The last time the United States hosted a World Cup, Roberto Baggio missed a penalty in the Rose Bowl and Romário danced his way to a title. Thirty-two years later, the tournament returns to North America — and almost nothing about its shape looks the same.
The numbers alone are startling. 1994: 24 teams, 52 matches, 32 days. 2026: 48 teams, 104 matches, 39 days in the US alone — with Canada and Mexico also hosting. FIFA hasn't just grown the World Cup. It's doubled it.
Infantino's expansion project — and who it really serves
This isn't organic growth. It's a deliberate commercial and political strategy driven by Gianni Infantino and FIFA's need to protect football's revenue dominance while extending their own institutional power.
More matches means more broadcast content. Media rights are FIFA's biggest earner, and jumping from 64 to 104 games significantly lifts the value of rights deals, especially across the dozens of new participating nations. Meanwhile, expanding to 48 teams deepens FIFA's political base — every member association carries equal voting weight regardless of population or football pedigree, so bringing in nations like Cape Verde and Curaçao (combined population under one million) isn't just symbolic. It's strategic.
The bigger prize is market access. A 48-team field dramatically increases the chances that China, India, and Southeast Asian nations qualify — unlocking consumer markets that a 32-team tournament might routinely exclude. That's not a coincidence. That's the point.
The unresolved tension for FIFA is whether expansion eventually cannibalises the premium value of qualifying in the first place. The World Cup matters partly because most teams don't make it. Dilute that scarcity, and the product changes in ways that don't show up in a rights deal until it's too late.
Soccer in the US: not the same country it was in 1994
When FIFA awarded the 1994 World Cup to the United States, it came with a condition: establish a viable professional league. MLS launched in 1996, survived its near-death years, and is now a legitimate fixture of the American sporting landscape — feeding players into European leagues and drawing global names in their prime, not just their retirement.
The women's game has grown even faster, backed by significant new investment and a national team that has spent decades as the most successful program on the planet. The pathway from youth football through college into professional tiers, male and female, is more developed now than at any point in American soccer history.
The US men's team sits 16th in the world rankings and will enter 2026 as a credible dark horse on home soil. That sentence would have read as optimistic fiction in 1994. Now it's a reasonable assessment.
On the pitch itself, the game has been nudged rather than overhauled. The 1994 tournament introduced the back-pass ban and three points for a win — structural changes that reshaped how the game was played at every level. The 2026 edition brings VAR expansion to second yellow cards and corner decisions, mandated drinks breaks at the 22-minute mark in each half (a direct response to the heat problems of '94), and five substitutions plus a concussion replacement, up from two allowed in 1994.
- Teams: 24 (1994) → 48 (2026)
- Matches: 52 (1994) → 104 (2026)
- Substitutions: 2 (1994) → 5 + concussion sub (2026)
- VAR: not present (1994) → expanded to corners and second yellows (2026)
The 1994 tournament remains the best-attended in World Cup history, largely because NFL stadiums were used to maximise capacity. The 2026 edition will follow the same approach. Some things, at least, haven't changed.
What Baggio and Romário would recognise, stepping onto a 2026 pitch, is the game itself — the same dimensions, the same object, the same fundamental logic. Everything built around it, though, is a different world entirely.
