LOS ANGELES, Oct. 13 (AFP) — A coalition of 13 national football associations gearing up for this year’s expanded 48-team FIFA World Cup has publicly pushed back against Aleksander Ceferin, president of the European football governing body UEFA, over controversial reported comments dismissing many matches in the expanded tournament as “completely uninteresting.”
In a unified joint statement released Sunday, the group of federations — which includes first-time World Cup qualifiers Cape Verde, Curacao and Uzbekistan, alongside 10 other African and Caribbean nations — said they “respectfully but firmly reject” Ceferin’s remarks first published by Slovenian national newspaper Delo.
The comments, reportedly made by Ceferin in pre-tournament remarks, centered on criticism of the decision to expand the 2026 World Cup field from the 32-team format used in 2022 to 48 teams. Ceferin was quoted as claiming expansion would dilute the overall competitive quality of the tournament, resulting in dozens of low-stakes, unengaging fixtures.
“For our countries, there is no such thing as an unimportant World Cup match,” the joint statement emphasized. The coalition argued that Ceferin’s framing of lower-ranked qualifiers’ matches as less valuable ignores the years of relentless effort, personal sacrifice, and collective national ambition invested by players, coaching staff, club organizations, football administrators, and millions of passionate fans across smaller and emerging football nations.
Notably, reporting from a second Slovenian outlet noted that Ceferin also offered a balancing perspective in the same conversation, acknowledging that “even small countries can participate and feel the pulse of the World Cup, which is a big thing.” That clarification did not soften the coalition’s pushback, however.
Alongside the three debutant nations, signatories to the statement include the football federations of Algeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia, all of which have secured spots in this year’s expanded 48-team tournament. The statement repeated that every participating nation has earned its place through competitive qualification, every fan is entitled to their national team’s World Cup dream, and every fixture carries profound meaning for millions of people worldwide.
“All nations participating at the World Cup deserve respect,” the statement read. “We therefore reject the UEFA President’s comments.”
When AFP reached out to UEFA for a response to the joint statement, a spokesperson for the governing body did not explicitly confirm or deny that Ceferin made the reported comments. Instead, the organization directed reporters to a separate interview Ceferin gave one week prior, in which the UEFA chief did not address World Cup expansion at all.