A 48-team field gives a chance for regional power to make it to the world stage

On January 11, 2024 the wider European soccer world thought about Uzbekistan for perhaps the first time, when The Athletic reported that Manchester City had completed the signing of Abdukodir Khusanov from Lens.¹At time of writing, Khusanov has not yet formally been announced, but the Wikipedia page for the Uzbekistan national football team lists him as a Manchester City player.

The 20-year-old central defender will likely become the first ever Uzbek player in the Premier League, and his signing sheds a light on the Central Asian nation at a critical time in its soccer-playing history: With the expanded field for the 2026 World Cup, Uzbekistan has its first realistic chance at qualifying for the world’s biggest sporting event. 

A 48-team World Cup is in many ways a terrible idea: It makes hosting a logistical impossibility for any but the richest of nations,²Or in the case of the 2030 World Cup in (deep breath now) Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, some kind of overly complex coalition of countries. and a field of 48 is unwieldy from a tournament structure standpoint.

But one way in which it is a good idea is that it opens the tournament up to smaller nations outside of Europe which historically needed a miracle to get an opportunity to qualify.

This is most true in Africa, where prior to this World Cup cycle, 54 teams had to scrape through a brutal tournament with zero margin for error to secure one of just five spots. In 2026, nine African teams will secure automatic bids to the World Cup and one more team will get a shot at an intercontinental playoff.

But it’s also true in Asia, where the Asian Football Confederation has gone from having just four automatic slots in the finals to eight plus a playoff spot. This creates a relatively forgiving final round qualifying format, in which teams just need finish in the top two in a 6-team group to automatically qualify, or finish third or fourth for a shot at that playoff spot.

And so Uzbekistan find themselves with an inside track to the North American World Cup in 2026 with qualifying just over halfway done: The White Wolves are in second place in Group B, three points clear of the United Arab Emirates with four games to play. If they can avoid defeat in the UAE and defeat Qatar at home in June, they will more than likely secure the second automatic qualification spot in their group, behind Iran.

Qualification would be a huge moment for the Uzbekistan, which has been a regional force for decades without ever making a huge impact on the continental or global stage. Uzbekistan has largely dominated Central Asian football — which is admittedly not saying much because the countries of Central Asia have only been fielding independent soccer teams for 30 years and Kazakhstan plays in Europe. 

Still, in absolute terms, they are a respectable team: 58 in the FIFA World Rankings and 49 in the slightly-more-accurate ELO ratings. More to the point, they are the best-rated team in Asia outside of the four big teams from the continent: South Korea, Japan, Iran, and Australia. In other words, they are exactly in the position of a team that would have had to scrape through a playoff last cycle but might be able to automatically qualify for 2025.

But it’s not just kinder math that is helping Uzbekistan towards its first global tournament. This is also a story about modern globalized player scouting and discovery, and how that helps national team get better.

Khusanov is a great example of this. He played his entire youth career in his home city of Tashkent, before leaving to play in the Belarusian Premier League in 2022. Still just 18 years old, it quickly became clear he was going to be too good for Minsk in the very near future. He was named to a number of “most promising young players in Europe” lists before eventually joining Lens in 2023. Even without the Manchester City transfer, Khusanov’s meteoric rise is a huge success from a developmental perspective. He went from Uzbek youth football to one of Europe’s coveted Big Five leagues in just two years. 

Now suddenly, Uzbekistan had a real central defensive star on their hands, and when he was elevated to the senior national team, Khusanov quickly formed a strong back three with a couple of other young-ish Uzbek dudes playing in Europe. In qualifying, Khusanov often starts alongside at least one of Xusniddin Aliqulov³FBREF Romanizes his name as Xusniddin, while Wikipedia uses Husniddin. II frankly do not know enough about the Uzbek language to know which one is correct, though I suspect FBREF’s data is scraped directly from the lineups filed to FIFA. and Rustam Ashurmatov. Aliqulov has made himself a fixture at Turkish club Rizespor over the past two seasons, while Ashurmatov plays for Russian giants Rubin Kazan after bouncing around South Korea and Uzbekistan in his early 20s.

The most famous Uzbek player is probably Eldor Shomurodov, who has managed to establish himself over the past five seasons as a fairly reliable journeyman striker in Serie A and is currently a backup attacker for Roma.⁴The rest of Uzbekistan’s roster is a mix of guys playing in Iran and around the Middle East, and a heavy core of players from Pakhtakor, the most successful team in the Uzbek league.

And sure, none of those teams are Manchester City, but these are more competitive levels than the Uzbek league. And broadly speaking, getting players into the European talent ecosystem is the best path for Uzbekistan to make the jump from dominating the other former Soviet republics in the AFC to reliably qualifying for the World Cup.

This sprinkling of Uzbek players throughout Europe is a product of the general globalization of the hunt for talent. With the transfer market as competitive as it is, big and big-ish teams are desperate to find quality and ideally quality that is undervalued.

Lots of clubs are still facing significant financial hurdles after the COVID pandemic, and lots of clubs have also managed to navigate some of those money issues by getting really good at discovering and developing talent from places away from the traditional power centers of football. 

A team like Lens is much more likely to take a chance on a promising Uzbek kid making nose in Belarus than they were even four years ago. And it’s more possible than ever for a promising Uzbek kid playing in Belarus to get on the radar of a big European club.

Khusanov is not necessarily about to become a star center back for Manchester City — he might not even play significant minutes over the next couple of years. But the pathways for global soccer talent into the Big Five leagues are more open than they ever have been, and the downstream effect of that is that national teams who don’t historically have players developing in the better leagues now have prospects getting those opportunities.

And the World Cup is a much more traditional showcase for relatively-unheard-of players to get the attention of a new club. If Uzbekistan’s first wave of big European players can get them into the World Cup, the tournament itself can reinforce the link between Uzbek talent and mainstream European soccer.

With a larger World Cup field, and players like Khusanov moving to the biggest clubs in the world, this cycle is a major chance for Uzbekistan to make the step from regional soccer power to relevant global soccer competitor.

Now they just have to finish qualifying.