CONMEBOL's 64-team World Cup pitch resurfaces as FIFA weighs 2038 expansion

On 30 June 2026, two months before the 2026 tournament kicks off in North America, a proposal that would redraw the geometry of the World Cup itself returned to the front of FIFA's inbox. The 64-team format, first circulated by CONMEBOL in March 2025, is back in circulation among football officials weighing what the 2038 edition should look like.

The argument matters less for the headline number than for what it reveals about who gets to set the rules of the world's most-watched sporting event. CONMEBOL's pitch is not a technical tweak. It is a structural claim: that South America, which has produced seven of the three-time world champions and supplied FIFA four of its last five presidents, deserves a tournament shape that reflects the federation's weight in the game's political economy.

What CONMEBOL actually proposed

According to a 30 June 2026 post by unusual_whales summarising the proposal, CONMEBOL floated the 64-team expansion as far back as March 2025. The federation's argument, as outlined in that thread, rests on two pillars: more guaranteed slots for South American member associations, and a tournament large enough to absorb the political demands of every confederation without the annual brawl over allocation that has defined FIFA politics since the sport went to 32 teams in 1998.

The current 32-team format, in place since France 1998, sends four direct spots to South America through CONMEBOL's notoriously brutal qualifying round. A 64-team field would, on the most straightforward arithmetic, double that allocation. The political economy of those extra places — who gets them, by what formula, with what qualifying pathway — is where the next decade of FIFA diplomacy will be fought.

Why 2038, and why now

The 2038 tournament is the first World Cup cycle that will be designed without a co-hosting model baked in. The 2026 edition, hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico, was the last of its kind: a multi-country North American arrangement tied to specific stadium and visa logistics. From 2030 onward, FIFA's calendar returns to a single-host framework for 2034 (Saudi Arabia) and 2038, and that single-host decision makes the format question politically tractable in a way it has not been since 2018, when the 48-team expansion was ratified for 2026.

That is the opening CONMEBOL is moving through. A 64-team format ratified for 2038 would be the first tournament shape the federation could influence before, rather than after, the host and infrastructure were already chosen. It is the difference between lobbying FIFA in Zurich and lobbying the host nation's organising committee over a fait accompli.

The counter-read

The case against expansion is the case every FIFA reform campaign has made for thirty years: more teams means more dead rubber group games, more qualifying-round mismatches, and a dilution of the competitive product that turned the World Cup into a $7 billion broadcast property in the first place. UEFA, whose six direct slots under the 32-team model are the most of any confederation, has historically resisted expansion that does not increase its share in proportion. The African confederation, CAF, has been the most consistent proponent of a larger field on exactly the same logic CONMEBOL is now using — that the political weight of the continent's fanbase has outgrown its allocation.

The dominant framing still favours a measured move, not a doubling. FIFA's own technical reports on the 2026 cycle flagged fixture congestion, player workload, and broadcast-window compression as the binding constraints, and a 64-team field — sixteen groups of four — would intensify every one of them. CONMEBOL's pitch is therefore best read not as a technical argument but as a political one: a demand for a tournament shape that reflects who FIFA's biggest member federations actually are, rather than who was loudest in 1996.

What it costs, and who decides

The decision sits with the FIFA Council, the 37-member body that ratifies tournament formats. Its next formal window for format decisions is the lead-up to the 2030–2034 cycle review, and the 2038 host vote is scheduled to follow the 2026 tournament in the United States, Canada and Mexico. South American federations hold roughly one-fifth of the council seats through CONMEBOL's bloc, and that share is the federation's principal lever.

The stakes are concrete. An extra sixteen places is the difference between Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and Paraguay fighting over four spots and fighting over eight. For a federation whose flagship competitions have been eclipsed by UEFA on broadcast value for two decades, that arithmetic is the point of the entire exercise. The unusual_whales thread published on 30 June 2026 records the proposal as live; what remains uncertain is whether FIFA's European and Asian council members will treat the CONMEBOL demand as a credible negotiating position or as a posture to be settled with a softer headline number, somewhere in the forty-eight to fifty-six range.

A wider pattern

FIFA's format debates have tracked the federation's revenue model since 1978, when Argentina's hosting marked the moment the World Cup became a sellable media property rather than a public-good tournament. Every expansion since — from 16 to 24 in 1982, 24 to 32 in 1998, 32 to 48 for 2026 — has been driven less by sporting logic than by the financial pressure to give more broadcast partners and more sponsors a stake in the property. CONMEBOL's 64-team pitch fits that lineage exactly. It is not a deviation from FIFA's commercial logic; it is the next application of it.

The nuance the available reporting leaves open is procedural: it is not yet clear whether CONMEBOL has formally tabled the proposal at the FIFA Council or whether the March 2025 document is still circulating informally among confederation staff. The sources do not specify a vote calendar. What they do specify, as of 30 June 2026, is that the most ambitious World Cup expansion yet proposed is in active circulation, and that the federation pitching it is no longer asking for a favour.

This Monexus desk piece reads the CONMEBOL 64-team pitch as a federation acting on its structural weight, not as a request. The wires will frame it as a FIFA governance question; we frame it as a question about who the institution answers to.