The grand vision of a 64-team World Cup has had an exceptionally short life, destined to become little more than a forgotten memo in the archives of FIFA. The proposal, once the centerpiece of a high-level summit in New York, has been so thoroughly and swiftly rejected that it has been erased from the serious agenda of world football.
The vision was born in South America, a dream of a centenary tournament in 2030 that would be the biggest and most inclusive in history. It was carried by a delegation of presidents and football chiefs to the offices of FIFA President Gianni Infantino, full of ambition and hope.
But the vision collided with a starkly different reality. It was met not with enthusiasm, but with a wall of institutional resistance. The idea was deemed unworkable by the FIFA Council, damaging by confederation heads, and logistically nightmarish by pragmatists. Its life in the public consciousness was brief, lasting only as long as the headlines from the New York meeting.
The final confirmation of its demise is procedural: the issue is not on the agenda for the next FIFA Council meeting. In the world of bureaucracy, this is the final step in transforming a grand vision into an irrelevant piece of paper. It has been filed away, its purpose served as a talking point but with no path to implementation.
The swift journey from a presidential summit to a forgotten memo is a powerful lesson in the realities of football politics, where even the grandest visions can be extinguished by the quiet, collective power of the status quo.