FIFA's 64-team World Cup plan points back to a US return

Donald Trump said the thing out loud. The 2026 World Cup, hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico, is still weeks from its opening game, and the US president is already floating another one: a US return, possibly as soon as 2038, under a FIFA that is openly scoping a 64-team tournament.

The two threads are not separate. FIFA's renewed push to expand the field, reported this week by BBC Sport, runs straight into the White House's appetite for a return engagement, and the financial gravity is doing the rest. Ticketing and hospitality revenue from the 2026 cycle is set to dwarf any previous men's World Cup. Gianni Infantino, who has spent a decade arguing that "more is better" for the men's tournament, is now bringing that same logic to a fixture list that, on paper, already strains the calendar.

The pitch, in plain numbers

BBC Sport's framing of the proposed 64-team version lands the core of the case bluntly: more teams means more matches, and more matches means more inventory to sell. The 2026 tournament, the first at 48 teams, added 24 fixtures to the slate that the 32-team format would have carried. A 64-team edition would widen the group stage further, drag qualification through more intercontinental play-offs, and push the calendar deeper into a window that already compresses club football.

It is the kind of arithmetic that appeals to host federations, to broadcasters who pay per match, and to sponsors whose activation windows track the games. It is the same arithmetic that makes a 2038 US tournament attractive to a sitting president who has already staked domestic prestige on 2026. Trump told reporters on 21 July that the United States could comfortably stage a second World Cup in short order; the framing, as reported, was less a question and more a sales pitch.

What FIFA actually gets out of it

The 2026 cycle has functioned as a stress test. FIFA, which sits on most of the commercial upside from the tournament, has watched primary host revenue categories tick upward even before kick-off: ticket allocations, hospitality packages, and corporate suites have moved at prices that make 2022 in Qatar look lean. FIFA wants to recoup the broadcast income it expects to lose in the next rights cycle, when streaming platforms compress traditional pay-TV margins, and the lever it knows how to pull is volume.

Add two dozen fixtures, add two extra group-stage rounds, add a deeper knockout bracket, and the rights-holders in 2034 (Saudi Arabia) and 2038 have a product that is harder to skip. Infantino has signalled, repeatedly, that FIFA is no longer in the business of rationing access; it is in the business of selling it. That posture does not survive without bigger tournaments, more frequent tournaments, or both.

The cost the talking points skip

Every expansion FIFA has announced has produced a winner and a larger pool of losers. Adding fixtures means adding dates, and dates are a finite resource in a football calendar already crowded by UEFA's Nations League revisions, the expanded Club World Cup, and bilateral national-team windows that domestic leagues have grudgingly accepted. Player welfare groups, including FIFPRO, have been louder this cycle than at any point since 2014 about compression. A 64-team World Cup deepens that pressure rather than relieves it.

The same arithmetic cuts the other way for smaller national federations. A wider field rewards confederations with weaker qualifying infrastructure and dilutes the average quality of the group stage, which is the inventory broadcasters actually want fans to watch. FIFA's response to that critique has been consistent: more is better, growth is the product, and the audience will absorb what the schedule feeds them. The 2026 tournament will be the first large-scale test of whether that holds.

What 2038 might actually look like

A US return in 2038 is not a certainty. FIFA rotates confederations, and CONCACAF's turn in the senior men's cycle came in 2026; an immediate re-up would be a stretch even for an incumbent president who treats precedent as a soft variable. What is plausible is a US-led joint bid that anchors a North American cluster, or a US candidacy slotted into a global calendar that places a 64-team edition somewhere with the stadium depth and commercial plumbing to absorb it. Saudi Arabia hosts in 2034; that sets up a 2038 conversation about geography, climate, and revenue density in which the United States is the obvious counter-bid.

The bigger story is that the institutional centre of gravity in men's football is drifting toward the host economy with the deepest balance sheet. The 2026 tournament was sold to FIFA as a commercial proposition, not a sporting one, and the post-tournament math is now visible: a second US event within a decade would lock in broadcast and sponsor terms for the cycle after 2034, when streaming rights revenue is expected to flatten and FIFA needs anchor markets to keep its own distributions to member federations from contracting.

The remaining uncertainty is on the field. Whether a 64-team World Cup produces a tournament worth watching in its first week, or whether it produces eight days of mismatch football before the round of 32, is the only argument that has ever moved FIFA off an expansion it had already announced. Infantino's tenure suggests that is not a constraint he has internalised. Whether the federations who bank on the sport's competitive credibility, not just its cash flow, accept that trade is the open question for the 2038 vote.

This piece is part of Monexus's sports-business coverage. The financial framing leans on reporting from BBC Sport on FIFA's expansion logic; the political framing draws on a 21 July press read-out referencing Donald Trump's comments on a second US tournament.