April 11 – South American football supremo Alejandro Dominguez has repeated the idea of expanding the 2030 World Cup to 64 teams as a one-off centenary celebration of the tournament.
Speaking at the 80th Conmebol Congress, the president of the South American federation said: “We are convinced that the celebration of the centenary will be something unique, because it has only once been 100 years old. And for this reason, we are proposing, for one, to carry out this anniversary with 64 teams, across three simultaneous continents. So that all countries have the opportunity to live a world experience, and so that no one is left out of this party even if it is played everywhere, it is our party.”
His words follow the proposal by Uruguayan FA president Ignacio Alonso at last month’s FIFA Council to expand the 2030 finals to 64 teams. The New York Times reported that Alonso proposed the idea toward the end of the Council meeting but that his words – a prepared speech in English – were met by stunned silence.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino has already overseen the expansion of the World Cup from 32 teams to 48 teams, a format that will be applied for the first time at the 2026 World Cup in the United States, Mexico and Canada.
However, another tournament expansion may take the notion of a mega-sporting event to a new extreme and render the qualifiers in certain confederations redundant. The 2030 World Cup will be staged across six countries on three continents, with South America hosting the first three matches to mark the tournament’s centenary. In 1930, Uruguay staged the first-ever World Cup.
Dominguez (pictured) might be keen on the idea, but at last week’s Uefa Congress in Belgrade, European football boss Aleksander Ceferin rejected the proposal, calling it a “bad idea”.
He said: “This proposal that was made was even more surprising for me than for you. I think it’s a bad idea – it’s not a good idea for the World Cup itself and it’s not a good idea for our qualifiers as well. So, I am not supporting that idea. I don’t know where it came from but it’s strange that we didn’t know anything before this proposal at the FIFA Council.”
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