FIFA President Gianni Infantino hails 'incredible success' of record-breaking FIFA World Cup 2026

I feel good, I feel fantastic, I feel great, satisfied for the incredible success of this FIFA World Cup. Very proud, of course, of everything that has happened. Spain has been fantastic, they deserve to win the World Cup. Argentina has been great as well. But everyone that has operated in this World Cup, that has worked, and I'm FIFA President, of course, I care about that as well, has done an extraordinary job. And I'm very happy because what we did is we made millions of people in America and around the world happy. We have seen images and scenes of fans in the stadiums, in the cities, in America, in Canada, in Mexico, all over the world, which are unique. And this reminds us that football and the World Cup is not just competition, but it's actually there to unite the world and to make maybe the world a little bit, a little bit better. Well, this World Cup has not just broken all possible records, it has smashed them, it has destroyed every record. We have had a record number of spectators in the stadiums, almost 7 million. We will have had, I mean, the official figures will come out soon, but only over 6 billion people watching it from home. The world was standing still to come. We broke the number of goals, almost three goals per match, over 300 goals. All the top, top players performed extremely, extremely well, from, of course, Rodri, who was the best player of the tournament, to Leo Messi, to Kylian Mbappé, to Haaland, to Harry Kane, to Juventus. New players came in, beautiful stories, debutants, Capo Verde stories, so beautiful. I mean, you cannot scrape the perfect World Cup in such a way as this World Cup happened. I think we have to invent a new vocabulary, new words to define the success of this World Cup. Well, for now we enjoy still this World Cup in 2026, but it's true that 2030 will be a very special World Cup. The World Cup of the centenary, the 100th year celebration of the World Cup, it is to be a fantastic one. We will see if it is still with 48 teams, which has been very successful, or maybe with 64 teams, we will have to discuss that, to analyze that. We will see if we have hydration breaks or not by then, we will have to analyze and discuss it. We will see if the offside law is going to change or not and give more advantage to the attackers, even though we had record number of goals in this World Cup. We will see how the World Cup in 2030 in Spain, in Portugal, in Morocco, with celebration matches in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, will look like. We will see also how the world will look like. We have seen in this World Cup that even if many people are saying that the world is divided and aggressive, and many people were trying to challenge and criticize FIFA or the World Cup for many, many things, before the kick-off, during the World Cup even, nothing can touch the power and the magic of the World Cup, because the world needs events like this to bring them together, to bring people together in joy and happiness. We saw so many families, so many women in the stadium, we saw so many happy scenes in the cities, we saw fans from different countries celebrating. The fans were not segregated. You go to some of these places that give lessons to all of us, and they try to segregate fans, and it doesn't work, and they have riots, and you cannot go to stadiums, and they have fights. We didn't have any of that. We had peace, we had joy, and we had people coming together, because when you do the things as we do in FIFA, with your heart and with the passion, then they turn out perfectly well. This World Cup has been incredible. The next one will be fantastic.