A bigger World Cup is a better World Cup - by Nate Silver
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Sports<br>A bigger World Cup is a better World Cup<br>This tournament has been great so far. But 48 teams create an awkward bracket. A 64-team World Cup is the inevitable outcome — and maybe the better one.
Nate Silver<br>Jun 17, 2026
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Cape Verde goalkeeper Vozinha after the team’s draw with Spain on Monday. Getty Images.<br>I know we’ve been sports-heavy lately, but I’ll be doing a Substack Live with Seth Masket tomorrow at noon about his new book on the Republican Party.<br>We’re also very overdue for the next SBSQ, so I’ll try to find a morning here soon for a lightning round edition. That does mean, however, that there’s still time to submit questions in the comments section of SBSQ #31.
I spent a few days at the Winter Olympics in Milan this February. It was a relatively spontaneous decision; I had to be in Europe anyway. Attending wasn’t exactly cheap, but cheaper than we expected.1 We saw the men’s hockey semifinals2 — but one of the top sporting experiences of my life was watching Alysa Liu win the gold medal. I’m not a figure skating guy at all, but it was absolutely thrilling, and much better live than with the commentators snarkily talking over the performance on TV.3<br>The Women’s Free Skate is a long day, though — four hours and change from start to finish, basically 80 percent of which involves skaters who have literally zero statistical chance at winning.4 Nevertheless, I was struck by the poise of every competitor — most of them teenagers, out there completely alone — in what was undoubtedly a moment they’ll remember on their deathbeds. Being the best skater in, say, Estonia or Kazakhstan is an achievement unto itself, and the crowd reacts with great admiration, tossing flower bouquets and stuffed animals onto the ice.5<br>The World Cup is good, actually
Anyway, soccer’s World Cup is here in the United States. (And Canada and Mexico.) This plug is about as subtle as a FIFA “hydration break”, but quite a lot of you have subscribed to our World Cup forecast, and we really appreciate that…<br>For full access to the World Cup model and the forthcoming midterm elections model, please consider becoming a subscriber.
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I think it’s been an outstanding tournament so far, even as the narrative has shifted from a Day of Draws on Monday to a Day of Dominance on Tuesday. The tournament is averaging 3.1 goals per game so far, the most since the 1958 edition. And plenty of them have been from the world’s greatest players. If you’re even remotely a sports fan, how can you not be excited when Mbappe and Haaland both score a pair of goals — and then Messi tops them both with a hat trick?<br>There is, however, considerable debate over whether FIFA undermined the tournament by expanding from 32 to 48 teams.<br>Economically, this was obviously the right move. Despite some initial, basically reasonable skepticism about how FIFA was pricing tickets, the World Cup is just about the most popular product imaginable, and it only happens once every four years. Even games like Austria-Jordan are selling out, or coming very close to it. If products are flying off the shelf, you expand inventory. It would be completely irrational not to do that.<br>I’m not, by default, a maximalist. Our philosophy at Silver Bulletin is very much that more isn’t always better. And that goes for sports, also. I absolutely hate the NCAA tournament’s decision to expand to 76 teams, for instance. Look for a rant about that next March.<br>Nor does it increase the pool of potential winners. The teams ranked #33 through #48 in our initial World Cup projections — basically the beneficiaries of the expanded field — had a combined chance of about 0.2 percent of winning the tournament. Even the United States was by far a better bet than the entire bottom third of the field.<br>But do you not think it’s thrilling to Cape Verdeans or Haitians or Iraqis to be there to compete? Cape Verde actually drew with Spain on Monday. Iraq and Curacao lost, badly in the end, but at least their teams briefly leveled the score and gave their fans a moment of hope.<br>Does this come at a cost of competitive integrity? I’ve watched perhaps 75 percent of the World Cup so far, and I wouldn’t say so. Minnows are fun, and the matches have been feisty. The first weekend of the NCAA tournament is exciting precisely because of the possibility of seeing a 1-in-50 upset, even if UMBC or whomever was inevitably going to bow out in the next round.<br>Switching modes from fan to analyst, does the competitive state of international soccer warrant the expansion? In other words, is the talent gap narrowing between the Spains and the Cape Verdes of the world?<br>(I wouldn’t say the worst teams; there are 211 FIFA members, some of whom occasionally lose games by scores like 31-0.)<br>Not exactly. Our PELE ratings are (retrospectively) calculated all the way to the dawn of competitive international soccer in 1872, so we can look at...