The 2026 World Cup draw has concluded at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The United States will face Paraguay in its World Cup opener; here you can find a guide to all the teams, group by group. For more commentary and analysis, visit our live blog.
The draw will begin soon.
To see the easiest and hardest possible draws for your team, try our interactive draw simulator. It lets you explore all your team’s possibilities, ranked by difficulty.
How the draw works
There are 48 teams in next year’s World Cup — an expansion from the 32 teams of previous tournaments.
To ensure both geographic and competitive balance, the qualified teams are split up into four “pots” of 12 teams each. The three host countries — the United States, Canada and Mexico — are all in the first pot, and each has already been assigned a group. Mexico is in Group A, Canada in Group B and the United States in Group D.
During the draw, the rest of the teams will be taken out of each pot and put into the remaining groups, ending with 12 groups of four teams each, with one team from each pot.
It’s not quite that simple; there are additional rules to make sure no group has more than one team from the same continent (or two, in Europe’s case), and to make sure the highest-ranked teams end up on opposite sides of the knockout round bracket if they win their respective groups. If, during the draw, you expect a team to go into one group and it goes into another, one of these rules may be the reason.
Finally, there will still be six open spots remaining even after the draw is complete. These will eventually be filled by teams who win a play-in tournament in March — four from Europe and two from the rest of the world.
From Europe:
European playoff path A: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Italy, Wales or Northern Ireland
European playoff path B: Ukraine, Poland, Albania or Sweden
European playoff path C: Slovakia, Kosovo, Turkey or Romania
European playoff path D: Denmark, Ireland, the Czech Republic or North Macedonia
From the rest of the world:
FIFA playoff path 1: Jamaica, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or New Caledonia
FIFA playoff path 2: Bolivia, Iraq or Suriname
‘Weak’ and ‘strong’ groups
Quantifying team strength for international soccer teams is challenging for lots of reasons. There are relatively few international tournaments to choose from. Teams don’t always field their best lineups depending on injuries, the match calendar or a host of other factors. And, of course, we don’t even know which players will be named to the rosters for next year’s tournament.
But some groups really can be much stronger or weaker than others. Our labels here are based on the average FIFA rating of the four teams in a given group, compared to what we’d expect from the average strength of a random group draw.
Groups labeled as “very weak” are in the bottom 5 percent of strength among all possible draws; groups labeled as “weak” are in the bottom 25 percent.
Groups labeled “strong” are in the top 25 percent of strength among all possible draws; groups labeled “very strong” are in the top 5 percent.
FIFA’s “World Ranking” measure is something akin to their version of an Elo rating — and the measure they used to arrange the teams into the four pots for the draw. There are other ways of measuring, including World Football Elo ratings, FIFA’s ordinal world ranks or even betting odds or prediction markets. These measures differ from country to country, even significantly. But they’re all instructive for an exercise like this.
Schedule
FIFA has said it will release specific game schedule information on Saturday, about 24 hours after the draw is complete. Pick a team below to see the most current information about when and where they will play:
The United States is in Group D with Australia, Paraguay and European playoff path C (one of Slovakia, Kosovo, Turkey or Romania).
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