After a wait of four years, it’s here! The FIFA World Cup of 2026 promises to be bigger than ever and a lot messier too as we have witnessed already. It’s the time that football fans briefly change affiliations. Arsenal and Manchester United fans could find themselves uniting in their love for the England national team. Someone sitting in India could find common cause with a Brazilian in the beautiful flair in the way the Brazilian football team plays.
But if you have never watched a FIFA World Cup (and are being forced to do so out of peer pressure), worry not. We have you covered. With our beginner’s guide to the FIFA World Cup, here’s how you can sound much savvier about the spectacle.
What’s in a name?
Since this year’s FIFA World Cup — which will be co-hosted by three nations, the USA, Canada and Mexico — will be played largely in the USA, expect the word soccer to be used liberally since the Americans call it that. They have their own version of football, called American football. It’s the one where they don’t actually use their feet but use their hands to throw and catch a pointy ball. But the rest of the world has put its foot down and calls it football.
The numbers that matter for this year’s FIFA World Cup:
This year, the FIFA World Cup has been expanded to an unprecedented 48 teams who will play in 16 stadiums in a record 104 matches over the 39-day tournament.
How the World Cup works
The 48 teams have been drawn into 12 groups of four countries using their world rankings. A team only plays the other three teams in their group. A win earns a team three points, a draw/tie is worth one point. A loss means you take home zero points and a bruised ego.
The top two teams from each of the 12 groups make it to the next stage, which is the round of 32. Eight teams who come in third during the group stage and have the best overall results also get a ticket to the round of 32.
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Once the round of 32 starts, each team is battling in every game for survival. 16 teams get eliminated here, with the 16 winning teams progressing to the round of 16. The same format continues till we have a FIFA World Cup winner.
What a football match is like
A football match is 90 minutes long, broken into two 45-minute halves. Players get a 15-minute breather between these two halves.
But at the FIFA World Cup, players will also get two mandatory three-minute hydration breaks during the 22nd and 67th minutes of every match. This means that each game is effectively four quarters.
During the group stage, if a match is goalless after 90 minutes or both teams have scored the same number of goals, the teams split one point each. But from the round of 32, if both teams are deadlocked on the number of goals, there will be an additional 30 minutes of football. If both teams are level on goals there too, then we head into a penalty shootout to decide the winner.
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What does a ticket for FIFA World Cup cost?
If you have some money to spare and want to watch a FIFA World Cup game, the cheapest tickets are for $140. Actually, the cheapest seats in the US were for $60. But those were for locals and given away by a lottery system.
The tournament also has a ‘dynamic pricing’ for tickets, which is something like an Uber surge pricing, so when ticket demands rise (when the draws were made etc) the price rises too.
According to The New York Times, the cheapest tickets for the World Cup are Category 3 seats, which cost anywhere from $140 to $1,410 in the group stage.
Some seats for the World Cup final on July 19 are going for nearly $33,000 (just over Rs 31 lakh).
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This, of course, does not include other costs like a $98 train ride to MetLife Stadium, or a $250 parking spot in Los Angeles. Or the return flights to USA, Mexico and Canada for FIFA World Cup games.
Which teams are the hot favourites at FIFA World Cup 2026?
Argentina are the defending champions. They also have a phenom called Lionel Messi.
Two-time winners France are also one of the favourites, who will come to this edition hoping to get over the line after faltering in penalty shootouts in the final in 2022. They have a power-packed roster, with names like Kylian Mbappé and Ousmane Dembélé.
Spain are also in the mix for the title. Their top star is an 18-year-old forward called Lamine Yamal.
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Then there are England, who come to the event after back-to-back heartbreak in the finals of two European Championships.
But if you love your football with a bit of flair, think no further than Brazil. The South Americans are the most successful country in the tournament, chasing their sixth world title. But they have not won the World Cup since 2002. Brazil have participated in every edition of the FIFA World Cup, the only team to do so. Brazil have also won the most World Cup matches (76).
Only eight countries have won the World Cup, with six of those teams winning multiple titles led by Brazil’s five.
Which players are the most popular?
Lionel Messi (Argentina) and Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal) are the crowd favourites at any event they feature in. What makes this FIFA World Cup special is that both Messi and Ronaldo might be playing in their last ever WC since Messi is 38 and Ronaldo is 41. Of course this comes with a rider. Since both Messi and Ronaldo are compulsive record breakers, and the current record for the oldest players to play in a World Cup game is held by Essam El-Hadary (Egypt) at 45 years, 161 days old, do not count out Messi and Ronaldo being there in four years’ time.
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