CONMEBOL President says World Cup 2030 will have 64 teams, but it's not certain yet
It's still not finalised that World Cup 2026 will have 64 teams.
CONMEBOL President Alejandro Domínguez, from Paraguay, is confident that World Cup 2030 will feature 64 teams, 16 more than this edition and twice the usual in World Cups, in a message on X. "The next one is at home! In 2030, the World Cup comes to Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay, a great opportunity for football, to celebrate the World Cup Centenary with a 64-team tournament".
However, according to multiple outlets, like Clarín, there is still no real evidence that World Cup 2030 will feature 64 teams. Instead, it is a proposition pushed especially by CONMEBOL to allow more countries to participate.
For this competition, for instance, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru, and Chile did not qualify as South America only had six fixed spots in World Cup, plus another potential one through the inter-confederation play-offs. Previously, with World Cups with 32 teams, only four countries had fixed spots: in World Cup 2022, only Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Ecuador qualified for the tournament.
And while Domínguez will push Infantino to accept the idea of having a special 64-team World Cup, the first centenary of the competition, UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin is strongly against a larger World Cup, and has already boycotted Infantino.
