Where Data Tells the Story
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The 2026 Men’s FIFA World Cup will finally kick off today, as Mexico takes on South Africa at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. In several ways, it will be the biggest World Cup of all time. Whether it will also be the greatest one remains to be seen. For starters, it’s the first time that three countries are hosting the tournament together. That means no World Cup has ever had a larger geographical footprint, with some host cities more than 2,500 miles apart. It will also be the first World Cup to feature 48 nations, meaning that the entire tournament structure had to be rebuilt.
The group stage will be played across 12 groups instead of eight, followed by a newly introduced round of 32. This brings the total number of games to 104, up from 64 matches at every World Cup since France 1998. The fact that there will be 72 group stage matches to eliminate just 16 teams has widely drawn criticism, because it reduces the importance of individual group stage matches as teams can go through with just one win in three games. In the previous format, where only the first and second ranked teams of each group advanced to the round of 16, every match mattered, which is why many considered 32 the ideal number of participants.
FIFA’s perspective on this can be summed up as “the more the merrier”, which is unsurprising, considering that more matches will bring in more ticket sales, more broadcasting revenue and many more financial advantages over a smaller tournament format. In this spirit, there have already been suggestions that the 2030 World Cup could be expanded to 64 nations, which would presumably bring the number of games to 128.