Can’t ever rule out Brazil in a World Cup.
I agree, and I appreciate giving weight to a team’s history even when their current form is not so good, but I would put them a step below Argentina (and England I guess, but I haven’t been following them too much)
You could say the same about Germany. True, at the moment things aren’t looking good, although we did get back on track in the qualifiers and I’m quite sure we will qualify. We were also having a bad streak of injured key players (ter Stegen, Musiala, Havertz, Rüdiger) in the last 12 months or so. Of course the current squad isn’t on par with the team from 2014, but let’s see what happens in 2026 (if we make it there…).
+1
Okay so we’re saying the winners will come from Spain, France, England, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, and I’m going to add Portugal and Italy to that list. I assume the USA and Mexico will play all their games inside their own country (unless they face each other at some point) so I think we should add them to the list of unlikely but not impossible.
I’m gonna write Canada off though, sorry.
And a 3-0 loss. I guess it will be at least another 4 years before we qualify.
These are the big guns, but I would also add Belgium and Croatia to the list, though only as underdogs. Or maybe an African team will make it very far this time (Egypt? Ghana?), which would be great for international football. Let’s face it, it’s long overdue for a non-European and non-South-American team to win the title.
How will the draw work? Is that guaranteed?
It is according to Wikipedia. At least the cohosts will all play their first group game in their home country stadium. Doesn’t guarantee all the group games will be in the host country though?
I would also add Japan to the dark horse candidates.
If you’re going to add Belgium and Croatia, I think you’d also have to add the Netherlands.
Yes, I concur, I forgot about them, always a force to be reckoned with in tournaments.
ETA: and yes @Frodo , Japan, maybe the strongest Asian team. They just beat Brazil.
I actually think the new format is bad for England.
While it is no guarantee even with 32 teams I was pretty confident England would get out of the group and get to the last 16. After that you are hoping the draw is kind (like it was in the 2018 world cup where we still managed to lose to Croatia in the Semis) and not like Euro 2020 when we won the group and had to face Germany in R16 becasue they finished 2nd in their group.
With the new format get through the group only gets you to the last 32 and then it is the luck of the draw who you need ot beat to get through the the last 16. We could play another highly ranked team at these point and even if we play a weaker team in a one off game we can lose to anyone so getting to the last 16 is much less certain than it was in the old format where one slip in the group stage wouldn’t be fatal. If we get to the last 16 we wll have played one more game but I am not convinced that is much of an advantage to teams like England.
Isn’t it basically the same after the group stage? If I understand correctly, if they win their group, for example, they’ll be up against either the runner-up in a different group, or one of the top third-place teams.
We’ll see next summer. It depends a lot on the luck of the draw of course. But probably the round of 32 opponent will be a mid-ranked team who England can dispatch with some aplomb and go into the round of 16 on a high.
Of course inglorious failure is always an option, as always, but I’d say another round of not too challenging opposition (combined with a probably less challenging group stage) will help England
No there is a whole other knock out round, the round of 32 that is new.
They almost certainly would have comfortably qualified. Yes, I would have probably said the same thing before the 2018 cycle started. However, by far and away the best player on that team was a Christian Pulisic that had just started his professional career. He’s still the best player, but 2026 Pulisic is much better than 2018 Pulsic, and the gap is smaller.
Looking at the roster that lost to Trinidad and Tobago I think Howard, Guzan, Ream, and a Pulisic clone are the only ones that make a 2026 roster. Maybe Bradley. Starting Paul Arriola and Bobby Wood? Yeesh.
And here we see the hidden security costs of holding a tournament in crime-ridden hellholes like Foxborough Boston or Philadelphia.
Fortunately, we automatically qualify because we are a co-host, so we don’t have the monumental task of beating, say, Trinidad and Tobago in order to qualify. 
I wish the US had to qualify. Better to play games where results matter, even if it’s against Canada and Guatemala, than friendlies. Maybe if they scheduled all teams in the top 10 instead of 1 of them.