Post-match: 2026 FIFA World Cup Draw; December 5th - 12pm

Most of those games are indoors or on the West Coast. I count a total of six games starting at 4 pm local or earlier involving European teams in outdoor stadiums in the Northeast or Toronto. None in Miami or Kansas City, none in Mexico.

 

Each game is going to be a bare knuckle fist fight. I just have my fingers crossed we land the first blows and come out super aggressive. Worst case scenario is Australia or Paraguay get a flukey early goal and then go into bunker mode for 80 minutes. Now that would suck.

 

With 48 teams there are 50% more first round matches. I should look at the schedule before spouting off, but here goes…they have to fit more matches into each day, and so they have more match windows, and so it’s harder to fit all of them into the “right” time.

 

Plus one thing I did forget about was that the game is on Juneteenth, which is a federal holiday, so there will be more people off work than a typical Friday. That's actually why FIFA was probably OK with putting the game in the afternoon.

 

European world cups (and Euros) are normally 1AM and 4 AM for me so one game at 5AM I'll live with. It just didn't make sense when you could make it prime evening time for the USA which makes it late morning to early afternoon for me.

 

That doesn’t excuse screwing up the match times for the host.

 

I read that FIFA prioritized scheduling by giving the hottest locations the late games and games in domes and on the west coast play earlier. I haven't gone through to see if that actually lines up with the sites but it does make sense. So time zones and audiences supposedly aren't the priority but summer heat at each site is.

 

Just looking at the 9pm local kick off time for some teams is just a little brutal. When do CL league games kick off locally? It is like 745? Not sure. I Know UFC fights and Boxing matches are normally quite late at night so maybe its not that big of a deal but man, I would not want to play a game at 9pm-11pm locally, that just sounds insane to me. Admittedly we've had Hockey and Baseball playoffs go past 1am so it's not crazy to happen as a result of game state, but deliberately? Is it to avoid heat, or is it to match tv preferences for markets?

 

These are the first two posts I've seen that acknowledge that Paraguay isn't going to play like they did in the friendly. Oh, they played defensive, but...

It'll be dirtier, and it'll be far less risk taking. It's going to be hard to get 3 from it unless we break through early.

I know less about Australia, but I could see that as well.

 

Most games are central european time zone at 9:00 p.m.

 

It's not, at least by any objective measure.

Because there isn't a great team in the group, it's probably a better group to win, but one of the harder groups at this World Cup to probably finish second.

And if this were a 32 team World Cup, the fact that the last place team is better wouldn't hurt so much -- but since you can get out of the group in 3rd, the fact that we don't have a guaranteed creampuff to roll up GD and 3 points on actually hurts quite a bit.

 

Gretzky is pretty widely know as an enormous prick. Like one of epic proportions. I don't think he gives a shit if he can't pronounce a country. Hell, he might have done it on purpose.

 

Our balanced group really has to hurt the chances of any third placed team in it. I know not every group has an easy match, but quite a few do.

 

Both of these actually make FIFA's rankings a much poorer predictor of future results.

The first is just dumb.

The second one has some utility -- the fact that we lost more points by advancing via penalty and then losing to Mexico in the GC than a team like Canada or Panama did by losing in pens is stupid.

But not punishing us for losing straight out in knockout fixtures is a bizarre decision and weakens the ratings.

I do think FIFA's weighting of competitive fixtures versus friendlies differs from ELO as well.

 

Canada's group at first glance looks harder than ours until you remember the third-place thing, and realize that they can simply beat up Qatar, cut their losses elsewhere, and probably advance.

A pretty good team is going to finish our group stage in 4th place, and they might well be a stronger team than Canada, all told, to say nothing of Qatar.

 

Good details here https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6869227/2025/12/07/2026-world-cup-schedule-washington/

 

Canada’s difficulty will be very dependent on if Italy makes it out of the playoff or not.

 

This is perfect. Thank you!

So it means we are likely not as low as ELO #34 because home field advantage doesn't do as much for the USMNT compared with other nations. Those recent friendly wins should have counted for a little more.

And it means we are likely not as high as FIFA #14 because those NL defeats to Panama and Canada absolutely should have dinged our standing significantly.

Which brings us right back to Superdave's "Group of Small Margins" (tm). If we play with the cohesion we have shown in the recent friendlies (Ecuador, Australia, Paraguay, Ururguay), I like our chances to advance.

 

True--and Italy has to win two games on the road in March to make it--but even if it's Italy, there's a good chance that 0-1 losses to Italy and Switzerland won't end Canada's campaign if they can get it going with 2 or 3 against Qatar.

 

The other interesting question is how much of a pro Italy crowd you’d have in Toronto (where there’s a big Italian population).

 

The US' ELO is probably low more because we play more matches historically with a B team than anyone else. Over a two year period, we probably play something close to 8-10 games with a roster that may be closer to a 3rd string on average, and I'm not counting injuries.

The HFA item is true as well, but I don't think the real effect is as positive for us as we'd like to think. For one, while we don't get quite the same HFA ... we don't really ever get it. We'll have a better one in this World Cup, for sure, but HFA is not completely crowd support -- a lot of it has to do with sleeping in one's own bed, familiar fields and sightlines, friendly refs, etc.

We also play SO little on the road that I think the negative aspects of traveling or heavy away support can intimidate us more.

So I'm not entirely convinced that dinging us for playing EVERYTHING at home is necessarily inaccurate so much as it is for the wrong reasons.

We're playing better than #34 right now, but #14 doesn't make any sense given the results of the past two years.

 

True.

Side note: a big portion of the Croatian diaspora lives around Toronto, too. England vs Croatia should be fun, though perhaps one of those humid sweat fests that both teams will really hate, older Croatia maybe more than England.

 

Yeah--3 points would give them a shot to advance but in this format you need 4 to really feel fairly safe, and that means Canada will need to get a result against one of the European teams. They can beat up on Qatar all they like and it won't help them if they finish with 3 points and there are 8 other 3rd place teams with 4+.

 

We're actually a tough team to rate even if we tried ourselves. Between not having much of a home field advantage (I'd add in fan atmosphere even if we have 100% of the crowd added to the other points) we have had tons of injuries and missing players. I still think the turn around happened the moment Balogun walked on the field against S Korea and it showed how hard it has been for us missing Balogun and Pepi at the same time. The Gold Cup we missed not only a couple from being injured or on a quest but because FIFA stripped us of any players in CWC. Wonder how the European teams would have handled that if they were missing some of their best players during the Euros?

 

That would seem unlikely, though. Most of the (surely imperfect) simulations I've seen have generally had the bulk of the 3-point teams without negative GD making the cut.

I'm sure no one will "feel" safe below 4, but 3 and positive GD seems to be the magic number.