Tournament expansion has been a notable thing in many sports in recent years. That’s certainly true with FIFA’s international soccer tournaments, where the men’s FIFA World Cup will go to 48 teams in 2026. And the global governing body announced Friday that it has a similar expansion planned for the FIFA Women’s World Cup beginning in 2031 (where the tournament will be hosted in the U.S.):
The FIFA Women’s World Cup is set to become bigger and more inclusive 🌏🏆
In a historic decision for the game, the FIFA council has unanimously decided that from 2031 onwards, the FIFA Women’s World Cup will see 48 teams competing against one another for the very first time.
— FIFA (@FIFAcom) May 9, 2025
The men’s World Cup expansion has sparked plenty of controversy itself, and the women’s tournament expansion may spark even more. While there’s a notable disparity in men’s soccer between the most elite teams and everyone else, international tournaments there have seen quite a few upsets over the years, including Greece’s run to the UEFA Euro 2004 title and runs to the semifinals from Morocco and Croatia in the 2022 FIFA World Cup. And many of the countries that have been last-out in 32-team tournaments have produced notable results against some of the included teams.
Of course, women’s soccer has also seen some unusual results. Those include Japan’s FIFA Women’s World Cup triumph in 2011 and Canada’s Olympic triumph in 2021 (at the so-called 2020 Olympics). But the results there have generally been about surprising teams from the top 12 or top 16, rather than huge upsets.
The Women’s World Cup has already grown much more dramatically in recent decades than the men’s tournament. The men’s World Cup started with 13 teams in 1930, went to 16 four years later, and generally continued that until expansions to 24 (1982), 32 (1998), and now 48. By contrast, the women’s event began with 12 teams in 1991, went to 16 in 1999, 24 in 2015, and 32 in 2023. So scaling up to 48 by 2031 is notable for it.
For reference, while the actual qualification process depends a lot on confederations, the current teams ranked #47-50 are Thailand, Slovakia, Romania, and Uzbekistan. Thus, it seems quite possible that this expansion could lead to more lopsided games and complaints like what we saw around the USWNT’s World Cup-record 13-0 opening win over Thailand in 2019. (Yes, the gulf between the U.S. and Thailand teams has grown significantly worse since then, at least from a rankings standpoint.)
However, this does mean more game inventory for broadcasters. And in this case, that will start with Netflix, which announced a deal for U.S. rights to the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cups last December. There’s an advantage there, as that streaming service is not limited by linear channel availability the way more conventional broadcasters are. But there are still increased production costs around extra matches and commentators.
It will be interesting to see what kinds of audiences these extra matches draw. And it may be even more interesting to see what impact the tournament expansion has on bidding for the 2035 Women’s World Cup, which will likely take place before we have any data from 2031. Will this extra inventory help boost broadcaster interest and rights fees, or could it be a neutral or a negative with how non-competitive many of these matches might be expected to be? We’ll find out.
