The 2026 FIFA World Cup shows that expanding the tournament to 48 teams has made it more inclusive without reducing its competitiveness. The strong performances of several underdog nations demonstrate football’s transformation into a truly global and less Eurocentric game.

After the completion of the group stage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, we can conclude that the tournament has so far been defined not only by its biggest stars—with the list of goalscorers led by Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, Ousmane Dembélé, Vinícius Júnior, and Erling Haaland —but also by the outstanding performances of several underdog nations. Cabo Verde and Curaçao, for example—both small island states with populations of only a few hundred thousand—avoided defeat against football powerhouses. Curaçao held Ecuador to a draw, and Cabo Verde even drew all three of its group-stage matches against Spain, Uruguay, and Saudi Arabia to qualify for the Round of 32. There were several other unexpected results. For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), participating in the FIFA World Cup for only the second time, earned a draw against Portugal, led by its star player Cristiano Ronaldo. Ghana held one of the tournament favourites, England, to a draw.

When considering these results, it is worth recalling the strong criticism that accompanied FIFA’s decision to expand the World Cup from 32 to 48 teams. UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin argued that “we have a lot of matches that are completely uninteresting.” Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, then Chair of the European Club Association (ECA), described the expansion from 32 to 48 teams as “proper nonsense,” while Manchester City’s long-serving manager Pep Guardiola warned that the quality of the competition would suffer, adding: “We are going to kill the players.”

We believe that such criticisms reflect a largely Eurocentric understanding of the World Cup, one that prioritizes the interests of established football powers over FIFA’s objective of making the tournament more globally representative. Although FIFA deserves criticism on some issues—for example, the excessive ticket prices at this year’s World Cup, the highest in the history of the tournament—we argue, for two reasons, that the organization’s decision to expand the tournament to 48 teams, thereby making global football more inclusive, was the right one.

First, the expansion to 48 participating national teams represents a major step towards making the world’s greatest sporting event more inclusive. In this sense, the expansion of the World Cup reflects the growing spread and democratization of the global game. It allows the tournament to better reflect an emerging multipolar world of football in which non-European countries have a greater voice and influence. FIFA today consists of 211 member associations—more than the number of sovereign states (193). Yet only thirteen countries participated in the inaugural FIFA World Cup in Uruguay in 1930. Sixteen teams then competed in every tournament from Italy in 1934 until Argentina in 1978 (with the exception of the 1938 World Cup in France, which featured only 15 teams).

For a long time, nations from Asia and Africa struggled to challenge the European and South American dominance of global football and to make the World Cup more inclusive. African teams even boycotted qualification for the 1966 FIFA World Cup in protest against FIFA’s decision to allocate just one place in the tournament in England to be contested by teams from three continents: Africa, Asia, and Oceania. As the BBC commented: “FIFA finally reacted. Two years after the finals, it unanimously voted to give Africa a World Cup place all of its own. Asia got one too. The boycott had worked.”

The World Cup expanded to 24 teams at the 1982 FIFA World Cup in Spain and then to 32 teams at the 1998 FIFA World Cup in France, before the most recent expansion to 48 teams at the 2026 FIFA World Cup in North America. At the 2026 tournament, Africa has ten direct qualification places, Asia nine, and Oceania one. Europe and South America, however, continue to dominate global football with 16 and 6 places, respectively. The increase from just one participating team from Africa, Asia, and Oceania—North Korea in 1966—to 20 participating teams from these three continents in 2026 highlights football’s successful transformation into a truly global and less Eurocentric sport.

Second, while only eight European and South American countries have ever won the FIFA men’s World Cup, the performances of national teams from outside Europe and South America have steadily improved, particularly since the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the United States. One major reason, apart from FIFA’s expansion policies, is that the best players from many countries now compete at comparable levels because they play in the same professional leagues. At the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the largest number of players are employed by clubs in the English Premier League (154), followed by the German Bundesliga (94), France’s Ligue 1 (78), Spain’s La Liga (74), Italy’s Serie A (66), the Saudi Pro League (47), and Major League Soccer (MLS) in North America (45). Interestingly, the English Football League Championship (EFL Championship), England’s second tier, ranks ninth among the leagues with the most players represented at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with 37 players.

Between the inaugural 1930 FIFA World Cup in Uruguay and the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy, only seven non-European and non-South American countries advanced beyond the first round. From the 1994 FIFA World Cup to the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, 12 non-European and non-South American countries qualified for the knockout stage, with South Korea (2002) and Morocco (2022) reaching the semi-finals.

At the 2026 FIFA World Cup, all three North American co-hosts qualified for the Round of 32. While only two out of nine teams from the Asian Football Confederation qualified for the next round, nine out of ten African teams reached the knockout stage.

We concur with Arsène Wenger, who observed during the 2026 World Cup that “the gap between nations is getting smaller every year.” He also suggested that he would not be surprised if the next world champion came from Africa, Asia, or another emerging football region.

Danyel Reiche is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Society at United Arab Emirates University (UAEU). Tamir Bar-On is an Assistant Professor at Rabdan Academy in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Together, they co-edited a special issue of Soccer & Society on “The North American World Cup 2026.”