Against whom, when and where. The main questions about the next 2026 World Cup, have been revealed this Saturday in an unusual FIFA draw to adjust the schedules and headquarters of the television commercial interests.
On June 15, Spain will play against Cape Verde in the first match of the final phase of the soccer World Cup organized jointly by the United States, Canada and Mexico at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. The match is scheduled for 12:00 pm, which in Spain corresponds to six in the afternoon.
Six days later, on June 21, they will face Saudi Arabia in the same stadium and at the same time. They don’t arrive at their best. They are a very irregular team, capable of resounding victories like the one they inflicted on Argentina four years ago, but also of conceding resounding defeats.
The Spanish team’s third match will be against Uruguay, the most difficult rival in the group for Spain. The match will be played on Friday, June 26 at 8:00 p.m. local time (three in the morning Spanish time) at the Chivas Stadium in Guadalajara with capacity for 48,000 spectators. The team led by Marcelo Bielsa has Darwin Nuñez and Fede Valverde among its main stars. Traditionally, the light blue team has been a rocky team and with Bielsa they have not lost that strength. It will be the toughest first round match for Spain.
If the national team does its homework and comes first in the group and the team led by Lionel Messi does the same, the two main favorites will not meet until the final. The team led by Luis de la Fuente has expressed its preference to establish its headquarters in Chicago during the championship.
The gala has been somewhat lackluster compared to the Hollywood-style spectacle held the day before at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC to frame the 48 teams that will participate in the championship in 12 groups that will define the teams’ path to the final. The president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, served as master of ceremonies for the competition in which former footballers Ronaldo Nazario, the Italian Francesco Totti, the Bulgarian Hristo Stoichkov and the American Alexi Lalas participated.
The first match of the 2026 World Cup will be played on June 11 in the Azteca State of Mexico, the venue with the most opening matches, which will witness the confrontation between Mexico and South Africa. The final will be played on July 19 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, very close to New York. A day before, the duel to define the third place will be played in Miami.
The first two finishers in each group will qualify directly for the round of 32 along with the eight best third-place finishers. In total, 104 matches will be played in the most competitive tournament in history, with the participation of more national teams than ever.
The tournament will be held next summer in 16 cities in the three North American countries: 11 American cities (Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle), two Canadian cities (Toronto and Vancouver) and three Mexican cities (Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey). This edition represents a challenge for the organization and the delegations due to the added difficulty of the long distances between venues, with four different time zones and the high temperatures that some of the cities where the matches will be played usually register in summer.
The high participation means that there are less competitive teams, leaving the first phase somewhat more decaffeinated. We will have to wait for the round of 32 to start seeing some more closely contested matches.
This weekend’s draw was held without knowing the identity of all the participating teams, since there are still six places up for grabs from teams that did not qualify for the final phase during the previous rounds. The final match schedule will be available in March, once the matches of the FIFA qualifying tournament and the European qualifying rounds have been played, which will determine the remaining six places in the competition.
