The 2026 World Cup was the first to contain 48 teams, with Canada, Mexico and the United States of America pitching in to share hosting duties. The next tournament, in 2030, will also be held across multiple countries, with Spain, Portugal and Morocco the main hosts, although the tournament will also have three matches held in South America.
In honour of the 100th anniversary of the World Cup, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina will each host one match, paving the way for Saudi Arabia to be the sole hosts in 2034. Saudi Arabia will use 15 stadiums across five cities
Spain will be one of the World Cup’s hosts in 2030 (Image credit: Getty Images) That will make it the first country to host an expanded World Cup tournament on its own. Whether or not it will have the capacity and infrastructure to handle hosting duties in time for the 2034 competition remains to be seen, but not all of the proposed tournament stadiums have been built yet. Al Nassr’s Al-Awwal Park will be one of the host venues (Image credit: Getty Images) That includes the 92,000 capacity King Salman International Stadium, which is slated to be completed by 2029. Currently, work on the stadium, which will be in the Saudi capital Riyadh, is yet to properly start, although it is expected to begin by the end of the year. The best features, fun and footballing quizzes, straight to your inbox every week. However, that is merely one of 10 new stadiums that need to be built between now and the beginning of the tournament.
Of those 10, work has only started on three, so there is a great deal of construction required between now and 2034. What’s more, the five stadiums already in existence require a lot of refurbishment to make sure they are in line with what Saudi Arabia promised when they submitted their hosting bid.
The Qatar World Cup was moved to the winter because of the region’s extreme summer temperatures (Image credit: Getty Images) Currently, the 2034 tournament has no start date and many are predicting it could be moved to the winter once again, as it was in 2022 in Qatar, to avoid the Middle East’s blistering summer temperatures. Already the 2034 tournament has drawn some controversy and criticism from Human Rights campaign groups, despite it being eight years away. In May 2025, FairSquare and Human Rights Watch reported the deaths of numerous migrant workers, including from, but not limited to, decapitation, electrocution, and falling to their deaths. They also claimed that Saudi authorities were failing to protect workers from preventable deaths and weren’t investigating workplace incidents, nor were they ensuring compensation for the families of those workers who died.
