World Cup 2026
Round-of-32 opponent predictions
Who will each team face in the round of 32? Pick a team and a finishing position to see every possible opponent and its probability.
Most likely knockout bracket
Round-of-32 boxes show each slot's most likely tie and the chance that exact tie occurs - click a box to pop up every possible pairing. Later rounds show how the bracket and schedule progress to the final; the teams there depend on knockout results, which this page does not forecast.
How the round of 32 works
The 48 teams are split into 12 groups (A-L) of four. The top two from every group advance, together with the eight best third-placed teams - 32 teams in all.
The eight best third-placed teams are ranked across all groups by: points, then goal difference, then goals scored, then disciplinary record, then drawing of lots.
The bracket is partly fixed and partly variable. Four group winners meet a specified runner-up, and the remaining group runners-up meet each other. The other eight group winners each host one of the eight qualifying third-placed teams - but which third a given winner plays depends on which groups the eight qualifying thirds come from. FIFA pre-defines this with a table of 495 possible combinations (Annex C of the tournament regulations), so once the eight thirds are known, every matchup is fixed.
Rules summarised from "2026 FIFA World Cup knockout stage", Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Tournament regulations: FIFA.
Data, sourcing & disclaimer
The finish-position probabilities (each team's chance of finishing 1st / 2nd / 3rd / 4th in its group, and of qualifying) are sourced from the publicly available Opta Analyst Supercomputer. No additional predictive modelling has been applied to those numbers.
The opponent probabilities shown here are obtained purely by applying FIFA's published round-of-32 bracket rules (above) to Opta's figures - i.e. bracket arithmetic, not a new forecast. The one unavoidable assumption is the joint distribution of which eight third-placed teams qualify together, because Opta publishes only the per-group marginals; this is modelled as independent Bernoulli draws conditioned on exactly eight advancing, restricted to combinations consistent with the now-fixed order of the already-decided third-placed teams (impossible combinations are ruled out). Probabilities reflect a single snapshot (27 June 2026) and change as results come in.
Finish-position and qualification data © Stats Perform / Opta. "Opta", "Opta Analyst" and the Opta Supercomputer are trademarks of Stats Perform. This page is an independent, non-commercial, illustrative visualisation and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced by Stats Perform, Opta, FIFA or any national association. Data is used here for personal, non-commercial reference only; all rights in the underlying data remain with their respective owners. Tournament rules text is adapted from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0. Flag images courtesy of flagcdn.com; World Cup icon by Icons8.