48-team World Cup opens in Mexico City

The 2026 World Cup opened on 11 June at the Estadio Ciudad de Mexico, the stadium that hosted Pelé’s coronation in 1970 and Maradona’s masterpiece in 1986, and the first match of the new format ended with the hosts beating South Africa 2-0 in front of more than 80,000 fans. Julián Quiñones scored the first goal of the tournament in the ninth minute, Raúl Jiménez, at 35 the fourth World Cup of his career, headed the second, and the final whistle came after three red cards and a Mexico City night that behaved like a party with a scoreline. It was a good opening night. The questions the tournament raises are bigger than the match.

The format is the story that will not go away. This is the first 48-team World Cup, played across three countries and sixteen cities, with 104 matches instead of 64. The expansion was sold as inclusion, more countries getting to the biggest stage, and there is something in that: the tournament now has genuine debutants and more of the world watching its own teams. The cost is a group stage padded with mismatches, a month-long slog that risks testing patience before the knockout rounds arrive. Whether the trade is worth it will be decided not by the opening week but by the tournament as a whole. My own position, for what it is worth, leans toward the sceptical side of the debate, but it is early, and the expanded format deserves to be judged on the games it produces, not on the fixture list.

What nobody predicted was how much of this World Cup would be Chinese. The opening ceremony featured Labubu, the monster-like vinyl figure created by the Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung and owned by the toy company Pop Mart, dancing across the pitch as an official FIFA-licensed mascot, and the internet promptly exploded in the way the internet does. Referee Ma Ning took charge of the opener, the first Chinese referee to referee a World Cup match in the modern era and the first in any role since 2002. Six teenagers from Inner Mongolia, chosen from hundreds of thousands of school footballers by the tournament’s sponsor Mengniu, walked out as flag-bearers for the hosts’ opening game. A tournament with no Chinese team at a stadium in Mexico, and China still managed to be one of the loudest presences in it, through products, referees and children. That is a particular kind of soft power, commercial rather than political, and it is worth noticing precisely because it operates below the level of flags and anthems.

The football itself has been a reminder of what altitude does to the game. The Estadio Ciudad de Mexico sits at 2,240 metres, and the opener showed both effects: the hosts pressing hard in the first half, the visitors fading as oxygen ran low, and referees handing out cards at a rate that suggested a combination of aggression and legs that stop responding. The conditioning challenge of playing at altitude will shape the group stage, and the three red cards in the opener, two of them for South Africa, may turn out to be the match’s most instructive detail.

The other change is the three-nation format. Hosting across Mexico, the United States and Canada means time zones, travel and a tournament that feels less like a single country’s festival and more like a continental event. The practical effects are mixed: more cities, more stadiums, more spectators, but also longer journeys for fans and teams, and a sense of occasion that is harder to sustain across three time zones. Mexico, with the biggest football culture of the three hosts, has so far been the emotional centre of the tournament, which the draw, and the opening night, have confirmed.

The tournament runs until the final on 19 July, and the format arguments will run alongside it. What the opening week has established is that the expanded World Cup can still feel like a World Cup, and that its centre of gravity, at least in these first days, sits where it always has: in Mexico City, with 80,000 people watching a team in green shirts run through thin air. The rest, the debates about expansion and commercialism, will have to wait for the results.