In a situation where they make it 48 teams, with 4 teams in each group, that would be 12 groups, if they do 2 teams from each group that would be 24 teams, how are they going to handle that? They would be forced to make some teams play more games of knock off stage, and I do not think that would be fair. If they want to make it bigger, I would say 32 is the ideal number, let them stay with that, getting it to 64 would be way too much, and putting extra teams to groups would just make more teams lose at groups that's it, nothing changes, the fun is at the knock off stages not the groups.
In the end, this is just a small cup, a team plays a maximum of 7 games including finals, most teams have like 3 games, and some have something in between, trying to make it more games doesn't change a thing. This cup is already making way too much money too, not like they are not making any money, so they do not really need to change anything at all, feels like it is as normal as it gets.
Yeah, I'm not sure how they will manage to do the whole tournament with so many teams.
It means in my mind that basically the qualification stage will continue a bit into the initial stage of the world cup.
Maybe they will have a longer knock off stage, which is probably the simplest to implement as each stage halves the number of teams, whereas the group stage comes with multiple games.
But I have to say that the fun is in every game, not just knock-off stage. If anything, I think the group stage is more interesting as there is a chance to make one mistake for example, and still win, like Argentina did as they lost their first game to Saudi Arabia, and then continued to win the whole thing.
At the end of the day FIFA will probably maximize money making designs. We'll see how it goes.