Curling Plans Major World Championship Overhaul After 2026 Olympics

When curling appears on television from the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics next year, it will look familiar: granite stones gliding over pebbled ice, teammates sweeping furiously, and millions of casual viewers wondering why they only seem to watch this sport every four years.

Behind that familiar image, the sport is preparing for its most sweeping change to its competitive structure in a generation.

A new three-tier world championship ladder

Beginning with the 2026–27 season, the sport’s global governing body, World Curling, will expand its men’s and women’s world championships from 13 to 18 teams and introduce a tiered system of B and C divisions linked by promotion and relegation. The overhaul is designed to widen access for new countries, reshape how teams qualify for the Olympics and, crucially, create a more robust calendar of events outside the Games themselves.

“We’re trying to figure out how to make curling more accessible to a broader audience in between the Olympics,” World Curling president Beau Welling said in an interview published Jan. 5. He described the sport’s exposure as a cycle of “peaks and troughs of interest in a pattern pegged to the Games” and said the new structure is part of an effort to change that.

The reforms, first approved by members in October 2025, will take full effect after the 2026 world championships, the last to be played under the current 13-team format and traditional continental qualification system.

How the expanded top tier will work

Under the new model, the top tier will be the 18-team World Men’s and World Women’s Curling Championships, played each spring. Instead of a single round robin, the field will be split into two pools of nine.

• Each team plays all other teams in its pool.
• The top three from each pool advance.
• The pool winners go directly to the semifinals.
• Second- and third-place teams cross over for qualification games (second from one pool vs. third from the other) to decide the remaining semifinal spots.

The top 14 teams in the final standings will retain their place in the following season’s championship. The bottom four will be relegated.

B Division in November, C divisions at season’s end

Those relegated teams will drop into a new World Curling Championships B Division, to be held every November. That event will feature 16 men’s teams and 16 women’s teams. The stakes will be clear:

• The top four B Division teams will be promoted into the main world championships later that season.
• The bottom four will be relegated again, this time to regional C divisions.

At the base of the new pyramid, World Curling is creating C divisions split into two regions: Europe and Pan-Continental, the latter covering the Americas, Asia and Oceania. The C events, staged at the end of the season, will include the teams relegated from B as well as any other member associations seeking to compete at world level. The top two C teams from each region will move up to the following season’s B Division.

In effect, the world championships will become a three-tier ladder with 34 places per gender—18 in A, 16 in B—and a broader pool of emerging nations able to enter through C.

Why World Curling says it’s needed

World Curling has framed the change as a response to two decades of steady membership growth. The federation listed 28 member associations when curling returned to the Olympic program at the 1998 Nagano Games. It now counts more than 70, with recent additions including Armenia, Argentina and several countries in Africa and Asia.

In public statements and technical documents released with the reform, World Curling described the overhaul as a “comprehensive” effort to create a “clearer, fairer and more inclusive global competition system with more opportunities for teams at all levels.”

Welling has linked that language to specific development goals. The new structure, he said, “opens up curling to everyone, but also to newer, non-traditional countries,” and offers a more transparent route to Olympic qualification points than the previous mix of regional championships and one-off qualifying events.

Knock-on effects: regional events and juniors

The shift will also sweep away some of the sport’s newer experiments. The Pan Continental Curling Championships, launched in 2022 to merge the Americas Challenge and Pacific-Asia Curling Championships into a single qualifier, will stage their final edition in 2025 in Minnesota. European B and C Championships will be discontinued, with the new world-level C divisions taking their place. The top European event will survive as a standalone 10-team championship but will no longer determine which nations advance to worlds.

The reform reaches into the junior ranks as well. Starting in 2027, the World Junior Curling Championships will expand from 10 to 16 teams per gender, adopt a two-pool system and introduce their own junior B division. All junior games will be shortened from 10 ends to eight, mirroring the senior ladder and intended to bring more young athletes into top-level play.

Media strategy and the push for year-round attention

While Welling and federation officials emphasize inclusion, the new structure also dovetails with World Curling’s media strategy. After the collapse of streaming partner Recast in 2023, the organization rebuilt its direct-to-consumer platform and relaunched The Curling Channel in 2024 with a new technology partner. It now sells full-season and half-season passes that promise more than 600 live games in 2025–26.

More divisions and more teams mean more inventory to sell. B Division events in November and C tournaments at the tail end of the season will add dozens of games per gender to the calendar. Promotion and relegation battles may help package those events as must-watch for dedicated fans.

“Getting eyeballs on curling is a fundamentally important strategic goal,” Welling said, noting that the federation wants its own content “not just every four years.”

That shift has not been universally smooth. Some fans have complained on social media and message boards about the move away from largely free YouTube streams toward a paywalled platform, as well as about technical issues with early broadcasts. World Curling has acknowledged those problems and said it is working with its provider to improve reliability.

Opportunity—and pressure—for emerging nations

For national federations, especially in developing programs, the new ladder offers both opportunity and strain.

Under the old system, many newer members from countries such as Brazil, Nigeria or the Philippines saw their progress limited to regional B or C events. Now, in theory, a team can start in the C Division, win promotion to B, finish in the top four there and reach the main world championships, where results count toward Olympic qualification.

In practice, that climb may require funding and infrastructure many federations do not yet have. Teams could face three separate international trips in a single season: C Division in the spring, B Division in November, and, for those who succeed, the world championships in March or April. Those events must fit around national championships, training schedules and, in some cases, emerging professional circuits.

There are also questions about competitive balance. Expanding the main world championships to 18 teams could lead to one-sided scores in the early years, as newer or weaker teams adjust to the level of play. Supporters of the change argue that exposure is necessary for those countries to improve and that the pool structure will keep medal contention concentrated among the top teams.

Expansion vs. sustainability

The federation faces a broader tension between expansion and its environmental pledges. In 2025, World Curling announced a sustainability strategy targeting infrastructure, ice-making and the carbon footprint of its event calendar through 2034. Adding new tournaments and long-haul travel for more teams could work against those goals unless events are clustered regionally or scheduled to minimize trips.

A bid to be more than an Olympic sport

None of those challenges alter the central calculation driving the reform: curling’s leaders believe the sport needs to be less dependent on the Olympics to define its identity and audience.

Curling’s modern Olympic story began with a one-off appearance at the 1924 Chamonix Games, followed by seven decades off the program before its full return in Nagano in 1998. Since then, it has been one of the Winter Games’ surprise television hits, but it also shares the concerns of other niche sports about event quotas and shifting priorities at the International Olympic Committee.

By turning the world championships into a multi-tiered ladder and investing heavily in its own streaming platform, World Curling is trying to build a global season that can stand on its own.

For most viewers tuning in from Milano-Cortina, those changes will still be invisible. The real test will begin a year later, when an 18-team field steps onto the ice under a new set of rules—and when emerging nations, traditional powers and paying subscribers all find out whether curling’s great reshuffle delivers what its architects have promised.