With the FIFA World Cup draw having decided where and what countries will play each other on Dec. 5, the United States is gearing up for the World Cup, one of the biggest sporting events in history.
From June 11 to July 19 next year the FIFA World Cup comes to the United States, Mexico and Canada. As many know, the FIFA World Cup is the most popular and most watched sporting event in history. For the second time, the United States will host the football/soccer tournament with a variety of NFL stadiums in multiple states hosting games.
Those states being Texas, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California and Washington. The cities in those states are Atlanta, Boston (Foxborough), Dallas (Arlington), Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami (Miami Gardens), New York/New Jersey (East Rutherford), Philadelphia, San Francisco Bay Area (Santa Clara) and Seattle.
Mexico and Canada are also hosting some games in the tournament. Mexico are Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey and for Canada just two cities, Toronto and Vancouver.
Although Canada and Mexico are joint hosts as well, the United States gets more games. They also get the most important games; the two semifinals taking place in Dallas (Arlington), Atlanta and the final at Met Life stadium (New York/New Jersey). This promises to be the biggest World Cup ever due to the number of teams participating jumping up to 48 teams compared to the previous tournaments number 32. This was done to make this the biggest and potentially best FIFA World Cup of all time.
The world’s most popular football/soccer athletes are coming here to represent their countries such as Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal), Lionel Messi (Argentina), Kylian Mbappé (France), Lamine Yamal and Dean Huijsen (Spain), Erling Haaland (Norway), Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane, (England), Luka Modrić (Croatia), Neymar Jr. and Rodrygo de Goes (Brazil), James Rodriguez (Colombia), Mohammed Salah (Egypt), Antonio Rüdiger (Germany), Federico Valverde (Uruguay), Thibaut Courtois (Belgium), Achraf Hakimi (Morrocco), Virgil van Dijk (Netherlands), Christian Pulisic (United States), Edson Alvarez (Mexico), Alphonso Davies (Canada) just to name some of the big names coming to the tournament.
According to the FIFA website, currently 42 teams out of the 48 have qualified for the tournament that being, Canada, Mexico, USA, Australia, IR Iran, Japan, Jordan, Korea Republic, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Algeria, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia, Curaçao, Haiti, Panama, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, England, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Scotland, Spain and Switzerland. The remaining six slots will be decided by a playoff tournament before the official tournament starts.
This tournament is starting to shape up to be the biggest sporting event of all time with it holding a total of 104 games across 16 venues in three countries. To put it into perspective, the previous tournament held in Qatar in 2022 had 64 games with 5 billion viewers across the whole tournament and its final game between France and Argentina achieving 1.5 billion viewers worldwide. In comparison, the upcoming 2026 edition has about 1.6 times more games than the previous edition. It all starts with the group stage.
The group stage is the first phase of the tournament where teams will be selected at random out of different pots depending on their performance in the FIFA World Cup qualifiers in groups of four. There will be 12 groups of four with the top two in each group and the eight best third place team moving on to the knockout stage where the tournament will continue until two teams remain in the FIFA World Cup final.
The winner of the FIFA World Cup 2026 tournament will be presented the World Cup trophy by FIFA president Gianni Infantino and the President Donald J. Trump due to the final taking place in the United States.
Tickets are already being sold and are currently being resold by resellers but it’s still a mystery as to what teams play each other in the group stage and what venues each team will land.
The only confirmed games are the inaugural games, which will start with the Mexico National Team to start the tournament in Mexico City on June 11, 2026.
