48-team World Cup proposed by FIFA president to bring soccer to more people

What is the World Cup for?

The obvious answer is to determine the best international soccer team in the world. It’s a tournament where every country has the ability to qualify, and where every country besides the host has to prove that it is worthy of participating in the tournament. The format is a fair way of determining who deserves to be the world champion.

The cynical answer is to make money, and this isn’t incorrect, either. Profit might not have been the original point of the World Cup, but FIFA’s philosophy changed significantly under the leadership of Joao Havelange in the 1970s, and his ideas turned world soccer’s governing body into a marketing giant. Sepp Blatter built on the commercial foundation that his predecessor laid, and the 2014 men’s World Cup made $4 billion for FIFA.

On Tuesday, AFP learned that FIFA president Gianni Infantino will propose a 48-team men’s World Cup at January’s FIFA council meeting, featuring 16 groups of three teams each. This format hits on a bad-for-competition double whammy, ensuring more bad games and more chances for the best teams in the world to get upset before the late rounds. It appears, on its face, to be a cynical ploy to make more money by letting more teams into the competition. But there’s a third thing that the World Cup is for, and it’s something that Havelange, Blatter, and Infantino have all agreed on — growing the sport worldwide.

Okay, so their reason for wanting to do that is probably cynical. More countries with well-developed soccer programs and lots of soccer fans means more money for FIFA. But somewhere in their black, money-grubbing hearts, all of the last three presidents of FIFA have appeared to have a love for the sport and a desire to make the highest level of the game accessible to more people.

Havelange had the ideas of creating women’s and youth World Cups, which Blatter expanded on. Blatter also brought the World Cup — controversially — to Africa, Russia, and the Middle East for the first time. Was his primary goal to solicit bribes for delivering votes? We’ll never know. If you believe that and live in the developed Western world, you’ll have a difficult time finding someone who disagrees with you. But even if corruption was the motivation, there’s no doubt that bringing top-level international soccer to new places is good for interest and investment in the sport in those places. The jury’s still out on South Africa 2010, but bringing the World Cup to the United States, Mexico, Japan, and South Korea has undoubtedly had a positive effect on the health of the sport globally.

Expanding the World Cup to 48 teams is a different type of gamble than taking the tournament to new corners of the globe because it’s not going to make for a better soccer tournament. That could create a drop-off in interest over time, but Infantino is betting that the World Cup is such a strong brand that high-level soccer and a tournament format that creates the most excitement possible aren’t necessary to maintain or grow global interest. Any loss in viewership due to the product’s dilution should be more than offset by the fact that there are 16 more countries with teams to root for in the tournament.

Especially if two of those 16 countries are India and China. The last time that China qualified for the men’s World Cup was in 2002, when they didn’t have to deal with auto-bids South Korea and Japan in qualifying. India did not attempt to qualify until 1986 and has never made the finals. Chinese businessmen have recently started to invest heavily in the Chinese Super League domestically, while wealthy financiers are trying to get the Indian Super League off the ground, rivaling the older I-League.

China is much closer to relevance in men’s international soccer than India, but both teams are clearly in need of some help if they’re going to establish themselves as competitive teams on the global stage. Their constant exclusion from the World Cup presents a problem for FIFA — those two countries make up 35 percent of the world’s population. Soccer has also struggled to take a hold in other huge Asian countries, too — Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia are among the teams to never qualify for a World Cup. Under the current format, the countries that make up half the population of the world don’t feel like they have a good chance of making the tournament.

Infantino, his associates, and FIFA’s corporate partners want to start making money off of those people, but their greed will have a positive externality. With added hope of making it to the World Cup, the national federations of the biggest countries without good soccer teams will look for investors and get serious about developing their programs. This will give more kids something to do, as well as more avenues to professional soccer careers. More people will have competitive national teams to cheer for.

A 48-team World Cup will not be more entertaining to watch for the people who are already interested. It will not provide better competition for the players who already play in it. But in every other way, it’s likely to be a big success.