FIFA announced this Wednesday that the joint candidacy of Spain, Portugal and Morocco will be in charge of organizing the 2030 World Cup, beating the candidacy of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay for said event. The 2030 World Cup will be the third to be held in more than one country, after South Korea and Japan in 2002 and the one that will be held in Canada, the United States and Mexico in 2026.
Furthermore, the 2030 World Cup will be the second in which 48 teams will participate instead of 32 as has been happening until now, so there will be more groups, more venues and more matches (104 matches in total). The 2026 World Cup to be held in the United States, Mexico and Canada will be the first in history in which 48 teams from 48 different countries will participate and 104 matches will be played, including the grand final.
The FIFA Council also unanimously agreed that the first three matches of the World Cup will be played in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay to celebrate the centenary of the first World Cup held in 1930 in Uruguay.
The capital of Uruguay, Montevideo, will host the opening ceremony and the first match of the World Cup to commemorate the 100 years of the first World Cup won, precisely, by Uruguay. Argentina and Paraguay will host two more matches before the World Cup makes the jump to Europe and Africa. Therefore, it will be the first World Cup in history to be held on three continents at the same time.
The rest of the World Cup matches (a total of 101 matches) will be held in Spain, Morocco and Portugal. The federations of these three countries must now choose the cities and stadiums where the matches will be played. Candidates must propose a minimum of 14 stadiums, of which at least seven must already be built, although FIFA will allow up to 20 venues to be submitted if they are available.
Each of the federations that are part of the joint candidacy must propose at least two stadiums per country. The Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) has already started working with 15 venues that will later be reduced to eight or 10 at most.
The venues currently proposed by the RFEF are Madrid (with the Santiago Bernabéu and the Metropolitano), Barcelona (with the Camp Nou and the Stage Front Stadium of Espanyol), Valencia (Mestalla), Vigo (Balaídos), La Coruña (Riazor) , Gijón (El Molinón Enrique Castro ‘Quini’), Bilbao (San Mamés), San Sebastián (Reale Arena), Zaragoza (La Romareda), Murcia (La Nueva Condomina), Seville (La Cartuja), Málaga (La Rosaleda) and Las Palmas (Gran Canaria Stadium).
Portugal has proposed three venues: the Do Dragao stadium in Porto, the La Luz stadium in Benfica and the José Alvalade stadium in Sporting Lisbon. Morocco, finally, has proposed the stadiums in Rabat, Casablanca, Tangier, Agadir, Marrakesh and Fez. November 30 will be the last day for the federations of the three countries to present all their documentation, before FIFA carries out the evaluation of the candidacies in the first four months of 2024 and, probably, announces the final venues for the World Cup. 2030.
“We are preparing a very powerful dossier on both stadiums and the World Cup concept, thinking about the ecological transition, a new transportation system, modern, technological stadiums…”, said this Wednesday the Secretary of State for Sports and President of the Higher Sports Council, Víctor Francos.
Asked about the stadium where the 2030 World Cup final will be played, he said that it is still too early to know if it will be played at the Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid or the Camp Nou in Barcelona, the main candidates to host the final. “We have advanced many technical aspects, the inspections of the venues that have shown their willingness to be so, and now we must detail the distribution of venues in each country and which matches are played in each stadium. We are going to start working now,” he replied.
