The 2026 World Cup has 48 teams, up from 32. That format ran from 1998 to 2022. FIFA voted to expand in 2017, citing global inclusion and commercial opportunity. The order in which those reasons actually drove the decision is a matter of opinion.
The structure is 12 groups of four. The top two from each group go through automatically. Eight of the 12 third-placed teams also advance, chosen by comparing points and goal difference across all 12 groups. Thirty-two teams reach the knockout rounds.
The knockout stage now starts with a round of 32, which did not exist before this edition. Previous tournaments went straight from the group stage into a round of 16. The extra round makes the path to the final one game longer for everyone still in the competition after the group stage.
A team that wins their group and reaches the final plays seven matches. Same as before the expansion. The extra games show up in the overall match count — 104 total, up from 64 — not in the route a title winner has to take.
The criticism of the format is not complicated. The best teams and the worst teams are further apart in quality than they were when 32 competed. Some group games will be hard to watch. A contender can coast through a weak group and then face a serious test in the round of 32 with limited preparation. Whether the knockout rounds fix that by sorting things out quickly is the question the format's defenders keep coming back to. My read is that they mostly do, but the group stage is going to have some genuinely poor matches and that is worth knowing going in.