It’s been one week, and all 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup have played once. Here are some key themes that have emerged.
And so we are underway. The first third of the group stage of this marathon of a World Cup has drawn to close.
There have been upsets and dismantlings and thrilling draws and extremely uninspiring musical performances from Future. Alexi Lalas has been there. Always, Alexi Lalas has been there.
But what, if anything, have we learned about the 2026 World Cup and its 48 teams? Here are a few trends.
Soccer games are played by teams, not confederations
The thing about international soccer is that it happens very rarely. In World Cup years, teams that are really good play maybe 20 times. Compare that to the increasingly oversaturated world of club soccer, where the teams that compete for trophies play as many as 60 games across a season.
And they play even fewer games that definitely matter. There are a lot of friendlies and Nations League group stages.1The Nations League is something that confederations invented to cut down on meaningless friendlies. It’s an ongoing tournament in which teams play semi-meaningless group stage fixtures over the course of a full year and then four teams play meaningful-adjacent knockout matches. Teams go six months or more at a time without playing a game that tells you anything about how they will perform under pressure.
So in the absence of data in the form of games, people tend to fall back onto stereotypes and history. Brazil will play aesthetically beautiful expressive soccer, Germany will be disciplined and efficient, Spain will pass the ball a lot. You rely on the history of the World Cup to figure out something about the future.
But if you over-index on the history of the tournament, you probably view the World Cup through the hierarchy of the continents and regions that have won it. Roughly, the assumption is that Western Europe is the best, followed by Good South America,2Argentina, Brazil, possibly Uruguay, sometimes Colombia followed by Europe (Miscellaneous), Rest of South America, Africa, Asia, North America, and then Oceania.
But the first truth of this World Cup is that the modern soccer world is much more muddled up than that. This is a global sport — it is the global sport, actually — even though it occasionally functions in a Eurocentric way. Fans in Sydney and San Francisco and South Afxrica orient their lives around watching their favorite teams in England, and the best talent from around the world ends up in the biggest leagues on the continent. But even if you accept at face value that Europe is where all the best soccer is, that global center of gravity means European soccer is actually full of dudes from all over the place. The people who play European soccer are from Cape Verde and Japan and Australia and Colombia and even Uzbekistan.
So if you look through the lens of regional assumptions, it is unprecedented for a smaller African team like Cape Verde to steal a result against Spain or for a team like DR Congo to hold Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal to a 1-1 draw. Those are Less Prestigious Africa teams, at least three rungs down that traditional ladder from Good Western European Teams.
But soccer games are played by teams, not confederations. And if you look at the actual teams that went out onto the field, DR Congo is basically a mid-table Ligue 1 side, like maybe Angers or something like that. So sure, Portugal basically played one third of PSG’s roster on Wednesday, but over the course of a league season sometimes Angers gets a draw against PSG.
And aside from those big upsets, the whole continental hierarchy has been befuddled. The USMNT easily beat Paraguay, Australia defeated Türkiye, Japan got a draw against the Netherlands, Qatar stole a point against Switzerland. Time and time again, the assumption that the team from a historically good confederation would beat a team from a historically weak one has been false.
It’s a good reminder to spend less time trying to figure out the strength of a domestic league or if the regional championship is tough to win, and more time actually worrying about the teams
Old habits die hard (derogatory)
At risk of slightly contradicting the previous section, sometimes recent history does matter.
To return to the biggest surprise results thus far — Spain and Portugal’s draws against Cape Verde and DR Congo, respectively — they both follow eerily similar patterns. For fans of both teams, these performances must have felt like a very difficult houseguest who finally departed but has now returned and is asking for the wifi password.
For Spain, the unwelcome return was a slightly ponderous lack of goalscoring. This was a notable problem in the period between the great Spain teams of the early 2010s, who dominated the ball and passed circles around opposing teams and won everything, and the Spain team that won the Euros two years ago. In that interregnum Spain dominated the ball and passed circles around opposing teams, but frequently were unable to score goals.
In both 2018 and 2022, Spain exited the World Cup in the round of 16 after simply forgetting to put the ball in the net for 120 minutes and losing a penalty shootout. This, more or less, is also how they lost to Italy in the Euro 2020 semifinals.
The emergence of Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams, for a time, fixed this. With those players on either wing, Spain were able to break up the rhythm of the nonstop passing because Williams and Yamal could just run past people.
With neither of those players fit to play as more than substitutes against Cape Verde, Spain fell into the same old habits again and simply failed to score for 90 minutes, although there was also a great goalkeeping performance involved. It turns out that Spain’s Euros performance was more about having those two players fully fit than a fundamental change in the team. And you sure would feel stupid if you wrote a long blog post about how Mikel Oyzarzabal was actually their most important player.
For Portugal, meanwhile, the 1-1 draw against DR Congo was like a 2022 World Cup re-run. A dynamic and talented Portugal team carrying the dead weight of its aging superstar up-front, making their attacking play a little too stagnant and predictable, and not nearly good enough to break down a disciplined defensive unit.
To take a victory lap after making fun of myself a couple of sentences ago, I wrote in my Portugal preview that Roberto Martinez needed to figure out a way that Portugal could set up in a way that didn’t make Cristiano Ronaldo their most important player. Against DR Congo, they set up with Ronaldo as a focal point, and they drew a hypothetically winnable game.
Old habits die hard (complimentary)
A few other teams reverted to form in a more positive way in the opening round.
Germany, once famous for batting away any minnow they were faced with at the World Cup, had gone through a weird phase of never quite being able to beat the teams that they were supposed to. A 7-1 win over Curacao feels like a sign that — even if they won’t reach the absolute heights of 2014 — they can tap into the mentality that took the little teams seriously enough to take care of business.
Meanwhile in Kansas City, Argentina and the various members of the Lionel Messi Last Dance Brigade sent a reminder: If someone woke up today from a four-year coma, you should tell them that Leo still doing it.
Tell her Bron still doin it lol https://t.co/tVt1aasowe
— ken (@JaiIpose) October 23, 2024
The World Cup is really good
FIFA tried their best to break it: They put too many teams into it. They made the tickets too expensive. They argued with local government officials over security costs and compensation and pushed public transit prices to the point of absurdity. They refused to push against the United States governments’ most draconian immigration measures, allowing fans to be barred from following their teams and players to be interrogated by government agents and referees from being prevented from entering the country.
But the basic premise of the thing, that the entire world comes together to play this one silly game that we’re all obsessed with, is just too good. The players care too much. The fans are too excited. And even if you try to stop Haitians or Ivorians or whoever else from entering the United States, there are enough Haitians or Ivorians or whoever else living here that the stadiums are going to be full, and the fans are going to party.
The people who run it desperately want to stop it from happening, but the World Cup always wins.
Onto round two.
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