. Wars continue during World Cups, as do geopolitical tensions. Football does not erase conflict; at best, it suspends it within a narrative frame. But even this, today, carries significant weight.
In an age that pushes relentlessly towards fragmentation, the World Cup remains one of the few events capable of producing a shared global imagination. For a month, the planet talks about the same goals, the same refereeing controversies, the same figures.
Perhaps football’s “pacifying” power lies precisely here: not in resolving tensions, but in continually reminding us that a shared symbolic space still exists.
Of course, this idea also comes with deep ambiguities. Amnesty International has already called on FIFA to guarantee human rights standards and migration policies in the host countries. And the fact that this is being described as Donald Trump’s World Cup has been identified by the Guardian as one of the tournament’s most delicate political issues.
Global football is not innocent. It never has been. It is a vast space of power, money and consensus. But precisely for this reason, it remains central to the story of our time.
And perhaps the 2026 World Cup will be remembered above all for this: the first tournament that truly attempts to represent the contemporary world in its most faithful form. Open, vast, interconnected, uneven, hyper-commercial, multicultural, politically ambiguous. Like the present itself.
There will be more teams, more matches, more cities, more languages, more stories. Inevitably, there will also be more chaos. But democracy, in the end, always works like this: it loses a little elegance and gains representation.
That is why the 2026 World Cup will be different from all those that came before it. Not because it will be the biggest. But because it will be the first to genuinely resemble the planet.