World Cup will expand to 48 teams in 2026

I agree with you on the location of the tournaments. Letting countries that have zero infrastructure/can't afford the competition financially/are unstable host such a major event is laughable at best and dangerous at worst, just look at brazil: a country that hosted the World Cup and Olympic Games back to back ( which in and of itself is pretty ridiculous) while being too poor to afford the proper facilities/that has bigger problems they should be spending billions on and where people have literally been decapitated (referee a couple years ago) on the soccer field.

On the number of teams in the World Cup I do disagree. I grew up in Europe so I follow Soccer (football) pretty closely and I can comfortably tell you that most people are fed up with how watered down these competitions have become. From the club side of things a strong, top 3 club team in any one of the top 5 leagues will probably play around 60 games a year between domestic league and cup and european cups. Due to this people lose interest and players get injured which in turn, diminishes the spectacle.

Let's take the Champìons League (CL) as an example. Right now the top three leagues in Europe are currently allowed to enter four teams into the Champions League and then there's another 20 spots left for smaller countries and team to compete for for a total of 32 teams in the group stage. Bear with me now but I thought it was called the "Champions League" so where are we finding 32 champions? The answer is we aren't. We just took the CL and made it into the Uefa Cup/Europa League (which for those who don't know, is basically the CL for runner ups) while also keeping the latter. So now we've muddied the distinction between the two and we just made the whole thing longer. In my humble opinion the CL should be the top 1-2 teams (aka the CHAMPIONS) from the 5 major leagues and the 3rd place finisher (in the domestic league) in say, Italy, plays the 3rd place finisher in England and the winner gets into the CL. Once we've done that we end up with around 12 teams and now we can allocate like 8 spots from smaller leagues or teams that actually can somewhat hold their own with your Real Madrid, Chelsea, Juventus, Bayern etc! They recently changed it to give "historically good" leagues 4 guaranteed spots which is the classic half-ass of a compromise so now not only do we keep the number of teams high but we also screw over the little guys.

On the World Cup.....man where do you even start. FIFA is a joke and the new Chairman makes me reconsider my views on Sep Blatter and makes Roger Goodell look like a friggin' genius. 48 teams in the World Cup?! seriously? For starters lets's consider this: the qualifiers for the damn thing start up to 2 years before hand. So, now we have club players who play 60-70 club games a year also play in these god awful qualifying games for their national side. You look at the game in TV and 3/4s of the stadium is empty and frankly with this many games nobody cares. And before someone replies "well they're paid millions to play a damn 90 minute game who cares if they play a couple more?" I will say this: Soccer might not be the most physical of sports but i do think people tend to underestimate how much physical strain comes from one game. In soccer you don't have the clock stopping, you don't rotate offense and defense, you don't just play in the summer or the fall, your rosters are smaller, you don't play indoor, you don't have padding. There is only so much you can ask players to do. Now we get to a competiton that happens only once in 4 years and that should represent the best of the best and the greatest celebration of soccer in the world and we learn that Ronaldo got injured in one of those meaningless qualifiers or that France is sitting half the team in the group stages because with 48 teams they're probably going to play Burkina Faso and the Cook Islands. What is the point of this? I realise that every one deserves a shot but do we really need to include everyone? at the end of the day the end result as @Sil said above, doesn't change so why do we need to include this sort of "diversity requirement" just so we can let San Marino get demolished by Germany 11-0 again? who gains from this? We already have the Euro Cup, Copa America etc which is where the smaller teams can play and try to compete with the big teams (unsurprisingly this works better in europe) and already those have started to become boring and lob sided, do we really need a giant competiton with even more bad teams? This is why no one cares about the Olympics anymore, there's simply too much to follow and the same will happen to the World Cup.

I might be wrong but to my mind its the FIFA execs who gain and it just goes to show how broken FIFA is and that nowadays we have gotten to the point where money gets you everything and everyone needs to be allowed to pitch in otherwise its unfair. Grow up people. While supporters from smaller countries are initially going to be excited about being included, thats going to wear out real quick if every time they make the cup they just get put six feet under by their opponents. One more thing; let's be real here the main motivation here is to let China in and I really dont have any problem with that. They're the most populated country in the world and looking to grow their soccer brand but for the love of Christ do we literally need to include 16 more teams just so you can cover that up FIFA? IDK guys, this is my 2 cents so feel free to to throw all your ms my way or rebuke me on any of my points.

TL;DR Quality over quantity, people from the Europe, South America and North/Central America won't pay to watch Argentina-Faroe Islands and we'll just end up turning the World Cup into the Olympics.