Matt Cooper

We have Mexico and South Africa this evening in the opening game.

We're joined by Miguel Delaney, Chief Football Writer of The Independent and Dion Fanning, co-host of the Free State podcast.

Okay, Dion, I'm going to start with you and I'm going to show my age a little bit in that I grew up with the tournaments of 74 and 78, 16 teams.

Then it went to 24 teams back in 1982.

I think it was 2002 it went to 32.

Now it's going to 48 teams, which means that with 16 extra teams, 40 extra games, 104 games, even for those of us who've always loved World Cups, is that too much?

I think there were probably more UEFA teams back when there were 24 now than there are with 48.

And as Dave Hannigan pointed out last week, that's why we're going to have the beauty of Congo versus Uzbekistan.

You'll be staying up to watch that, will you?

What time is that on?

Does it matter what time it's on?

I don't know.

Miguel, what do you think?

Are there too many games in this?

Particularly when you actually think, on a more serious note as well, the demands this is going to put on the players.

Heat and altitude, travel, an awful lot of perhaps even exhausted players coming into the end of club seasons who are going to have to add an enormous amount of minutes unless they're managed very carefully by their coaches.

You'll get there from Mexico against England, I think, is it, in the round of 32 or 16?

But Dion, when you talk about getting excited, I wonder how excited are they really in Iran, for example, about having to play their three games in the United States, being discriminated against in the sense they're not allowed to bring a large number of their backroom staff with them, and being told they have to fly in on the day of the match and fly out immediately afterwards.

Again, why didn't FIFA just switch their games to Mexico or Canada to get around that?

He did it in Russia he did it in Qatar and he's doing his giant suck up act again