If it seemed to take forever for all of us to get to the end of the draw for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, it wasn’t only because they forced us to watch the Village People perform the least of their antiquated top-40 hits.
On a quadrennial basis, the draw inevitably becomes a desperately poor variety program, with celebrity cameos, middling music (OK, Andrea Bocelli was pretty great, but that was at the beginning) and, in this case, political escapades. All we really want to find out is who plays whom, when and where.
What made this one different, of course, is that there are a lot more whos, whoms, whens and wheres.
The expansion to a 48-team World Cup for the first time meant accommodating 16 more teams by establishing through the draw four more groups that will stage 24 more first-round games than had been standard going all the way back to the last tournament of the 20th century.
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And we learned, not even six months before the first ball will be kicked in Los Angeles, bigger is always bigger, but not always better. It's a lesson all sports should abide.
We were 47 minutes into the event before FIFA president Gianni Infantino called Canada prime minister Mark Carney, Mexico president Claudia Scheinbaum Pardo and U.S. President Donald Trump to the stage, ostensibly to begin arranging the teams. But then he allowed each of them to make a speech about the importance of staging the World Cup in their countries. So that was another six minutes before any team was placed on the board. And we already knew it would be Mexico in Group A, Canada in Group B and the USMNT in Group D.
They didn't around to the business portion of the draw for another half-hour after that, and didn't finish until 2 hours after it all began. And when the final team, New Zealand, was drawn to Group G, there were a few scintillating matchups but no obvious "group of death" to discuss for the next six months.
We look back at 2014 and remember the United States inserted into the loaded group that contained eventual champion Germany, Portugal and Cristiano Ronaldo and Africa power Ghana. Or 2002, when Argentina was eliminated after three games because its group included England, Sweden and Nigeria. U.S. Coach Mauricio Pochettino remembers the pain of that result well, as he conceded a penalty to England that David Beckham converted for the decisive goal.
With the top teams stretched across a dozen groups, there’s less opportunity for elite nations to intersect.
We have already seen the effects of World Cup expansion on the qualifying process. In the past, this was always a riveting exercise, and sometimes harrowing, with fierce competition particularly for the positions allotted to Europe and South America.
CONMEBOL continued to stage its brutal home-and-home, 18-game qualification process, but this time with the knowledge that 60 percent of its nations would be guaranteed a position in the field and possibly 7 of the 10 could make it. There were just four guaranteed positions in 2022, with one team earning the chance to make it to the World Cup in an intercontinental playoff.
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In Europe, England – which missed the Euros in 2008 and the last World Cup here in 1994 – was assured of reaching the 2026 World Cup the moment UEFA completed its draw for the qualification process.
In the 32-team tournament four years ago, Europe was granted 13 positions in the World Cup field. Its qualifiers were arranged into eight groups, with the winners of their 8- or 10-game round-robin competition automatically reaching Qatar and others competing in a playoff tournament for the remaining five spots. Those matches filled every FIFA window with the demands for even the most accomplished nations to be sharp and perform fluidly or risk falling into the playoff round – or worse.
With the expansion, Europe got 16 teams guaranteed, and so there were 12 groups in their qualification tournament. England was assigned to a five-team group that required playing eight total games over a period from March to November of this year. Those games were against Serbia (ranked No. 37 in the world by FIFA), Albania (No. 63), Latvia (No. 140) and Andorra (No. 172). England did not concede a single goal, home or away, against these opponents.
France and Spain were asked to do even less, placed in four-team groups whose six-game qualification tournaments did not begin until two months ago.
It could not impact this event, because the United States, Mexico and Canada all were automatically entered into the field as host nations, but each has encountered significant battles to reach the World Cup stage in recent years.
Who could forget the collapse at Trinidad & Tobago in 2017, which cost the United States an opportunity to compete in Russia the following summer? Canada’s earned qualification to Qatar 2022 ended a drought that had begun in 1990 and included eight World Cups. And Mexico, long the dominant program in the CONCACAF region that covers North and Central America, needed a late goal by the United States’ Graham Zusi – with the Americans already in the field – to eliminate Panama and send El Tri to a playoff for one of the final spots at Brazil 2014.
In the future, with the 48-team field, it is all but guaranteed we’ll never see such sporting drama.
There are learned soccer people who view the expansion of the World Cup in a romantic sense, delighted to see nations that have never known the joy of participating in the planet’s biggest sporting event, or haven’t been there in decades, at least breaking through to inclusion.
“Maybe there’s a chance that more good countries don’t miss out on the World Cup, because that’s when everybody really pays attention, and to get other countries that used to never get into the World Cup into it – I think that makes me for it,” MLS Apple TV broadcaster Nate Bukaty told AllSportsPeople.
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Curacao, an island in the Caribbean not far from the coast of Venezuela, became the smallest nation (population 155,000) ever to reach the World Cup. Cape Verde qualified for the first time in their history through Africa’s process that produced nine World Cup entrants – up from five – and one intercontinental playoff position. An island nation with slightly more than a half-million residents, Cape Verde became an independent nation in 1975 and first attempted to qualify in 2002.
“That excites me, the idea of seeing Cape Verde,” Max Bretos, the voice of LAFC, told AllSportsPeople. “I’m sure when the games start, and you watch it’s probably going to get miserable, because they’re probably going to get beaten soundly, or they’re going to be out of their depth or play a very cagey affair. But the idea of watching them, at this point, is very compelling.
“I soften my edges a bit with the idea of a 48-team World Cup because it’s clearly evident that countries that were unlikely ever to qualify all of a sudden have a runway, and those possibilities have opened up. There’s a lot of reasons FIFA expanded – I’m sure a dollar sign or a euro sign is attached to it – but they said they wanted to expand the competition for this reason, and I think we’re seeing the results of that.”
Those results have an impact beyond novelty. What will happen this summer in North America will generate far more money than a 32-team tournament; there’s the potential for 40 more capacity crowds and 40 more massive worldwide TV audiences. FIFA could not resist, especially with the larger stadiums available; 12 of the 16 venues seat 65,000 or more. There is the obvious possibility, though, the early rounds of the tournament will be less compelling.
The idea of the World Cup has always been to include the best national teams in an exhilarating, excruciating, exhausting month-long tournament in which every game contains extraordinary consequences. FIFA president Gianni Infantino tried to suggest near the start of the draw that the World Cup would be like “104 Super Bowls”. But the Super Bowl includes only the absolute best. That’s no longer what is required to enter the World Cup.
WORLD CUP DRAW BREAKDOWNS:
Group A | Group B | Group C | Group D | Group E | Group F
Group G | Group H | Group I | Group J | Group K | Group L