The tournament kicked off on June 11th in Mexico City and ended with the final on July 19th at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, as Spain beat Argentina 1-0. For the first time, the World Cup was hosted by three countries - the USA, Canada, and Mexico. A record 48 teams participated, meeting in 104 matches.
Tournament schedule and format
The group stage was played between June 11th and June 28th, followed by the Round of 32 (June 28th – July 3rd), the Round of 16 (July 4th–7th), the quarter-finals (July 9th–12th), the semi-finals (July 14th–15th), the third-place play-off (July 18th), and the final on Sunday, July 19th.
Teams were drawn into 12 groups of four. The top two from each group plus the eight best third-placed teams advanced.
The schedule, group tables, and bracket are available here.
Follow the biggest stars and your favourite players

If you used the Flashscore app, you could star your favourite national team and players to receive notifications about goals, assists, cards, or lineups. You could enable Player News or Team News in your settings to receive relevant articles.
Find out how to add favourite players here.
Match Momentum
You could follow every match with the Match Momentum metric, which displayed the course and dynamics of the game in a simple graph. For even better insight into the teams' strengths, we added FIFA rankings to team profiles and match details.
Analysis, reports, videos
Throughout the tournament, you were able to follow our comprehensive news coverage. We prepared on-site reports, video and text analysis before each match, video highlights, audio commentary, interviews, and daily updated online round-ups.
All World Cup 2026 news can be found in the World Cup section on Flashscore.
