United States signals intent to bid for 2038 World Cup, with 64 teams on the table
A US bid for 2038 would land four years after the country co-hosts the expanded 2026 tournament, and FIFA has not yet opened the formal host process.
United States organisers are preparing a formal pitch to FIFA to host the 2038 men's World Cup, according to reporting circulated on 26 June 2026, with the bid framed around staging the first edition of the tournament expanded to 64 teams. The Athletic and FIFA's own Telegram channel both carried the same exclusive framing within the same hour, indicating the story originated with a single pool of briefings to journalists before being relayed through FIFA's official channel.
The proposal would, if accepted, give the US a second World Cup inside a twelve-year span. The country is already a co-host of the 2026 edition alongside Canada and Mexico, and federation officials quoted in the coverage argue that the infrastructure built for that tournament — stadium inventory, training bases, transport corridors — can be reactivated rather than built from scratch. FIFA has not opened a formal host process for 2038, and the world federation's silence on timing is the single most important variable in the story.
What the bid would actually entail
A 64-team World Cup is not, on the numbers that have circulated around FIFA's expansion discussions in recent years, a marginal change. The 2026 edition — already the largest in the tournament's history — moves from 32 to 48 teams, distributed across 16 host cities in three North American countries. A further jump to 64 for 2038 would add another 16 national teams to the field, deepen the group stage, and force a recalculation of FIFA's broadcast and sponsorship inventory, which is the federation's primary revenue engine.
The US organisers' case rests on the readymade infrastructure argument. Eleven of the 2026 host venues sit on US soil, and several of those stadiums are recent builds or deep renovations. A second US tournament four years later would not require the federation to commission new construction at the scale that 2026 demanded; it would, in the framing used in the coverage, "continue making" use of assets already in place. The coverage does not specify which stadiums would be repurposed, which suggests the bid document — if one exists in finished form — has not been made public.
The geopolitics FIFA cannot avoid
FIFA's host-selection process in the modern era has been a soft-power contest disguised as a sports tender. The 2022 tournament went to Qatar, a decision that has drawn a decade of scrutiny over labour conditions and the integrity of the bidding process; the 2026 tournament was awarded jointly to the three North American hosts in 2018, beating a Moroccan bid. A US-only 2038 bid would, by definition, foreclose the contest to a single applicant — a configuration that FIFA's statutes do not forbid but that the federation's recent history of managed competition has avoided.
The bigger question is whether FIFA will accept a 64-team format at all, regardless of the host. Expansion from 32 to 48 teams for 2026 was contentious inside the game — federations in Europe and South America publicly opposed it, and confederations in Africa and Asia were its loudest supporters. A second expansion in one cycle would require re-litigating the political economy of the tournament: more teams means more qualifying slots per confederation, more matches to sell, and a longer calendar that the professional club game, through FIFA's ongoing dialogue with the European Leagues body, has resisted.
The commercial logic and the counter-narrative
The commercial case for a US-hosted 2038 is straightforward. The US sports rights market is the largest in the world; domestic sponsors and broadcasters have paid premium prices for World Cup inventory across the last three cycles; the dollar-denominated revenue from a US tournament is structurally easier for FIFA to project and hedge than revenue from a tournament in a smaller or more volatile currency. A US bid also insulates the federation from the human-rights scrutiny that has dogged every recent tournament held outside traditional markets.
The counter-narrative is that FIFA's credibility depends on the appearance of contest. A sole bidder, even a competent one, exposes the federation to the charge that the host-selection process is theatrical — that the outcome was negotiated in advance and the vote is a ratification. That charge has been levelled at FIFA before, most damagingly in the lead-up to the 2018 and 2022 votes. A 2038 process that begins with a single confirmed applicant would invite it again.
What the sources do not tell us
The reporting is thin on procedural detail. Neither the FIFA Telegram post nor the Athletic's exclusive specifies whether a formal letter of intent has been submitted to FIFA's administration in Zurich, whether the US Soccer Federation has signed off, or whether the State Department has been drawn into the lobbying effort. The 2026 bid was backed by a trilateral governmental commitment that included a White House endorsement; the 2038 reporting does not indicate whether that level of political weight is being assembled. It is also unclear whether the 64-team framing reflects a US preference or a FIFA condition. Until FIFA opens a host process and publishes a timeline, the proposal is, in operational terms, an expression of intent.
Desk note: Monexus has framed this as an intent signal rather than a confirmed bid. The two source items in the thread carry identical wording, suggesting a single underlying briefing; we have not padded the record with secondary outlets that did not cover the story.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/FIFAcom
- https://t.me/TheAthletic
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_FIFA_World_Cup
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2034_FIFA_World_Cup