Everything to Know About World Cup 2026: Teams, Hosts, Where and Who to Watch
We’ve been hearing about the 2026 FIFA World Cup for months, and it’s now upon us.
There are more teams and host stadiums than ever this year, and tickets to World Cup matches have been a hot topic since they were first released, with many fans priced out, and transportation to the US and to the stadiums themselves becoming a barrier to attending for some. That’s why you’ll find me watching every match from the comfort of my home (or maybe at a local park or bar for a watch party) when the tournament begins on June 11.
Matches will run daily until July 19, and this year, you’ll be able to watch them all on Fox and FS1. You can catch every single match in Spanish on Peacock, too.
Here’s a primer on everything else you might be wondering about this year’s World Cup, including which teams are playing, where matches will be held and who’s headlining the first-ever World Cup final halftime show.
When is the 2026 FIFA World Cup?
This year’s World Cup begins on June 11 with a match between co-host Mexico and South Africa, to be held in Mexico City.
There will be 48 teams playing in 104 matches over a little over a month. The championship final is scheduled to take place on Sunday, July 19, at New York New Jersey Stadium (aka MetLife Stadium), home to the NFL’s Jets and Giants, in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
The group stage runs until June 27, after which the knockout stage begins. The Round of 32 will run from June 28-July 3, the Round of 16 is July 4-7, the quarterfinals are July 9-11 and the semifinals are July 14 and 15.
Moondes/Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNET
Which teams are in the 2026 FIFA World Cup?
This year’s World Cup is the biggest ever in terms of the number of clubs participating in the tournament. In a FIFA first, 48 teams have qualified, and, in another first, there are three host nations: Mexico, the US and Canada. Argentina returns to the pitch as the most recent World Cup champions, having defeated France in 2022.
Canada (host country)
Mexico (host country)
USA (host country)
Algeria
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Brazil
Cabo Verde
Colombia
Congo DR
Côte d’Ivoire
Croatia
Curaçao
Czechia
Ecuador
Egypt
England
France
Germany
Ghana
Haiti
Iran
Iraq
Jan
Jordan
Morocco
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Panama
Paraguay
Portugal
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Scotland
Senegal
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Tunisia
Türkiye
Uruguay
Uzbekistan
Many fans will be tuning in to see Cristiano Ronaldo in his sixth World Cup tournament, but he’s not the only player deemed a favorite this year.
Vitalii Vitleo/
Players to watch at the 2026 World Cup
The top-ranked teams heading into the 2026 World Cup (in order) are France, Spain, Argentina and England, so naturally some of the top players to watch will be playing for those countries.
At age 18, Lamine Yamal of Spain is one of the youngest players in this year’s series (he’ll actually celebrate his birthday midtournament). When he was 17, Yamal was the runner-up for the 2025 Ballon d’Or, the award recognizing the best international footballer of the year, losing to Ousmane Dembélé of France. Dembélé is headed into his third World Cup and is fresh off a UEFA Champions League win with his club, Paris Saint-Germain.
Lionel Messi, one of the most famous soccer players in the world, returns this year as ctain of the Argentina team (aka La Albiceleste), in what will likely be his final World Cup. Messi, 39, along with Cristiano Ronaldo, 41, are two of the oldest players in the tournament and among the most respected and renowned players of all time. Even if Messi doesn’t win a second consecutive title, his World Cup performances will likely be a highlight of the tournament.
Harry Kane, ctain of England, will also be one to watch. Kane is England’s all-time top goal scorer and indeed one of the top scorers in every league he has played in, with a staggering 61 goals in 51 games for Bayern Munich this season. However, a World Cup title has eluded Kane and England — they last won in 1966.
Fans will also have their eyes on Jan’s Kaishū Sano, whose performance as a midfielder in the Bundesliga has earned him praise, and Nico Paz, a midfielder on Argentina’s squad, known for his footwork and creative play. Paz, 21, is making history as the first player on the Argentina national team to play in the World Cup without ever having played for any of the nation’s football clubs.
Other names who could go big include Australia’s Nestory Irankunda and Ardon Jashari, a midfielder on Switzerland’s team who has made waves at AC Milan.
Who’s performing at the FIFA World Cup final halftime show?
While we don’t yet know which teams will play in this year’s World Cup final match, we do know there will be world-class entertainment at halftime.
With a roster that rivals some of the best Super Bowl halftime shows, the 2026 World Cup final show will be headlined by Madonna, Shakira and BTS. Having just one of these global artists would have been impressive, but all three will share the stage on Sunday, July 19, at MetLife Stadium. If those names weren’t enough, the performance will be curated by Chris Martin of Coldplay and, yes, I’ve buried the lede:the Muppets will also pear.
Host cities at World Cup 2026
The US, Canada and Mexico are the host nations of this year’s tournament, and matches will be played in 16 cities across the three countries. The last time the US hosted the World Cup was in 1994; it was a simpler time back then, as that year, only 24 teams participated in matches across nine venues. Mexico has also previously hosted twice, in 1970 and 1986. This year, two venues are in Canada, three in Mexico and 11 in the US.
Estadio Monterrey (otherwise known as BBVA Stadium) is one of the stadiums in Mexico hosting World Cup matches this year.
NortePhoto/
One thing you’ll notice is that the venues have been temporarily renamed for the massive event, in line with FIFA’s branding guidelines. For example, Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium is referred to as Atlanta Stadium, while Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, is now Boston Stadium.
A statement on the FIFA websiteexplains: “All listed stadium cacities are preliminary at this stage and subject to change before the tournament. Stadium official names for the FIFA World Cup 2026 have been matched with Host City names and may differ from the common designation used locally.”
Toronto Stadium (BMO Field)
BC Place Vancouver
Estadio Guadalajara (Estadio Akron)
Estadio Monterrey (Estadio BBVA)
Mexico City Stadium (Estadio Azteca)
Atlanta Stadium (Mercedes-Benz Stadium)
Boston Stadium (Gillette Stadium)
Dallas Stadium (AT&T Stadium)
Houston Stadium (NRG Stadium)
Kansas City Stadium (Arrowhead Stadium)
Los Angeles Stadium (SoFi Stadium)
Miami Stadium (Hard Rock Stadium)
New York New Jersey Stadium (MetLife Stadium)
Philadelphia Stadium (Lincoln Financial Field)
San Francisco Bay Area Stadium (Levi’s Stadium)
Seattle Stadium (Lumen Field)
There are official World Cup songs, too
The first time I realized the World Cup had an official song was in 1998, when Ricky Martin’s Cup of Life (La Copa de la Vida) was released. The song was an international hit, and in the years since, the World Cup has expanded not just to include an official song but also an official playlist featuring songs from several music superstars.
This year’s anthem, Dai Dai, a collaboration between Shakira and Nigerian singer/producer Burna Boy, has already racked up more than 65 million views on YouTube in its first two weeks, and is one of several singles on the soundtrack. Also out now is Game Time by Future and Tyla, Lighter by Jelly Roll and Mexican singer Carín León and Goals, a collab between international stars Lisa, Anitta and Rema.
Here’s a rundown of all the songs on the 2026 World Cup soundtrack; you can listen to playlists on Spotifyand ple Music:
Dai Dai by Shakira and Burna Boy (Official Song)
Goals by Lisa, Anitta and Rema
Illuminate by Jessie Reyez and Elyanna
Echo by Daddy Yankee and Shenseea
Por Ella by Los Ángeles Azules and Belinda
Lighter by Jelly Roll and Carín León
Game Time by Future and TYLA
Where to watch World Cup 2026 matches
If you’re planning to watch all the action on TV at home, Fox will show every US Men’s National Team group match, plus every match from the round of 16 onward, including the championship final. You’ll be able to catch 34 additional matches on FS1. Fox and FS1 are available on services like DirecTV, YouTube TV and Fox One.
For fans looking to watch matches in Spanish, every game will air on either Telemundo or Universo and will stream on Peacock. Free streaming service Tubi will also be showing the opening match on June 11 and USA vs. Paraguay on June 12.
Resident Evil: Code Veronica Finally Gets a Remake
The remake of Resident Evil: Code Veronica opened Summer Game Fest, the annual showcase of upcoming games, which started on Friday. If it’s anything like the previouslyreleasedremakes of the games, fans can expect some beautiful visuals along with new lore for the series.
The trailer for Resident Evil: Code Veronica Remake doesn’t offer many details about the game’s release timing other than that it will come out sometime in 2027. If the pattern of previous releases is an indicator, the remake could drop early in the year in February or March.
No gameplay was shown in the trailer. Instead, it focused on someone being guided by an older European woman to the ransacked room of an American. It’s not until the end of the trailer that it’s revealed that the person was Claire Redfield, the sister of Chris Redfield and the main character of Code Veronica.
First released for the Sega Dreamcast in 2000, Code Veronica is not considered a main entry in the franchise, but it’s also not a side story since what hpens in the game is considered canon in the Resident Evil lore.
The game follows Claire, who has been searching for her brother Chris since the destruction of Raccoon City. She infiltrated an Umbrella Corporation facility and was ctured, then sent out to a prison island in the Southern Ocean. She learns more about the origins of the Umbrella Corporation and a new virus, the T-Virus Veronica.
Halfway through the game, players switch from playing Claire to controlling Chris, who heard of his sister’s cture and made his way to the island not long after she was taken to another facility in Antarctica. Eventually, the two come together to take down the twin siblings, Alexia and Alfred, who are the grandchildren of Sir Edward Ashford, one of the founders of the Umbrella Corporation.
No platforms were announced in the trailer. Most likely, it will be available for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series consoles, although it could also be released for the Nintendo Switch 2.
The software update that bricks Pixel Studio is rolling out now, but it could take a while to reach everyone. Once downloaded, the main interface displays a prominent “Open Gemini” button that leads to the Play Store. It also suggests that users try Nano Banana for image generation.
Pixel Studio’s latest update marks the end of the Pixel-exclusive p as users are now being redirected to use Nano Banana in Gemini
The latest one to join Google graveyard 🪦
— AssembleDebug (Shiv) (@AssembleDebug) June 5, 2026
We’ve known this was coming for a while. Google announced it was winding down Pixel Studio back in February and has been slowly stripping away core functionalities. For instance, the photo editor was completely stripped of AI tools a few months back.
Pixel Studio was introduced in 2024, alongside the Pixel 9 smartphone. It was an p dedicated to AI image generation, like many others. Users could input prompts to quickly whip up images and it could also do stuff like create stickers based on pre-existing photos. Join me in pouring one out for the shuttered p as it heads to the Google graveyard.
ISS astronauts had to shelter in place in the SpaceX Dragon capsule because of an air leak – Engadget
Russian cosmonauts attempted a repair, but that has since been put on hold.
NASA directed astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to shelter in place and prepare for a potential evacuation, according to a report by the BBC. This comes after the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos discovered an air leak in the transfer tunnel while docking a cargo ship.
Five of the seven astronauts currently aboard the ISS sheltered in place inside the docked SpaceX Dragon vessel. The ship was designated as a “safe haven” as two Russian cosmonauts attempted a repair. The air leaks resulted from cracks in the transfer tunnel.
The Zvezda service module transfer tunnel, known as PrK, has suffered from cracks and leaks for some time, and has been mitigated by Roscosmos as much as possible to date. The cracks have always been a concern that NASA watches very closely. NASA and Roscosmos have been working…
NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens says that astronauts have since resumed planned operations aboard the ISS, as the Russian cosmonauts paused repair efforts “as more measurements and data is assessed.” She also says that the space agency looks “forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative proach to address the leaks.”
We don’t have a timeline right now. When this first hpened, NASA suggested that the cosmonauts were conducting a serious repair operation today. However, that looks to have been put on hold for some reason.
This isn’t the first time the station has had to deal with this problem, as these cracks have been causing sporadic issues for around six years. Astronauts have performed patchwork fixes that weren’t designed to last. The next repair mission is likely to be a more extensive operation that seeks to eliminate the problem once and for all.
Josh Wardlelaunched the wildly popular word gameWordlemore than five years ago in 2021. Then the New York Times bought the game a year later in 2022. The rules to Wordle are pretty straightforward. You have to figure out a five-letter word in six or fewer guesses (we have atwo-step strategy to help you solve the puzzle every time). After each guess, the game shows gray blocks for the wrong letters, yellow blocks for the right letters in the wrong spot and green blocks for the right letters in the correct spot.
CNET’sGael Cooperhas loads of tips and tricks to tackle each NY Times Wordle puzzle. If you’ve finished your daily Wordle and are still craving a good puzzle game, there are plenty to choose from.
Here are 10 other puzzle games you can play now for a fun challenge.
Connections
I know it’s old but I’m not even going to try to figure this out.
New York Times/CNET
Another New York Times-owned puzzle,Connectionsis a tricky word game. “Players must select four groups of four words without making more than four mistakes,” the New York Timeswrote on X. There are also four color-coded difficulty levels for each game; yellow is the easiest, then green, then blue and finally purple. The game is also similar to the BBC quiz show Only Connect, and the show’s host took to Xto point out the connection. See what I did there?
Strands is another New York Times-owned puzzle but this game resembles a word search more so than Wordle and Connections. This game presents a theme every day to help you find words in a grid. In Strands words can pear forward, backward, top-to-bottom or any number of ways in a traditional word search, and words can also form in the she of an “L” or have a zigzag in them. When you find a word, t the first letter and drag your finger to the other letters. Every letter in the puzzle is used, so if you still have letters that aren’t connected to words, you aren’t finished yet.
You can play Strands on any web browser but you need a New York Times subscription (again, $1 a week) to play.
Quartiles
ple/CNET
Quartiles is a new word game ple News Plus subscribers can access on their iPhone or iPad that’s running iOS 17.5 or later. In this word game, you’re given 20 tiles with letters on them and you’re trying to put them together to form different words. The longest words are four tiles long, and these are called Quartiles. The game can be tough but finding just one of the Quartiles is as satisfying as remembering something that was just on the tip of your tongue.
You can play Quartiles on an iPhone or iPad but you need an ple News subscription (which starts at $13 a month) to play.
Multiple Wordle spinoffs: Dordle, Quordle, Octordle and Sedecordle
Quordle has you solve four word puzzles at once, which sounds daunting.
Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/
Are you up for a challenge? If you love Wordle and want puzzle games that take more brain power, you’ll want to check out eitherDordle,Quordle, OctordleorSedecordle. Each of these word games resembles Wordle, but they add more rows, columns and words to solve. Each game requires you to simultaneously solve a different number of words at once: Dordle has you solving two words, Quordle four at once, Octordle eight at once and Sedecordle a whopping 16. Good luck.
You can play Lewdle on any web browser. You can also download this game from ple’s p Store or the Google Play store.
Antiwordle
Not off to a great start with this Antiwordle puzzle.
Antiwordle/CNET
Tired of seeing those gray, yellow and green blocks plastered all over your social media feed? Give Antiwordle a try. While Wordle wants you to guess a word in as few tries as possible, Antiwordle wants you to avoid the word by guessing as many times as possible. When you guess, letters will turn gray, yellow or red. Gray means the letter isn’t in the word and can’t be used again, yellow means the letter is in the word and must be included in each subsequent guess and red means the letter is in the exact position within the word and is locked in place. If you can use every letter on the keyboard without getting the word correct, you win. Honestly, I’ve found this version of Wordle to be much harder than the original.
Absurdle bills itself as the “adversarial version” of Wordle. While Wordle nudges you in the right direction with each guess, Absurdle is trying to avoid giving you the correct answer. According to the game’s website, “With each guess, Absurdle reveals as little information as possible, changing the secret word if need be.” Absurdle doesn’t pick a word at the beginning of the game for the player to guess. Instead, it uses the player’s guesses to narrow its list of words down in an effort to make the game go as long as possible. The final word might not even include a yellow letter from one of your earlier guesses either. You can guess as many times as you want, which is helpful, and the best score you can get is four. Have fun!
Steam Machine and Steam Frame are coming this summer – Engadget
Valve
The Steam Machine and Steam Frame are officially scheduled to land in summer 2026, Valve announced today in a blog post about something else entirely. There’s still no word on how much either bit of hardware will cost.
Valve made the big release-window reveal in a developer-focusedblog post about the Steam Machine and Steam Frame being included in the Verified program, which launched with the Steam Deck and lets players know how well games will run on the handheld. The Verified program will do the same for the Steam Machine and Steam Frame hardware. For Steam Machine, the requirements for a Verified badge are nearly identical to the Steam Deck’s, Valve says.
As for the Steam Frame, Valve writes, “Like Steam Deck Verified, the Steam Frame Standalone Verified program focuses on the experience customers will have with the device out-of-the-box in standalone mode. The criteria are similar as well: the default grhics configuration needs to perform well, text and UI elements need to be clear and legible on the built-in display, and the default controller configuration needs to work well with the Steam Frame Controllers. The same test criteria ply to both VR titles and non-VR titles.”
There’s been plenty of speculation about the cost of Valve’s hardware since it announced the Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller in November 2025. The ongoing global memory shortage has dramatically driven up prices of gaming consoles and PCs in 2026, and there’s no clear end in sight. Xbox, Sony and Valve raised prices in their existing hardware lines this year by hundreds of dollars each, with Valve upping the price of the Steam Deck by as much as $300. Nintendo has plans to follow suit with the Switch 2.
The Steam Controller hit the market on May 4 and it costs $99, which is a perfectly reasonable price for a well-crafted not-PC controller with touchpads. Of course, it only has kilobytes of RAM, and instead runs on cool htic screams.
In additional Steam news, the Store homepage looks a little different today. Valve rolled out a refresh that aims to organize the chaos of all those game ads with wider, higher-res images and more quick-look details at your fingertips. Wishlist and DLC sections have returned, and there’s a new Personal Calendar with even more game promos based on your play history. The Discovery Queue is now viewable in an overlay and infinite scroll has been engaged on the homepage.
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