FIFA Adds 4 New Spots to 2026 World Cup for Asian Nations
Asia is set to receive a much larger allocation of nations in the newly re-structured tournament for the FIFA World Cup 2026 – now featuring at least four nations. The expanded edition of the World Cup will have room for 48 nations, and has space for up to 9 Asian nations to compete. The 2026 edition of the tournament will be hosted across three American nations; Canada, the United States, and Mexico. With huge nations like China rarely getting far ahead in the international competition stages for the World Cup, this new structure is largely seen as a rejuvenation that will likely bring some new competitors to the tournament.
The biggest cities in China have largely no representation of professional football clubs, and the national team have been hindered greatly by the lack of public support for grass-roots football.
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Even despite the four additional spots added to the FIFA World Cup 2026 tournament, the Chinese are still sceptical that they have a realistic chance of qualifying for the tournament. This is quite a substantiated problem in China, and the nation has notoriously never committed fully to a programme of football development that would allow their national team to grow to a higher quality level than we have previously witnessed.
The massive tournament structure will move from the original 32 teams, to a newly scoped out 48-team tournament. That has obvious repercussions for all stages of the tournament, the seeding of groups, and the amount of matches that a winning team would potentially need to play in order to lift the trophy. Generally, the changes have been received well, and there is plenty of support for the increased number of teams to play in the tournament.
With an allocation increase from 4.5 to 8.5, the Asian cohort of footballing nations will now have a much wider range of possibilities to qualify for the tournament. This will surely invigorate some of the fringe nations, which up until this rule change had very few realistic prospects to actually qualify for the tournament. With China currently ranked as the 78th best team in national level football, there isn’t much optimism around their qualification chances going ahead.
China’s Hope to Qualify for the World Cup
China endured a terrible qualification campaign for the 2022 World Cup, crashing out in the third round of the Asian qualifiers and never really demonstrating that they had the pedigree to perform at the highest level of football. Despite being one of the largest countries on the planet, it seems they still have considerable difficulties in leveraging their huge population to develop the grass-roots level of the game. Many commentators on football have often spoke on the topic of Chinese absenteeism from the elite level of football – it is indeed a curious phenomenon that is made even more absurd given the interest in consuming football content from Europe that exists.
One theory into China’s terrible quality at the national level is their unstructured approach to the performance of club football. In an age of intense scrutiny on public finances in China, many clubs around the nation operated at huge losses for so long, making the domestic pyramid structure completely obsolete when it comes to fostering and nurturing talent. Government lockdowns during COVID have only exacerbated the problems, pushing many Chinese football clubs in debt.
Without the support of local authorities and resources to help the sport grow at the grassroots level, it has become highly impossible for China to get any possible resolution to its low-talent pipeline of young players. It’s clear that European and South American club structures are far superior to the Asian setup. These ideals bleed over into the national level, and without a strong network of clubs to grow and support young players there will likely never be a resurgence of Chinese talent breaking into the game.
China has not done itself any favours in regards to growing the quality of football within its country, particularly due to the freedom to host and participate in sport has been greatly hampered by Xi-Jinping’s zero-COVID approach to lockdowns, the result of which was a relinquishment of their right to host the 2023 AFC Asian Cup. Just less than a year out from the tournament. But with the increased limit on total teams in the tournament, the trend may begin to reverse in China’s favour.
