A couple of days out from boarding a 15-hour flight, for a trip which will also include a 27-hour train journey, Matt Fejos might be forgiven for wondering whether a lifelong obsession with football was such a good idea after all.
And it is not just him he has to worry about, either. As the head of the Flying Kiwis supporters club, he is overseeing travel plans for around 1,000 fans of the lowest-ranked side set to appear in football’s most inflated World Cup.
The itinerary includes some creative workarounds to combat the exorbitant costs of North America’s 48-team battle of attrition.
There’s that day-and-a-bit train ride from Los Angeles to Portland. They will base themselves in Whistler, rather than Vancouver, and take a bus into that city for matchdays against Egypt and Belgium. Some will be sharing space in four-bed dorms in hostels to keep costs down.
His enthusiasm for what lies ahead is undimmed, though. “For Kiwis in general, it’s in our nature to spread our wings and be mobile,” Fejos said.
Which is handy for New Zealand football fans. Because the expansion of football’s showpiece event from 32 to 48 teams means they could now be regular participants.
The decision to enlarge the World Cup was first pitched by Gianni Infantino when he was bidding to succeed Sepp Blatter as Fifa president.
The idea was met with hostility by many in the sport’s elite, especially in Europe’s mainstream nations. Pep Guardiola said an increasingly busy calendar was going to “kill the players”.
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, in his role of chief executive of the European Club Association – a body representing more than 200 clubs, including Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich - vocalised the complaints.
“We have to focus on the sport again,” Rummenigge, who played in three World Cups for West Germany, said at the time.
“Politics and commerce should not be the exclusive priority in football. In the interest of the fans and the players, we urge Fifa not to increase the number of World Cup participants.”
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SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. AFP -
Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri. AFP -
The AT&T Stadium in Dallas will host World Cup matches. AFP -
The Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, will host five group stage matches, one round of 16 match, and one quarter-final. AFP -
The Mercedes Benz Stadium ahead of the 2026 World Cup in Atlanta, Georgia. AFP -
Guadalajara Stadium in Mexico. AFP -
Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. AFP -
Temporary structures at the BMO Field in Toronto, Canada. AFP -
BBVA Stadium in Monterrey, Mexico. AFP -
Workers clean the roof of Akron Stadium in Guadalajara. AFP
Then Infantino was elected, and they went ahead with it anyway. Now a tournament that has 16 more teams than each of the previous seven World Cups is about to kick off.
There will be nearly as many matches (104) at the 2026 World Cup as there were goals scored (115) at Italia ’90.
An English Premier League season has 380 matches over the course of nine months. This World Cup will cram around a third of that number of matches into a ninth of the time.
Critics say the gigantic fixture list will dilute excitement and competitiveness. But others think it could help broaden the sport’s margins.
“You can see there's good reasons commercially to have more countries genuinely interested in football,” Fejos said.
“It's transformative to a small country like New Zealand or Haiti, and there are nations smaller than us have made it.
“You can’t underestimate that. But I think the trade-offs are pretty big.”
Debutants Curacao are the smallest country to qualify for a World Cup. The island nation of around 160,000 inhabitants were 82nd in the Fifa standings when qualification was sealed, which was 13 places above New Zealand.
The All Whites are not novices, though. They played at World Cups previously, in 1982 and 2010.
In that latter tournament, in South Africa, they were the only side to remain undefeated, although three draws was not good enough for them to advance beyond the pool stage.
Their ticket to a first return to a World Cup in 16 years was sealed when they beat New Caledonia in Auckland in March 2025. There were 25,000 inside the 50,000-capacity Eden Park Stadium to see it.
“Selfishly for us, we want to go to the World Cup, so it's good, but it takes away a lot of jeopardy,” Fejos said of the expanded chances of qualification now on offer.
“There's not many places in the world that would qualify for the World Cup and it be a half-full stadium.
“Sold out is such a foreign concept in New Zealand football, compared to say England [where Fejos lived until moving home to Wellington last October]. A game doesn't sell out in New Zealand.”
Fejos says that the only time matches have really attracted national attention in the past have been when World Cup qualification has been at stake, plus occasional club matches involving Wellington Phoenix or Auckland FC.
The latter won Australia’s A League this season, qualifying them to play AFC Champions League football next season.
“Every four years you'd get more than 30,000 people in one stadium to watch football,” he said. “I think that affects the spectacle, or achievement, of qualifying.”
He says that it’s not just Oceania where the jeopardy is now watered down. He points out the top sides in Europe and South America can afford to rotate players, given the increased margin for error in the new qualifying process.
“If they can rotate players, the games won't mean anything and maybe qualification won't mean as much,” Fejos said. “So it's a tough balance.”
He does, though, believe it could be transformative because of the increased exposure playing at a World Cup will give New Zealand’s footballers.
It is a country which has been world champion multiple times in rugby, and Test cricket champions, as well as being competitive in a variety of Olympic sports.
Against that, Fejos says football is a “minority sport”, which suffers from a dearth of “back-page space, and space on the sports news, even”.
“We're a pretty laid-back country anyway, so it's not the same passion [for football] as in England,” he said.
“But there's something in New Zealanders when they know the world's watching; it's a big thing for us to compete globally.
“We have the mentality that we're so far away from the world, the population and resources are smaller, so the World Cup captures that wider national attention like nothing else.
“The Olympic spotlight brings relevance and importance, national attention to sports that most of the public don't have any thought for, or would never pay to go and watch in between.
“[The World Cup] is similar for a large percentage of New Zealand population that isn't interested in football.”
