FIFA’s expanded World Cup raises concerns over player welfare as PFA chief sounds alarm

PFA CEO Maheta Molango warns the 48-team tournament format could favor elite squads while grinding players down, and FIFA is already eyeing 64 teams for 2030.

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Add us on Google by Editorial Team Jun. 9, 2026

The World Cup is getting supersized, and not everyone thinks that’s a good thing. Maheta Molango, CEO of the Professional Footballers’ Association, used a FIFPRO briefing to lay out a pointed case against FIFA’s expansion plans, arguing that a bigger tournament doesn’t automatically mean a better one.

The 2026 World Cup, jointly hosted by the US, Canada, and Mexico, will feature 48 teams. That’s a 50% jump from the 32-team format that’s been standard since 1998. And FIFA is reportedly considering pushing that number to 64 for the 2030 edition in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco.

More games, more problems

Molango’s core argument is deceptively simple: scarcity creates value. He drew a comparison to the NFL, a league that has built an empire partly by keeping its regular season relatively short. Every game matters because there aren’t that many of them. Flooding the market with more fixtures, Molango suggested, risks diluting the very thing that makes the World Cup special.

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Molango warned that the expanded format could disproportionately benefit the strongest national teams. Countries with deep squads and robust support infrastructure can rotate players and manage fatigue. Smaller nations, the ones the expansion is supposedly designed to include, may struggle to stay competitive across a longer tournament.

Fixture congestion isn’t a new complaint

FIFA’s expanded Club World Cup faced similar backlash from FIFPRO and the PFA. The criticism followed the same template: more games create more revenue for FIFA but place unsustainable demands on athletes.

FIFA’s incentive structure isn’t hard to decode. More teams means more games. More games means more broadcast windows. More broadcast windows means more revenue. The 2026 tournament is projected to be the most commercially lucrative World Cup in history.

The fan experience question

Molango also pushed back on the assumption that expansion automatically improves the fan experience. A 48-team group stage inevitably includes more mismatches, more dead-rubber games where outcomes are functionally decided before kickoff.

And then there’s the 64-team proposal for 2030, which would be FIFA’s centenary World Cup. There are 211 FIFA member associations. A 64-team tournament would include nearly a third of them.

What this means for the sports business landscape

FIFA does operate a digital collectibles platform called FIFA Collect, which uses NFTs for fan engagement and has been tied to ticketing for the 2026 tournament. But the platform exists in a largely separate orbit from the player welfare debate.

The risk for FIFA is reputational as much as operational. If the 2026 World Cup delivers a string of lopsided group-stage matches and a visible uptick in player injuries, the case against further expansion writes itself. Molango and FIFPRO are essentially placing that bet in public, hoping the evidence will catch up to the argument before FIFA locks in 64 teams for 2030.

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