“It is nearly here. It feels like the 2026 World Cup in Canada, Mexico and the United States of America has been in the planning stages for centuries, such is all the drama that has already taken place before a ball has been kicked. But it is upon us. It would be too much to say the controversies about ticket prices, visas, extortionate train fares and literal wars will fade away once it gets started on June 11, but we will at least have some football to watch alongside them. The 48 teams that have qualified for the tournament all go into it with different priorities and different levels of expectation. Here, we have ranked all 48 from best to worst, as things stand — or rather, we’ve re-ranked them, making adjustments from the last time we undertook this endeavour in April, when all the qualifiers were confirmed, to take into account managerial changes, key injuries and any other factors that might have impacted those teams. Read on, and tell us where you think we’ve gone wrong. …”
NYT/ATH
2026 World Cup Power Rankings: Every Team Ranked From 48 to 1
“Ready for this summer’s soccer smorgasbord that will be the 2026 FIFA World Cup? You better be because you know I am. I’m ready for 48 teams from around the globe to take part in what will be an epic party spread across three nations, including the United States. But let’s be real. There are teams that are better than others. Some will have a legit shot at winning it all. And some will just enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime experience. So now it’s time to rank all 48 teams. And remember, these are my power rankings. If you don’t like them, you can get your own. …”
FOX Sports (Video)
“When an estimated 400 million people tuned in to the 1966 World Cup final between England and West Germany at Wembley, many of them watching a game live on television for the first time, it changed the way we remember football. Before the 1954 tournament, World Cups weren’t televised at all. If you wanted to know how teams played, you bought a newspaper the next day and read a column about it by some cigar-chomping sportswriter in a three-piece suit. Now fans could follow along for themselves in fuzzy black and white: And here comes Hurst, he’s got — some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over… It is now! …”
With Norway competing in its first World Cup in nearly 30 years, the 73rd annual Norwegian Day Parade in Bay Ridge was unusually lively.
“How it works. The progress of the World Cup from match to match is determined from the beginning: there are no further draws to decide who plays whom in subsequent rounds. To maximise the spectacle, the competition is structured, broadly, to ensure that the “bigger” teams don’t face each other (and knock each other out) too early in the competition, and to ensure that all 48 teams have an incentive to field their strongest side for every fixture. The top two teams from each group automatically qualify to the next round. Because the winner of a group will face a second- or third-placed team from another group, the hope is that France, for instance, will not rest on their laurels once they have enough points to qualify for the knockouts but will try to win their last game to get what in principle are easier opponents in the next round, the last 32. …”
While demonstrating against the 2014 World Cup, protesters clash with police outside of Maracanã Stadium following the removal of indigenous Brazilians camped in Rio de Janeiro’s Museu do Índio.
“Every World Cup needs them, those ‘dark horse”’nations who perform well in qualifying, enjoy some success in their respective continental tournaments and then threaten to upset the heavyweights. The term itself comes from 1830s horse-racing gambling — for an unknown horse for whom it was hard to assign betting odds. In the two centuries since, it’s been slightly corrupted as a footballing term. We have surprise packages, who emerge during the tournament, and that’s what dark horse should mean based on its etymology. …”
“King Charles III is pondering a tactical dilemma. His best player, Harry Kane, hasn’t turned up to the tournament because he didn’t deem it important enough to make the two-week voyage. … Sound familiar? Well, the names have been changed but all these things once happened in the biggest tournament that football has to offer. Welcome to the wild and wonderful story of the 1930 World Cup. There were only 13 teams in the first World Cup, or as the United States team manager called it at the time, the World’s Championship of Soccer Football….”
France’s players aboard the ship taking them to the 1930 World Cup in Uruguay.
“The night before England manager 
“The World Cup promises to be the most-watched event in the history of sport. As a consequence, it will also be one of the most lucrative events on which bookmakers have ever offered odds. With huge betting markets already established in East Asia and Europe, and 
“Incondicionales – Unconditional. Few countries have a knottier relationship with the World Cup than Mexico. The tournament will visit for an unprecedented third time this summer. Entire chapters of football history have been written on the turf of the Estadio Azteca, one of the sport’s holy sites. The Mexican national team, known to fans as El Tri, have missed only five World Cups. They have been ever-present since 1990, reliably contributing to the colour and fanfare of the greatest show on earth. That’s the good stuff. The consensus view, however, is that it is outweighed by the bad. …”
“The International Football Association Board (IFAB) has announced a raft of landmark rule changes that will come into force ahead of this summer’s World Cup, with the overarching objectives being to tackle discrimination, cut time-wasting, increase match tempo and improve fan and player experience. ‘We are trying to clean the game as much as possible,’ Pierluigi Collina, chairman of the FIFA referees committee, told reporters. Among the changes will be: A red card for covering the mouth in a confrontational situation; A red card for leaving the field of play in protest at a match official’s decision; VAR to overturn incorrectly awarded corners; Changes to on-field treatment rules. Collina is leading the implementation, while the World Cup’s 170 officials will take part in a final preparatory seminar in Miami on Tuesday. …”
SoFi Stadium workers protested against ICE last month, a key issue in their bargaining sessions with stadium operators.
“Thousands of tickets remain unsold for the United States’ high-priced World Cup opener, with data captured by The Athletic and other sources suggesting that the game is not on pace to sell out at current prices and purchasing rates. As of Thursday evening, two weeks before the 2026 World Cup begins, there were more than 3,500 tickets available on FIFA’s primary portal for the June 12 match between the U.S. and Paraguay. There were also over 6,500 tickets listed on FIFA’s resale platform, meaning there are over 10,000 tickets available for the match, which was initially billed as one of the tournament’s most attractive games. …”
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Garrincha in full flight against Wales at the 1958 World Cup
Mexico City’s Estadio Olimpico Universitario, which hosted World Cup matches in 1970 and 1986, feels less like an object placed on a site and more like a landmark that belongs to it.
“… The 10 players we will feature are the highest-ranked World Cup winners of our 100. Today, it is an Italian great who ranked 19th in our century and has a champions’ medal from the 1982 tournament despite never actually making it onto the pitch during it. Franco Baresi stood in the Amazon Theatre in Manaus. The salmon-pink opera house with a dome the colour of Brazil’s flag was built in 1896, when that city in the middle of the jungle became one of the richest on the planet during the rubber boom. …”
“A non-profit organization which supports people with serious spinal injuries was forced to cancel a raffle for two World Cup tickets after receiving cease-and-desist letters from a law firm representing soccer’s global governing body FIFA. In early May, Vancouver-based Spinal Cord Injury BC organized a promotion which invited people to enter a draw to secure two tickets to New Zealand against Egypt at BC Place on June 21, with proceeds intended to benefit various programs. The non-profit says on its website its key work is to ‘help people with spinal cord injuries and related disabilities to adjust, adapt and thrive’. …”
“For the first time in history, the FIFA World Cup will be hosted by three countries: the United States, Canada and Mexico. The 2026 tournament will also be the largest World Cup ever held, expanding from 32 to 48 national teams across 16 cities in North America. The tournament runs from June 11 to July 19, featuring 12 groups and a total of 104 matches across the three host nations – making it the most geographically expansive World Cup ever staged, with the furthest two venues, BC Place in Vancouver and Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, sitting some 4,400km (2,700 miles) apart. …”
“When Neymar was 18, he made his debut for Brazil as part of the rejuvenation of the national squad after the 
“FIFA’s 2026 World Cup is already surrounded by controversy before kickoff. From sky-high ticket prices and visa concerns to security fears, extreme heat, and fan backlash, critics say the tournament is becoming harder and more expensive for supporters around the world. With the biggest World Cup in history set across the USA, Canada, and Mexico, pressure on FIFA is growing fast.”
“It’s fair to say that Thomas Tuchel has ruffled a few feathers with his England squad for this summer’s World Cup. There was no room for 
“Zac Kenworthy, the vice-president of production at Fox Sports, has confirmed that his network intends to use half-time interviews during the World Cup and added it remains in ‘conversations’ with FIFA as to how they will use the 
“New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has secured a rare concession from FIFA after negotiating 1,000 tickets to matches at the upcoming World Cup finals priced at $50, which will be distributed by ballot to local residents. The 1,000 tickets will be split across games played at MetLife Stadium in neighboring New Jersey, including five group-stage fixtures, a round of 32 tie and a round of 16 game, but not the final on July 19. It is the only citywide access program of this kind that has so far been announced for the tournament, which will be hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico this June and July. …”
“Whilst the FIFA World Cup remains the most coveted prize for the best players across the globe, there’s no greater achievement for fans than completing the painstaking 
“World Cups are frequently remembered for magnificent goals, heroic performances and famous wins, but shock results play a huge role in our collective memory of the tournaments too. Here, then, is our attempt to quantify the five biggest upsets of all-time. USA 1-0 England, 1950 It’s difficult to fully explain the vast difference in expectations for England and the United States going into World Cup 1950. For England, this was their first World Cup appearance having boycotted the first three editions, but they remained convinced that English football was the strongest in the world. Their team included legendary players like Billy Wright, Tom Finney and Stan Mortensen, all amongst the greatest in their position in the world, as well as defender Alf Ramsey, who would manage England to World Cup success 16 years later. Soccer in the United States was yet to take off, and they sent a hastily assembled side managed by William Jeffrey, a Scot whose day job was coaching the Penn State University side. The players were amateurs — some regular first-teamers couldn’t travel because of the demands of their day jobs. …”
From local grounds to vast modern arenas, stadiums remain places where communities gather, argue and celebrate together, including the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, where the United States hosted the 1994 World Cup final. Brazil’s victory over Italy marked the first time the World Cup was decided on penalty kicks.
“Stooped figures huddle into their overcoats as they make their way toward a football stadium. Under an overcast sky, they come in the hundreds, converging from every direction. The stands are beginning to fill with spectators, yet there is barely a glimpse of the football pitch itself. In the distance lie the faint outlines of an industrial landscape—mills, factories and towering smokestacks. This is the scene depicted in ‘Going to the Match,’ probably the best-known work by British artist L. S. Lowry. It captures the pre-match atmosphere of northern England in the mid-20th century. … Football is arguably the most popular sport on the planet, arousing strong and conflicting emotions. For artists, the game offers fertile ground, concentrating into 90 minutes a wide spectrum of human experience. That universality is what makes football such a powerful subject for visual culture ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the first to be hosted across three countries: the United States, Canada and Mexico. …”
“Football may be the world’s biggest game, but it is also thousands of smaller ones—played in dusty courtyards and abandoned lots, remembered in faded photographs, argued over in cafes and sung about in many languages. As the 2026 World Cup approaches, these four books explore how the sport travels across cultures, shaping art, identity and memory far beyond the stadium. Together they remind us that football is not simply entertainment but a carrier of the human experience. … 2. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art. This richly illustrated anthology explores how football has been seen, drawn and interpreted across visual culture—from early newspaper illustrations to contemporary art and digital media. Daniel Haxall organizes the chapters around themes such as memory, politics, gender and commercialism to examine how artists and photographers have responded to the sport across different eras and societies. In this book, readers begin to see that how football is pictured often reveals as much about society as it does about how the game itself was played, and how it continues to be remembered. …”
“It’s set to be hot in North America this summer. The 
Mexico and South Africa playing the opening match of the 2010 World Cup.
Congolese fans in Kigali, Rwanda during the 2016 African Nations Cup (CHAN) final between DR Congo and Mali.
“The once-outlandish idea went from private meetings to the highest levels of government, from Chicago to Washington, D.C., from France to Tehran. It began as a speculative proposal for a soccer match — Iran vs. the United States. It became a logistical behemoth, drawing scrutiny from the U.S. State Department and Islamic hardliners alike. After weeks of worry, though, on Jan. 5, 2000, for the first (and, so far, only) time, the Iranian national soccer team boarded a plane bound for the United States. A few weeks from now, it will do so again. The Iranians will come for the 2026 World Cup despite 
“A month out from the World Cup, Brazil’s head coach Carlo Ancelotti appears, as always, utterly at ease. Now 66, Ancelotti has seen it all, and worked for them all: Silvio Berlusconi at Milan, Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, the Emir of Qatar at Paris Saint-Germain, 
“FIFA has drafted plans to use the MetLife Stadium field during the half-time show of the World Cup final, making it very likely that the interval for the tournament’s showpiece event on July 19 will run significantly beyond soccer’s 
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“Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions and a sustained ‘Trump Slump’ of declining international visitation, the substantial World Cup bump U.S. hotels were promised may not materialize, according to CoStar, the industry’s leading benchmarking and analytics firm.”
“With a little over a month until the World Cup comes to New Jersey, workers this week began installing the grass field at MetLife Stadium. Workers began the two-day installation process on Wednesday afternoon, when the first of 27 trucks filled with hundreds of rolls of grass arrived at the stadium from a turf farm in North Carolina roughly 12 hours away. The venue, which will be called ‘New York New Jersey’ for the duration of the tournament, will stage eight matches from June 13 until the World Cup final on July 19. …”
“How many times will Elon Musk post on X today? Will Donald Trump do anything this week? Hantavirus pandemic in 2026? Where will Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding occur? Oh, and who will win the 2026 World Cup? Welcome to the world of prediction markets, the increasingly popular betting platform that allows users to stake money, cash or crypto, on a wide range of topics. Just don’t call it gambling in the United States because, well, it technically isn’t… yet. …”
“In one of the more monumental shifts in the collectibles world, FIFA and Fanatics have inked a long-term, exclusive licensing deal that will allow Topps — owned by Fanatics — to produce soccer cards, stickers and trading card games for the World Cup and other FIFA events starting in 2031. This will end FIFA and Panini’s long-standing partnership in the space. Panini will have served as the key licensee for FIFA World Cup cards and 
“The San Diego, Calif. area is a major soccer hotbed in the United States, but will not be hosting any 2026 World Cup matches due to its lack of an NFL stadium. But that’s not stopping nearby Legoland California from getting in on the action! The amusement park in nearby Carlsbad, Calif., run by and themed after the famed Danish toy company, will provide several World Cup experiences from June 11-19. Visitors can play soccer mini-games and challenges against Lego minifigures, meet soccer legends like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in life-size Lego brick form, design custom World Cup jerseys and even get the chance to lift the Lego version of the World Cup trophy! 
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“A coalition of more than 120 US-based civil society groups on Thursday issued a travel advisory ahead of the upcoming FIFA Men’s World Cup over what the ACLU called the “deteriorating 
“The mood around England was great last year as they won all eight World Cup qualifiers without conceding a single goal. But they were poor in both home friendlies last month, showing how lost they look without Harry Kane. With 50 days to go until this summer’s tournament kicks off, you can hear expectations being gently recalibrated… …”
“The 2026 World Cup is 50 days away. After nearly eight years of planning and promise, a tournament that could help shape American soccer for decades is near. And among the 
“Fifty days out from the World Cup, France are in ominously impressive form and will go into the tournament as one of the favourites to lift the trophy. After a curious Euro 2024, where Les Bleus went out in the semi-finals having scored only three goals from open play (two of which were own goals), head coach Didier Deschamps used the subsequent Nations League campaign to recalibrate his misfiring attack. 
“It’s not just that the first men’s World Cup game in Canada is around the corner. A potential landscape-altering sporting event for the nation will begin in 50 days. Unlike the other 2026 World Cup co-hosts, Canada has never been in this position. What could happen with a strong performance on home soil? Domestically, soccer could end up joining mainstream consciousness the way it did in the United States after the 1994 World Cup. …”
“With 50 days to go until the World Cup, European champions Spain are comfortable with being one of the favourites. Yet manager Luis de la Fuente still has some interesting selection decisions to make before finalising his squad — and picking his starting XI for the opener against Cape Verde on June 15. From the outside, all seems serene for the world’s No 2-ranked team. Is this the case? …”
“Germany are 50 days away from what they hope will be redemption. Since winning the World Cup in 2014, they have twice failed to emerge from their group — falling at the first hurdle in 2018 and 2022 — but are among the favourites for 2026. An encouraging showing at the 2024 European Championship, where they reached the quarter-final, was seen as progress. However, in the two years since, the country’s optimism has risen and fallen in response to capricious form. What does Germany expect? Nobody’s quite sure. …”
“ITALY is in a state of mourning after the Azzurri crashed out of the World Cup against Bosnia & Herzegovina, a nation that sits 53 places lower in the. FIFA rankings. The subject is so sensitive that the government, via Sports Minister Andrea Abodi, called for the removal of Gabriele Gravina, the head of Federcalcio, the Italian Football Federation. It was, after all, the third successive World Cup failure, with the Bosnia play-off added to similar exits at the hands of Sweden and North Macedonia. Gravina announced his resignation two days after Italy’s embarrassing elimination and most observers of Italian football expect coach Gennaro Gattuso will fall on his sword after just eight games in charge. …”
“”Olé! Olé! Olé! Congooo Congooo!’ In the bowels of the Guadalajara stadium, Congolese and Mexican fans sang as one to celebrate the Leopards’ historic victory over Jamaica on Tuesday. Fifty-two years after their first appearance as Zaire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s men’s national team is back in the World Cup. Among the roughly 1,000 Congolese fans, most of whom had come dressed in blue, some left the stadium with Mexico’s green jersey draped over their shoulders. Meanwhile, others continued to jump arm in arm to the beat of ‘Vamos al Mundial!’ …”
The World Cup trophy outside the White House before the 2026 tournament’s group-stage draw
Scissors Kick 