By Alex Mwangi, MercatoWire tournament desk, Nairobi.
Mexico City, on a Thursday evening in June, smells of street corn and diesel and the particular static that comes before something large. In four days, Estadio Banorte will hold the opening fixture of the 2026 World Cup, Mexico against South Africa, and the city has been carrying that fact for weeks now, the way cities carry these things when the tournament belongs to them even fractionally, even as one host among three.
This is the first World Cup held across three nations. Sixteen cities. Twelve groups. 48 teams. 104 matches over 39 days. When FIFA announced the expanded format in 2017, the criticism was straightforward: more teams dilutes quality, the group stage becomes formality, the tournament loses its edge. Nine years later, on the eve of the first edition under this structure, the criticism looks correct and also beside the point. Football does not hold still for purists.
The format is new in every meaningful sense. Twelve groups of four, where previously there were eight groups of four. Two automatic qualifiers from each group, as before. Then the wrinkle: the best eight third-placed teams also advance, to complete a round of 32. That is the number that changes everything. Not 16 teams in the last 16 but 32 teams in a round of 32, a knockout bracket borrowed from no prior World Cup, requiring teams and fans and broadcasters to hold a different map in their heads. Eight of twelve third-placed finishers survive. Four do not. The group stage, then, is not quite group stage as it has been understood before.
The 48 teams span six confederations and carry football cultures that have almost nothing in common with one another except the ball and the desire to keep it moving forward. France, ranked first in the world, will play in Group I in the northeastern United States. Argentina, the holders, begin in Kansas City, at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, against Algeria on 17 June. England, ranked fourth, open against Croatia on 17 June in Arlington, Texas, a fixture carrying its own sedimented weight from 2018 and 2021, both of which the people who follow England closely would prefer not to think about right now.
I grew up watching the World Cup on borrowed televisions in Mombasa. The 1994 tournament, the one America last hosted, came through a single antenna and a screen that turned green at the edges. What I remember is not the football in any technical sense but the feeling that the world was folding in on itself in thirty-two directions simultaneously, each direction a country.
Thirty-two years later, America hosts again, and the improbability has scaled. Forty-eight countries. Ninety countries failed to qualify. Haiti is here; Curaçao is here; the United States is here as a host nation with genuine footballing expectations rather than the hospitable tournament organiser of 1994.
This is the anthropological fact of the expanded World Cup, the thing the format critics tend to underweight: the tournament has become global in a way that the old 32-team structure never quite achieved. When Curaçao lines up in Group E, they represent a Caribbean football culture whose national identity is not reducible to the FIFA coefficient. When South Africa walks out at Estadio Banorte on 11 June, the opening night, the fixture kicks off at 19:00 local time in Mexico City, which is to say 14:00 in London, 07:00 in Los Angeles, 22:30 in Nairobi.
What America gives this tournament is scale and infrastructure and the particular quality of American stadium events, which is that they are produced. The lighting is designed. The sound is engineered. The pre-match entertainment is choreographed by people whose professional lives have been spent choreographing Super Bowl halftime shows and NBA Finals arrivals. Whether this is good for football is a question worth holding without answering, because the football will either survive the production or be consumed by it, and we will not know which until the ball is moving.
The Estadio Banorte on 11 June, against South Africa, will be the beginning. Not the beginning of a football answer but the beginning of a question that 48 nations are posing simultaneously, which is: can football, in this form, at this scale, in this country, still be what it is when it is at its best?
The history of the World Cup suggests the answer is yes. It has survived expansions before. It survived moving from 16 to 24 to 32 teams. It has survived host nations that understood football at depth and host nations that were still learning the grammar. What the tournament has never survived is indifference, and whatever America is in 2026, it is not indifferent. The cities that are hosting, the crowds that are forming, the 48 nations that have qualified through the brutal arithmetic of regional qualification: none of them arrived here by accident.
The first ball is four days away. It rolls at Estadio Banorte, Mexico City, in the June heat.