World Cup 2026 and the 48-Team Door: Asian Football Learns to Dream Bigger

At Rostov, on the night of June 27, 2026, I stood between two groups of supporters. On one side were the Germans, silent, some with their faces in their hands. On the other were the South Koreans, weeping and singing Arirang. The reigning world champions left the tournament in the group stage after a 0-2 defeat. I did not write about the defensive error by Mats Hummels. I sat down between those two streams of sound and listened. Arirang was still ringing around the stands, and I understood that every nation has its own way of crying when its team loses. German tears on Russian soil taught me that defeat, too, has its own phonetics.

Eight years later, on June 11, 2026, another World Cup will kick off in the United States, Canada and Mexico. For the first time in the tournament's nearly century-long history, the finals will expand to 48 teams, with 104 matches in place of the previous 64. For Asian football, this is the widest door ever opened. And for Vietnam, it raises a question I have carried for years: are we ready to walk through it?

It is worth looking at the numbers to grasp the scale of the change. Under FIFA's allocation for the 2026 finals, Asia and the Pacific (AFC) receive 8 direct slots plus 1 place in the intercontinental play-off. At the previous 32-team World Cups, the AFC had only 4.5 slots. In other words, the opportunity nearly doubled after a single change of format.

The history of this expansion is not new. The World Cup once had 16 teams, then 24, then 32. Each time it grew, FIFA spoke of globalization, of giving a chance to football nations that had never been seen. But behind that language there is always another motive: more matches mean more television rights, more sponsors, more revenue. In 2026, the number of matches rises from 64 to 104, 40 extra games, an enormous commercial volume.

For Vietnam, a few specific facts are worth recording. The national team has never once appeared at a World Cup finals. The most recent achievement worth remembering is a run to the final round of continental qualifying, where we met opponents such as Japan, South Korea, Iran and Australia. China, where I live and work, has appeared at the World Cup exactly once, in 2026, and left with three defeats, without scoring a single goal.

What is interesting is that both football nations I am bound to stand before the same wider door, but with very different attitudes. Vietnam rose through a generation of players trained methodically in academies, while China once rose on money, then discovered that money cannot buy a foundation.

This is the part I want to spend the most time on, because a wider door does not automatically produce a better team, it only makes the gap between opportunity and ability more conspicuous.

I do not analyze tactics with diagrams; I read a defense like a 4-4-2 poem. And when I read Asian football, I see a very clear layered structure. At the top are Japan, South Korea, Iran and Australia, teams accustomed to appearing at World Cups and even escaping the group stage. In the middle are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Uzbekistan and Jordan, teams with foundations but lacking consistency. At the bottom is the rest, including Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.

The expansion to 8 direct slots mainly serves the middle and lower tiers. That is why it is welcomed in Southeast Asia. But looking more closely, I see a paradox: finals slots are growing faster than the pace at which football nations are upgrading their quality, and that gap will be filled by heavy defeats on the biggest stage.

My experience following matches shows a rule. A team only truly improves when it is tested at a level above its current ability, but not too far above. If the gap is too great, the test becomes a humiliation, and defeat loses its educational value. Expanding the World Cup risks creating many matches of the second kind.

Look at Vietnam's path over the past decade. In 2026, the U23 team reached the final of the Asian championship, causing a seismic shock. In 2026, the senior team reached the quarter-finals of the Asian Cup. Those results came from a generation of players trained at the Hoang Anh Gia Lai – Arsenal JMG academy and other centers, a generation that included Nguyen Quang Hai. That was the fruit of ten years of sowing, not of a single star signing.

China took the opposite road. The golden era of Guangzhou Evergrande, with expensive contracts and two AFC Champions League titles, once made people believe that money could close every gap. But when the money stopped, many clubs dissolved, and the national team still floundered. A football nation can buy a star, but it cannot buy a generation.

A contract is not signed in ink, but in the memory of an entire stadium. That is true of a player, and it is true of a football nation. The memory of an entire stadium cannot be bought with a transfer fee.

In purely tactical terms, I believe Southeast Asian teams need to prepare for a specific problem. In an expanded finals, the group format will most likely still give each team three group matches, but the number of teams advancing will increase. That means a single win and a single draw may be enough to progress. That opportunity demands something Vietnamese football has often lacked, cold-bloodedness in front of goal.

I once witnessed, in an empty stadium in Lisbon in the summer of 2026, Bayern Munich beat PSG 1-0 in the Champions League final. The only goal, scored by Kingsley Coman, came from a seemingly ordinary passage of play. An empty stand is not silence; it is a million voices compressed into every seat. In a big match, what decides the outcome is usually not technique, but the ability to keep a cool head when tens of thousands of eyes are watching.

For a small team, that is all the more true. Vietnam has often dropped points in the closing minutes, in situations I call the 88th minute of belief. An expanded World Cup slot will not automatically cure that illness. It only places the players in a bigger room, where the illness is more clearly exposed.

There is another dimension rarely discussed: the audience. In the Stadium of Memory project I initiated, I once collected thousands of supporters' messages about the match they remembered most. What stood out is that very few remembered a big win. Most remembered defeats, in one way or another. Every anonymous match inside me is a poem waiting to be sung. For Vietnamese supporters, a World Cup slot would be more than an achievement. It would be a collective memory, something no scoreboard can measure.

But memory is only beautiful when it is tied to a real match. If the national team goes to North America merely to be a backdrop for others, that memory will carry a bitter taste. That is why I want to look at the hardest part of the story, instead of simply cheering the number 8.

This is where I want to speak plainly, knowing it goes against the general joy. Expanding the World Cup is not a gift, but a test of maturity.

The popular view is that with more slots, Vietnam will find it easier to reach the World Cup. True. But what then? If we only go on to lose three matches and come home, the appearance delivers very little. I remember a coach once telling me: small teams are not afraid of losing; they are afraid of losing without learning anything.

On the day I was rejected for being a girl, I understood that the ball never reads documents. It does not read FIFA's slot allocation either. A slot is only a necessary condition. The sufficient condition lies in the quality of youth development, in the domestic league system, in the number of top-level matches young players experience each year.

The deepest paradox is that as opportunity grows, so does the risk of complacency. Federations easily turn a new slot into a political trophy, instead of using it as pressure to reform. A finals ticket can become the end of one cycle, when it must be the beginning of another.

I still believe in that door. But I believe in the people who walk through it, not in the door itself. The 2026 World Cup will give Vietnam a greater opportunity than ever. The remaining question is not whether we can qualify, but when we stand on that stage, what we want people to remember us by, a team that filled a quota, or a team that left behind a poem.