By Annette Taddeo, former member of the Florida State Senate
During the summer of 2026, North America will play host to the FIFA World Cup. This tournament, involving a record 48 teams playing matches at 16 venues spanning the continent, is set to be the biggest sporting event in world history.
September 7 – Tonight world champions Argentina will embark on the long road to the 2026 World Cup taking on Ecuador with South America leading the way in qualifying.
July 27 – The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) has held the draw for the first and second round World Cup 2026 qualifiers for the AFC’s potential nine slots at the expanded 48-team finals.
July 26 – FIFA has issued an invitation to tender for centralised media rights to Africa’s 2026 World Cup qualifying matches ahead of the largest CAF World Cup qualifying in history.
July 20 – A survey of fans across the US has found that fans want to see New York New Jersey as the host for the World Cup 2026 Final at the MetLife Stadium.
May 12 – Ahead of the World Cup 2026 brand reveal in Los Angeles next week, FIFA has launched a campaign titled #WeAre26 to raise the profile of the event and host cities in Canada, Mexico and the USA.
April 4 – Alex Robertson, a box-to-box midfielder, has pledged his international allegiance to Australia despite representing England at both U17 and U18 levels.
By Samindra Kunti in Kigali, Rwanda
March 15 – The World Cup will never be quite the same again. FIFA and its council decided that the global finals must be seemingly endless, the 48-team finals have now grown into a group stage of four teams and a tournament of 104 matches, eight to reach the final. In all the competition will last six, or seven days longer.
March 13 – This week in Kigali, Rwanda, in and around its Congress, FIFA will discuss proposals to change the opening group stages of the 2026 World Cup from three to four teams. Mario Guajardo and Alex Krumer, business and economics professors at universities in Norway are specialists in studying formats and schedules for sports competitions. They analyse some of the options available to FIFA.
By Paul Nicholson
March 3 – FIFA is set to discuss a change to the planned first group stages for the expanded 2026 World Cup – increasing groups from three to four nations – at its next Council meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, later this month.
January 9 – French coach Didier Deschamps is to stay until the 2026 World Cup after leading his country to the final of the last two editions of the tournament.
December 2 – FIFA are reported to be considering scrapping three-team groups at the World Cup 2026 tournament – the first with 48 teams – and sticking with the status quo of four-team groups.
June 17 – The 2026 World Cup hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico is beginning to take shape after FIFA announced the 16 host cities for the tournament on Thursday. The American capital Washington, D.C./Baltimore and Edmonton didn’t make the cut, reducing Canada very much to a junior partner with just two host cities.
June 16 – World federation FIFA will announce the host cities for the 2026 World Cup today, Thursday, bringing to an end a four-year bidding war among 17 US finalists.
June 9 – The Canadian men’s team may have pulled out of playing a friendly game last week as the players negotiate over 2022 World Cup bonus payments, but the City of Edmonton has confirmed it is all-in with its bid to host matches at the 2026 World Cup.