The biggest World Cup ever. Forty-eight teams. One hundred and four matches. Three host nations spanning six time zones. A brand-new Round of 32. And games kicking off at 3am UK time that you will absolutely set an alarm for and then sleep through.
When FIFA announced the expansion from 32 to 48 teams back in 2017, the reaction split football fans clean down the middle. Purists said it would dilute the quality. Romantics said it would grow the game. Cynics said it was about money. FIFA said it was about inclusion. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between, but three days into the tournament, we think the evidence is landing firmly on one side.
It is brilliant. And for once, Dad and the Lad agree.
Let us be fair to the sceptics, because some of their arguments are reasonable.
The schedule is enormous. One hundred and four matches across 39 days means football at breakfast, football at lunch, football at 3am and football when you are supposed to be on a Teams call pretending to care about Q3 forecasts. The group stage alone has 72 matches, which is more than the entire 2022 World Cup. That is a lot of football, and there is a legitimate question about whether fans, players and broadcasters can sustain attention across six weeks of wall-to-wall action.
There is the player welfare argument. Squads are already stretched by bloated club seasons, extra Champions League matches and the relentless expansion of every domestic calendar. Adding 40 more World Cup matches to the global schedule is not nothing. Players who reach the final will have played up to seven knockout matches on top of three group games. That is ten matches in six weeks, in North American summer heat, after a full club season. Bodies will break.
And then there is the quality question. More teams means more mismatches. The gap between the 32nd-best team in the world and the 48th is not trivial. Some group games will be lopsided. Some will be forgettable. The critics say a tighter, leaner 32-team tournament produced better football, higher stakes, and more drama per game.
All fair points. Now watch the football.
Three days in, the expanded World Cup has given us a record-breaking red card match in Mexico, a 4-1 demolition by the USA that had Pochettino comparing his team to prime Barcelona, Vinicius Jr curling in a stunner to rescue Brazil against a Morocco side who proved 2022 was no fluke, Scotland scoring their first World Cup goal in 28 years, and Australia delivering the shock of the tournament against Turkey with a 20-year-old from Watford punching the corner flag in tribute to Tim Cahill.
Tell us which of those stories you would like to remove.
The expansion has not diluted the quality. It has multiplied the storylines. More teams means more nations with a stake in the tournament. More communities tuning in. More kids watching their country on the biggest stage in the world and thinking: that could be me.
Curacao are the smallest nation ever to qualify for a World Cup. Their entire population is smaller than the capacity of Wembley. They are here, in Group E, about to play Germany. Win, lose or draw, an entire island will be watching. That matters. Football is supposed to be for everyone, and a tournament that includes 48 nations from six confederations looks a lot more like "everyone" than 32 ever did.
Four nations are making their World Cup debut: Curacao, Jordan, Uzbekistan and Cape Verde. Scotland are back after missing 2022. Turkey are back for the first time since 2002. Indonesia, if they had qualified, would have brought the largest travelling support the tournament has ever seen. The appetite is there. The expansion is meeting it.
This was the big worry. Twelve groups of four, with the top two from each group qualifying automatically, plus the eight best third-placed teams advancing to a new Round of 32. Critics said it would create dead rubbers and eliminate jeopardy. A team could draw all three group games and still go through.
In practice? It has done the opposite. Because third-placed teams can qualify, every result matters more, not less. A 1-0 defeat is not just a loss, it is a goal difference swing that could be the difference between going home and sneaking through. Teams cannot afford to collapse. They have to stay competitive even when they are losing. That is good for the football.
The Round of 32 adds an extra knockout match, which the purists dislike, but it also means 32 teams get to experience the sudden-death drama of a World Cup knockout game. For nations who have never been past the group stage, that is enormous. Imagine being Curacao and reaching the Round of 32. Imagine being Scotland, 28 years between World Cup goals, suddenly in a one-off knockout match with everything on the line. The format creates moments that a 32-team tournament simply cannot.
Let us address the elephant in the room. Or more accurately, the alarm clock on the bedside table.
The time zones are brutal for UK fans. Group-stage kick-offs range from 5pm to 3am British Summer Time. That means some matches, like Sweden vs Tunisia in Monterrey, start at three in the morning. Scotland vs Haiti kicked off at 2am. The later knockout rounds are kinder, but the group stage asks you to choose between sleep and football on a nightly basis.
On the pod, we discussed this. The house policy is simple: if it is England, you stay up. If it is a neutral you fancy, you set the alarm and accept the consequences. If it is a 3am game you are not that bothered about, you check the score when you wake up and pretend you watched the whole thing.
But here is the thing. The 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea had similar time zones for UK viewers, and it is remembered as one of the great tournaments. Brazil's Ronaldo redemption, South Korea's incredible run, Rivaldo's theatrics, Ronaldinho's free kick against England. Nobody talks about the early mornings. They talk about the football. If the football is good enough, the time zones do not matter. And three days in, the football is good enough.
Yes, FIFA are reportedly expecting revenues close to nine billion dollars from this World Cup cycle. Yes, 104 matches means more broadcast inventory, more sponsorship opportunities, more ticket sales. The expansion is good for FIFA's bank balance, and the cynics are right to point that out.
But money and merit are not mutually exclusive. The Premier League generates more revenue than any football competition in history, and it is also, by most measures, the best league in the world. More money can fund better infrastructure, better youth development, better facilities in countries where football is growing. If the 2026 World Cup generates record revenues and produces record moments, is that not the point?
Arsene Wenger, FIFA's chief of global football development, put it simply: the World Cup started with 13 teams in 1930, expanded to 16, then 24 in 1982, then 32 in 1998. Every expansion was met with scepticism, and every expansion produced a better tournament. 48 teams is the natural next step. In another 30 years, people will wonder what we were worried about.
We went into this World Cup prepared to be wrong. We had heard the arguments about dilution and schedule bloat and dead rubbers. We understood the concerns about player welfare and time zones and FIFA's motivations. Some of those concerns are valid and will need addressing before the next expansion inevitably arrives.
But sit down on a Saturday night and watch Morocco outplay Brazil at MetLife Stadium, then switch over and see Scotland score their first World Cup goal in a generation, then wake up on Sunday morning and discover that Australia have beaten Turkey 2-0 with a kid from Watford leading the line, and try to tell us this tournament would be better with fewer teams. You cannot. Because those stories are the tournament. They are why we watch. They are why we stay up until 3am and why we set alarms we know we will snooze and why we talk about this sport with an intensity that no other human activity can match.
Forty-eight teams is not too many. It is exactly right. And if the rest of the tournament delivers anything close to what the first three days have given us, this will be remembered as the World Cup that proved the doubters wrong.
Now if you will excuse us, Netherlands vs Japan kicks off at 9pm and we have got opinions to form.
Our full predictions special and opening days reaction. We called it brilliant on the pod too.
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