Against whom, when and where. The biggest questions about the upcoming 2026 World Cup, the biggest football spectacle on the planet, were revealed this Saturday in a quirky FIFA draw aimed at adjusting times and seats for TV commercial interests.
On June 15, Spain will face Cape Verde in the first match of the FIFA World Cup finals, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. The match is scheduled for noon, 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. Hervé Renard’s boys are not in the best shape. It is 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, Spain’s toughest rival in the group. The match will be played on Friday June 26 at 8:00 p.m. local time (three a.m. Spanish Peninsula time) at the Chivas stadium in Guadalajara, with a capacity of 48,000 spectators. The team led by Marcelo Bielsa counts Darwin Nuñez and Fede Valverde among its main stars. Traditionally, the light blue team have been a rocky team and with Bielsa they have not lost that strength. This will be the toughest first round match for Spain.
If the national team does its homework and comes first in the group and the Argentine team led by Lionel Messi does the same, the two main favorites will only meet in the final. The team led by Luis de la Fuente expressed its preference to establish its headquarters in Chicago during the championship.
The gala was somewhat lackluster compared to the Hollywood-style spectacle staged the day before at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC to group the 48 teams that will compete in the championship into 12 groups that will define the teams’ path to the finals. FIFA President Gianni Infantino served as master of ceremonies for the competition which included former footballers Ronaldo Nazario, Italian Francesco Totti, Bulgarian Hristo Stoichkov and American Alexi Lalas.
The first match of the 2026 World Cup will be played on June 11 at the Azteca stadium in Mexico, the venue with the most opening matches, and which will see 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. The day before, the duel to define third place will be played in Miami.
The first two in each group will qualify directly for the round of 16 as well as the eight best third-placed teams. A total of 104 matches will be played in the most competitive tournament in history, with more national teams participating than ever before.
The tournament will take place next summer in 16 cities in 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 long distances between venues, with four different time zones and high temperatures usually recorded in some of the cities where the matches will be played in summer.
The high participation means there are less competitive teams, leaving the first phase a little more decaffeinated. We will have to wait until the round of 16 to start seeing closer matches.
This weekend’s draw took place without knowing the identity of all the participating teams, as there are still six places up for grabs among the teams that did not qualify for the final phase in previous rounds. The final match schedule will be available in March, once the FIFA qualifying tournament matches and European qualifying rounds have been played, which will determine the remaining six places in the competition.