World Cup 2026

The 2026 World Cup was the biggest the game has ever staged: 48 teams, 104 matches, three host nations, and a format football had never tried. This series grounds the whole thing in numbers — the arithmetic of the expanded bracket, what recent and historical tournaments say about goals, upsets and favourites, and then the tournament itself, read match by match off the completed record.

The tournament is over: Spain beat Argentina 1–0 in the final on 19 July 2026. The 61 pieces below span all three phases and are left standing as they were written. First the previews — the format explained, the history quantified, the methods that turn a draw into probabilities, each labelled as a model rather than a forecast of fact. Then the round-by-round coverage, written from finished matches as the bracket emptied. Then the retrospectives, which go back over the previews and grade them, including where they were wrong.

Every 2026 figure in this category is computed from the 104-match dataset this site publishes at /data/wc2026_results.json, so you can recompute any of it yourself. No number here describes a match that was not played.