Canada, Mexico, and the United States learned on Friday which teams they will be facing when the 2026 World Cup kicks off on their shores in June.<\/b><\/p>\n
Tom Brady, Shaquille O’Neal, Aaron Judge, and Wayne Gretzky were given the job of drawing the names that determined the makeup of the tournament’s group stage, which accounts for a large chunk of the games at this huge global sporting event.<\/p>\n
As part of this draw, this collection of North American sporting legends revealed which teams the three co-hosts would have to get past if they reach the knockout stages, producing what will be seen as relatively favorable draws for each.<\/p>\n
This will be the biggest World Cup ever, in that it’s the first to feature 48 teams. When the tournament was hosted in the United States previously, in 1994, it featured just 24 nations, but expanded to 32 at the next edition in France in 1998. It has remained at that number until now.<\/p>\n
With so many teams, Friday’s draw in Washington DC, and the process behind it, produced a lot of information and permutations. Even the four aforementioned draw assistants, and hosts Rio Ferdinand and Samantha Johnson, had to pause on occasion to get their heads around it all.<\/p>\n
It was easier to digest when looking at the outcome from the point of view of individual teams, and from the perspective of the hosts, there was one small advantage from the format of the draw, even beyond the benefit they already get from playing on home soil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canada, Mexico, and the United States learned on Friday which teams they will be facing when the 2026…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-616231","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-united-states","9":"tag-us","10":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115673471592057556","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}