A great tournament, three continents, six countries and 48 teams. The colossal and transnational structure devised by FIFA to organize the 2030 World Cup is unprecedented and has generated a multitude of unknowns, among them, how on earth a cake of such dimensions is distributed.
The starting point, which must be ratified in an extraordinary assembly in December 2024, is the following: Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, a nation that hosted the first World Cup in history in 1930 and will therefore have the opportunity to commemorate the centenary, will be host of the first three games with their respective teams. Once these matches have been played, the competition will move entirely to the countries that defended the winning candidacy, that is, the one formed by Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
If logic is applied, an element of little use by FIFA in recent times, it must be said, the distribution of the three most important matches will not differ from the following: the final, for Madrid as the capital of the organizing country, that is, at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, and semifinals for Lisbon (Portugal) and Casablanca (Morocco) as an equitable solution.
Where is Barcelona in the equation? Well, apparently marginalized if it weren't for the interest of the Catalan Football Federation in proposing a plan. It would consist of considering the three previous Conmebol matches in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay as an appendix to the World Cup, compatible therefore with the celebration of a first match in Barcelona, the new Camp Nou in this case, converted into a second celebration of welcome, in a sort of second inaugural match.
In order not to generate acclimatization problems for the players who play the three initial matches on the American continent, with temperatures and time zones different from those in Europe and Africa, it is planned that these will take place in advance of the restart of the competition in Spain, Portugal and Morocco. That margin would give meaning to that aforementioned second inaugural event in Barcelona.
The Catalan Federation, with a lot of weight in the Spanish Federation that is now in a transition period until new elections, has the intention of achieving two headquarters for Barcelona, the one mentioned for a Spotify Camp Nou by then already remodeled and another for Cornellà, in Espanyol's usual stadium. In the absence of specifying the distribution, the following distribution of venues is being studied: nine for Spain (two for Madrid, two for Barcelona, two for the Basque Country; one for Seville, one for Valencia and a highly disputed one for Murcia or Zaragoza, leaving outside Galicia), three for Portugal (two for Lisbon and one for Porto) and four for Morocco (Casablanca and Rabat, among them). The negotiations between now and the final approval of the World Cup at the end of 2024 will be constant, will involve political agents and may produce many modifications between now and the final map.
Barcelona was already the scene of the opening ceremony at the 1982 World Cup in Spain. The Camp Nou hosted that event as well as the semifinal between Italy and Poland. For its part, the Sarrià stadium hosted a legendary second phase that included matches between Argentina, Italy and Brazil.
