The 2026 World Cup is still more than two years away, but after venues for all matches, including the final, have been allocated, anticipation is building.
The United States, Canada and Mexico will host the FIFA masterpiece.
The 2026 World Cup is not only the first jointly organized tournament since the 2002 event in South Korea and Japan, but will also feature an expansion of the field to an unprecedented 48 teams.
One of those details is how grading will work. Additional qualifying places have already been allocated to several confederations, and FIFA also announced whether the host nations will automatically qualify for the tournament.
Do the United States, Canada and Mexico automatically qualify for the 2026 World Cup?
FIFA confirmed that the three co-hosts will automatically participate in the 2026 Men’s World Cup. The decision was made by the FIFA Council and It was made public on February 14, 2023.
“In accordance with the long tradition of all hosts competing in the FIFA World Cup, as well as for sporting and operational considerations, the hosts of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, namely Canada, Mexico and the United States, They will automatically qualify for the 2026 FIFA World Cup final round of the competition, so their places will be deducted from the overall allocation of six allocated to CONCACAF [North America region].
“More details on the preliminary competitions in all confederations for the 2026 FIFA World Cup will be given in due course.”
There was always a widespread expectation that the three hosts (United States, Canada and Mexico) would be presented as automatic qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup, especially since it was even mentioned by the ‘United Offer’ Package 2026.
Since the first FIFA World Cup in 1930, the host country has always automatically qualified for the tournament. Even in 2002, the only other World Cup hosted jointly by multiple nations, both Japan and South Korea entered the tournament automatically as hosts.
The USMNT will play its first group matches in Los Angeles, Canada will begin in Toronto and El Tri will begin at Mexico City’s iconic Estadio Azteca in the first match of the tournament.
Allocation of places for qualification for the 2026 World Cup
In May 2017, FIFA confirmed which confederations will obtain the extra places in the 2026 World Cup.
Africa and Asia are the regions that receive the most new places. The European and South American confederations received three additional places. The three additional North American berths are, in essence, the three host berths, with three more teams and one playoff qualifier that will go through the qualifying phase.
Below is a comparison of the allocation of places for the 2022 World Cup, as they have been established since 1998, and the new expansion for the 2026 World Cup.
| Confederacy | Places 2022 | 2026 Places | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| FCA | 4.5 | 8.5 | +4 |
| cyf | 5 | 9.5 | +4.5 |
| CONCACAF | 3.5 | 6.5 | +3 |
| CONMEBOL | 4.5 | 6.5 | +2 |
| DE C | 0.5 | 1.5 | +1 |
| UEFA | 13 | sixteen | +3 |
| TOTAL | 31 (+host) | 48 | +18 |
The intercontinental playoffs have also been expanded, from four teams to six teams. Five of the teams will be rigidly determined from tournament to tournament, as indicated by the “half places” in the table above, and the sixth team will come from an additional spot awarded to the host confederation (in 2026, i.e. CONCACAF).
The six intercontinental playoff teams will be ranked according to FIFA rankings, with the top two getting a bye and the other four playing in a preliminary round.
Under the 2017 update, a single host would automatically qualify for the tournament and its allocation would be taken from that confederation’s allocation. However, because there is no official clarity on how multiple host qualification would work, we do not officially know which, if any, of the 2026 World Cup hosts would automatically qualify for the tournament and whether their spots would take up slots. of the CONCACAF allocation. six-seater automatic.
Due to the fact that the hosts of the 2026 World Cup are three of CONCACAF’s strongest teams and are likely to qualify anyway, the expectation is that all three hosts will automatically qualify and, as a single host, their places They will count towards the six guaranteed CONCACAF spots. .
What will be the format of the expanded 2026 World Cup?
Being the first World Cup with 48 participants, FIFA has already established the format for the tournament structure.
In the 32-team format used at Qatar 2022, there was a group stage involving eight groups of four teams each. The top two finishers from each group qualified for a 16-team single-elimination bracket-style knockout phase.
At the 2026 World Cup, with 48 teams involved, the format will require a change and there has been much debate over the set-up of the group stage and categories. Initially, FIFA had chosen a three-team group format that produced a 32-team knockout phase, but it was widely criticized due to its vulnerability to match-fixing.
Instead, FIFA has now confirmed that the format will include 12 groups of four teams each, with the top two finishers in the group plus the eight best third-place teams advancing to a 32-team knockout bracket.
In the new expanded format, the total number of matches in the World Cup will increase from 64 in 2022 to 104 in 2026. With that, the maximum number of matches any team can play will increase from seven to eight, with three in the phase of groups and five in the knockout phase. A big positive of the now-removed three-team group format was that it would keep the maximum number of games per team at seven, but that was sacrificed for the updated version.
