FIFA delays decision on 40-team World Cup
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The field has been set at 32 teams since the 1998 World Cup Adding another 8 slots to the FIFA World Cup will have to wait. Soccer's governing body is delaying a decision on whether to expand the World Cup field to 40 teams starting in 2026. Instead of voting on it this week during meetings of FIFA's executive committee, members asked to see a detailed report on the implications of expanding the tournament field. Allowing 8 more nations into the Cup would mean would add an extra 32 matches to the touranment---with all teams playing 4 matches in the group stage rather than 3---and extending the tournament by a week. . The earliest this expansion could take effect is in 2026. The bidding for that Cup is expected to start next year, with the United States, Canada, and Mexico likely to battle it out over hosting rights.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.189 | 0.060 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".