2026 World Cup draw: How to watch, start time, teams and how it works

The largest and most complex World Cup is history will kick off in a little more than six months. The 48-team tournament, the first to be played in three countries, will open in Mexico on June 11 and in Canada and the U.S. a day later. The final will be held in East Rutherford, N.J., on July 12.

SoFi Stadium in Inglewood will host eight of the record 104 games, including two of the U.S. team’s three group-stage matches. Who the Americans will face in the opening round will be determined Friday morning when the tournament draw is held at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

How to watch the World Cup draw

Friday’s draw will be televised live on Fox beginning with a pre-draw show at 8:30 a.m. PST. The draw will then take place between 9 and 11 a.m., followed by an hour of analysis and interviews, ending at noon.

How does the World Cup draw work?

The draw is the procedure used to assign the qualifying World Cup nations into 12 groups of four teams each. That will determine who, when and where each country will play in the first round of the tournament.

To begin the draw, the teams are divided into four pots of 12 teams based on the FIFA world rankings published Nov. 19. Team will be randomly chosen — or drawn — from each pot and assigned to one of the World Cup groups, lettered A through L in alphabetical order. Teams from the same pot cannot be assigned to the same group nor can teams from the same FIFA confederation.

The one exception is teams from UEFA, the massive confederation overseeing European soccer. It will send 16 teams to the World Cup, meaning two UEFA teams will be paired in four different groups.

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What is the Group of Death?

Although great pains are taken to keep the process random and the groups evenly balanced, a “Group of Death” frequently emerges featuring three or more strong teams, making qualification for the knockout round difficult.

How are the pots determined?

The host countries, the U.S., Canada and Mexico, were placed in Pot 1 and have already been assigned to specific groups. The U.S. will play its first game in Inglewood, Mexico will open in Mexico City and Canada in Toronto. The top nine countries in the FIFA rankings make up the rest of the pot with the next 12 teams in Pot 2, and so forth.

Below are the pot assignments:

The teams in each group will face one another once in pool play with the top two teams in each group, plus the eight best third-place teams, advancing to the single-elimination knockout stages.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.