How New Zealand could (and why we should) co-host a Fifa Men’s World Cup

A bold and beautiful vision for 2038.

I rocked up to Speight’s Ale House on a drizzly Hamilton night in 2023, expecting no trouble in getting a seat or at the very least a spot to lean. It was the Fifa Women’s World Cup, with the Football Ferns of New Zealand up against the Philippines. My hopes for a table were quickly dashed – the bar was packed.

It wasn’t just the bar. 32,000 fans had crammed into Wellington Regional Stadium to watch the game live. Football fever had well and truly reached Aotearoa.

Since then, it hasn’t really gone away. The All Whites’ opening match of this year’s World Cup was TVNZ’s biggest streaming day on record. I’ve sat in bars early on weekday mornings with passionate fans sipping their Guinness. People who’ve never spoken to me about football before are suddenly talking about Cabo Verde, VAR and Erling Haaland (a lot about Erling Haaland).

It’s not just that the country likes football, which has been among our most played sports for a while. But now we’re going out of our way to watch it on screens and in stadiums in unprecedented numbers. Even my grandparents, who only learnt what the word “streaming” meant last week, have a TVNZ+ season pass.

The success of the women’s World Cup, co-hosted by New Zealand and Australia in 2023, plus the growing popularity of the game across the Pacific region, begs the inevitable question: could we ever (co-)host a men’s World Cup?

Eden Park during the 2023 women’s World Cup (Photo: Eden Park/Facebook)

Several proposals have been put forward for how it could be done. A New Zealand-Australia bid seems the most natural, with the two nations having co-hosted major tournaments before, while a more bizarre trans-Pacific bid between New Zealand, Fiji and the United States has also been floated.

These proposals face some limitations. For a start, stadiums need a minimum of 40,000 seats to meet Fifa’s World Cup hosting requirements – New Zealand and Australia don’t have enough stadiums that big to host the tournament alone, especially not the new expanded format (and Fifa are now mulling expanding it to include even more teams in future). And the long distances and threat of jetlag seem certain to kill off any New Zealand-USA bid.

But there is one way that New Zealand could be part of hosting a men’s World Cup. Along with our Pacific neighbours Australia and Indonesia, we could pull off one of the greatest sporting tournaments in history.

There are plenty of naysayers, particularly after Australia withdrew their bid for the 2034 tournament. But their reasons largely relate to that edition specifically, given Saudi Arabia’s growing influence over Fifa and calls for unity within the Asian Football Confederation. 

Our prospects as co-hosts for 2038 are very different.

The first hurdle is that, with Qatar having hosted in 2022 and Saudi Arabia to come, Fifa may be reluctant to award another World Cup to the Asian Football Confederation to which Australia and Indonesia belong.

Let’s be real though, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand are literally a continent apart from the Middle East. Giving the South Pacific its first opportunity to host the world’s premier sporting event would be a huge boost to football’s growing popularity in the region. And let’s not forget that just three of the 23 World Cups to date have happened entirely outside of Europe and the Americas.

Time zones would prove the next major challenge, but this is a challenge every World Cup learns to overcome. Look at the pubs staying open until 5am for England’s Round of 16 appearance in this year’s tournament, or the 410 restaurants and bars that applied to stay open to show World Cup matches in Sweden over the current tournament. 

A 7pm kick-off in Auckland or a 5pm kick-off in Melbourne would be a beautiful pub-breakfast-friendly 8am in London. While European and American audiences might need to set a few early alarms, a Pacific World Cup would align with one of Fifa’s biggest growth markets – East Asia.

The 82,000 seat Jakarta International Stadium hosted the U17 World Cup in 2023 (Photo: Nodanodaboo via Wikipedia)

Here at home, we would benefit from the improved local infrastructure that major tournaments often leave behind. Our critical infrastructure could also benefit from a World Cup – we’ve seen this before in New Zealand, including the dramatic facelift on Auckland’s waterfront ahead of the 2021 America’s Cup. 

Warm-up matches hosted in smaller stadiums would help spread these positive impacts across the country, and our Pacific neighbours could benefit as well – picture Noumea’s Stade Numa-Daly Magenta, Port Moresby’s National Football Stadium and Nadi’s HFC Bank Stadium packed with travelling fans cheering their team on in warm-up matches.

Australian ambitions to host the men’s World Cup in the past have drawn concerns from other sporting codes that soccer’s gain will be their loss. Former chief executive Andrew Demetriou once defiantly said AFL “do not – and will not – accept second place for Australian football”. This view is shortsighted. Beyond the obvious benefits of improved stadiums, the World Cup would give our codes the opportunity to play in front of a global market – see the Tartan Army packing out Fenway Park to watch the Boston Red Sox. Ironically, a Fifa World Cup could be the greatest global advert for Super Rugby, NRL and AFL in history.

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So that brings us to the final question: can we actually do it? With our powers combined, New Zealand, Indonesia and Australia are surprisingly close to meeting the necessary stadium capacity required by Fifa – far closer than Saudi Arabia were when Fifa bent the rules for that nation’s 2034 bid. 

As it stands, Eden Park is this country’s only stadium large enough to host a match (though maybe a World Cup would be just the excuse we needed to push ahead with an iconic waterfront stadium). Wellington’s Hnry Stadium, Dunedin’s Forsyth Barr and Te Kaha in Christchurch would each need an expansion of five to ten thousand seats to meet the 40,000 threshold. Waikato Stadium is a bit further from that target at 25,000, but investment will be sorely needed even without the World Cup given the city’s projected growth. 

Across the ditch, Australia is already well positioned across its major cities, while Indonesia adds another six stadiums above the 40,000 minimum. Some of Indonesia’s venues are breathtaking – none more-so than the recently completed Jakarta International Stadium.

Imagine: a final at the MCG. One semi in Jakarta, the other in Auckland. Three phenomenal hosts, one unforgettable tournament. ...