With the start of North America’s World Cup just over six months away, Spain will head into the new year as FIFA’s top ranked team, with two of the three host countries for the 2026 tournament \u200btightly bunched together.<\/p>\n
The United States will end \u200dthe \u2060year ranked No. 14 in the \u200dpoll, while Mexico sits just behind at No. 15. Canada is ranked No. 27.<\/p>\n
Each of the three North America countries country will play host to \u200dFIFA World Cup games over the summer, with Mexico kicking off the tournament on June 11 against No. 61 \u200cSouth Africa in Mexico City. The United States will play its opening \u200bgame against No. \u200c39 Paraguay on June 12 in Los Angeles, the same day Canada opens \u200bits \u200crun against a yet-to-be-determined team in Toronto.<\/p>\n
Defending World Cup champion Argentina was ranked No. 2 in the final poll of 2025, while runner-up France was No. 3. England and Brazil completed the top five, while Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Croatia rounded out the top 10 in that order. \u200dThe \u200dtop 10 was unchanged from the November poll.<\/p>\n
Morocco has plenty of buzz heading \u200dinto a World Cup year and will open 2026 one spot outside the top 10.<\/p>\n
FIFA will release its next updated poll on Jan. \u200c18.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With the start of North America’s World Cup just over six months away, Spain will head into the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649463,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[192795,2000,299,1512,104],"class_list":{"0":"post-649462","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-2026-fifa-world-cup","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-fifa","12":"tag-spain"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115766439607309429","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649462","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=649462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}