The World Cup needs more stories like Cape Verde. Cricket only wants India vs Pak
World Cups are built to make the stars shine. For the heroes to fall and cry and prove that they are superheroes after all. Some show that they are also human. Some collect records, some become GOATS. Messi has done it all and so has Kohli in his own sport. But that’s only one part of the story. True romance lives in the underdogs. Standing between the posts of the third-smallest nation to ever qualify, Vozinha, the Cape Verdean goalkeeper, leads the reigning champions into extra time before bowing out. No one wrote the story in advance. That’s actually what the World Cup is for.
And cricket, in its next 50-over edition, leaves no room for any of that.
FIFA clearly understands the brief. Gianni Infantino is fresh off his first run at the 48-team World Cup, a tournament he has already seen as a success with nine of the 10 African teams reaching the knockout stages. the governing body is now considering a release for 64 teams.
“Every nation should be able to dream of participating,” Infantino said. UEFA’s Aleksander Čeferin thinks it’s a bad idea. Concacaf’s Victor Montagliani thinks it’s a bad move for the sport. Fifa is looking into it anyway. Whatever you make of the politics behind this push, and there are many, the direction is clear: wider doors, more countries with something real to play for.
To its credit, cricket has also listened, at least when it comes to the T20 World Cup. It is now a 20-team tournament and the ICC has just approved another expansion for 2028, which will increase the Super 10 stage from eight teams to 10 and add an Eliminator round, giving the second and third-placed teams another shot at the semi-finals. That’s real growth, more nations, more matches that matter, more Cape Verdeans waiting to see what happens. Fair play to the ICC for that.
WHY SKIP ODI?
Which makes it harder to explain the next one. If the associated nations are good enough to be trusted with an expanding, competitive T20 World Cup, why is the tournament that everyone calls the pinnacle of the format, the 50-over World Cup, the one that decides who really is the best team in the world, constantly restricting their access to it?
The 2027 ICC Enhanced ODI World Cup is a 14-team tournament that’s a 12-team tournament in a bigger jersey in business terms.
Warning: You will need a PhD in mathematics to follow the ODI World Cup format itself. AI generated graphics
The three lowest ranked qualifiers, currently ranked 12th, 13th and 14th, will play each “Super Series” before the ball is hit in the actual event. Only the winner advances. The other two go home with technical qualifications for the World Cup, in which they have never played a single match. This is not a design flaw. It is a format confirmed by the ICC’s own announcement.
Max O’Dowd, the Dutch opener who has spent his career fighting for cricket to be taken seriously, sums up what it’s like from the inside: Courtesy: X
Not exaggerating. To even make it to the Super Series, the likes of Netherlands, USA, Scotland, Nepal, Oman, Namibia, UAE and Canada spend three years in Cricket World Cup League 2, playing 36 ODIs apiece in nine triangular series held everywhere from Kirtipur to Windhoek to Dundee. The top four advance to the Cricket World Cup qualifiers. Some of them, plus teams from the Challenge League, cricket’s third tier, then battle it out in the global qualifiers for the two remaining direct spots. Whoever misses doesn’t go home either. They get one final audition, the Super Series, against two other bottom feeders, for the lone spot left in the tournament itself.
One X user summed up the whole ordeal better than any ICC press release: “Check how many games the top partners have to fight to qualify for the ‘Global Qualifier’ where they then have to win 2 first places to secure a place in this horrible ‘Super Series’ to get 1 place open in the actual World Cup. It’s not unfair. It’s inhumane!”
three years. Dozens of matches. Several qualification layers deep. And the reward for getting through it all is another mini-league where only one of you can go through a door you thought you’d already reached.
INDIA ICC vs PAKISTAN OBSESSION
Which brings us to the one fixture on which this entire format seems to be built: India versus Pakistan.
This is not a new anxiety. It has been since 2012 The ICC has arranged its seeding so that India and Pakistan land in the same group at almost every major white ball tournament, guaranteeing a match without technically calling it fixed. Soccer runs the World Cup draw like a real draw, pots set yes, but a ceremony where the balls come out and no one in the room checks the result.
Cricket does not mix with theater. There’s no draw, no balls, no envelopes, just a coffee table that keeps landing the same two names in the same group, tournament after tournament, and calling it a coincidence. That’s it. Random is what happens when you really leave it to chance. This never seemed random.
Even the financial logic is not sophisticated. Reports surrounding the 2026 FIFA T20 World Cup, when the Pakistani government threatened to boycott the match due to political tensions, suggested that the absence of the match put an estimated US$174 million in revenue at risk. That’s the number that explains every decision the ICC has made over the last 13 years. Bilateral cricket between the two nations has been dead since 2013. ICC tournaments are now the only stage left for the rivalry, and the only stage left is precisely the one the ICC controls.
The ODI World Cup 2027 takes this logic and adds another layer. India and Pakistan are expected to be placed in the same group in the 12-team stage, guaranteeing one encounter. If both advance to the Super 7, a true round-robin where everyone plays everyone else, they will meet again automatically, no seeding needed, the format will do the job. And if both reach the semi-finals, a third meeting will be possible depending on how the top four are paired, which has never happened before at a single World Cup. Two guaranteed, a third credible, in a format the ICC insists exists purely to “enhance consequences” in the early stages. So it’s convenient that the fallout falls squarely on two teams whose matchup alone can make or break a broadcast deal.
Speaking of which. JioStar, the broadcaster that will pay US$3 billion for Indian media rights to the ICC until 2027, has reportedly told the ICC that it cannot continue with the deal, citing losses in excess of Rs 25,000 crore. Faced with the declining relevance of the ODI format, the ICC’s fix is not fewer teams or fewer matches, but the removal of dead rubbers and production context for each individual game.
Australian journalist Adam Collins put it as well as anyone. Screengrab by X
That’s the whole story, isn’t it? The ICC can be trusted to expand the T20 World Cup, more teams, more knockouts, more room for the next Cape Verde to turn up and spoil someone’s evening. But throw in a format the sport still calls its pinnacle and the instinct is completely reversed, with the associated nations squeezed into a qualifying maze designed to spit most of them out, while the one fixture never left to chance is guaranteed not once but potentially three times.
Call it context, call it consequence, call it whatever the press release says this week. It doesn’t matter either. It is the governing body that has pinpointed which nations pay the bills and which simply make up the numbers, and in 2027 created a FIFA World Cup that treats both accordingly. Somewhere between Kirtipur and Windhoek, the team had just spent three years and thirty-six games finding that out the hard way. Cricket didn’t have to make that choice. It worked anyway.
– The end
Issued by:
Akshay Ramesh
Published on:
Jul 16, 2026 12:25 PM IST