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On Friday, soccer fans across the world will get an answer to the question they have asked for months: Who are we playing in the men’s World Cup?
To help prepare you for the World Cup draw, The Athletic made this simulator. It allows you to play out an unlimited number of draws and see all possible groups for the team you support.
Your team:
At your command, it will let you create as many draws as you want. And it will tell you whether the group drawn is particularly weak or strong.
We’ll start you off with a random draw:
Group A
Mexico
Grupo B
Canada
Grupo D
United States
FIFA’s procedures that govern Friday’s draw are mainly intended to create well-balanced groups (and separate countries from the same continent). Here, we label stronger and weaker groups based on the average strength of all four teams in any given group, as measured by FIFA’s world ranking measure.
If you press the “draw” button enough times, you’ll notice that very strong groups — ones that might be labeled this tournament’s “Group of Death” — do happen. And very weak groups can happen, too.
These edge cases may help give you a sense of the range of possibilities. But note: the “strong” and “weak” labels apply to the entire group from a neutral perspective, not necessarily the perspective of your team.
For your team, an easy draw might mean a breezy march to the top of your group standings and a match against a third-place team in the knockout rounds, perhaps a country like Paraguay, Qatar or Uzbekistan. And an unlucky draw could mean the opposite, with your team clinging to hope for a third-place berth, playing one of the tournament favorites like Spain, Argentina or France in your first knockout game — if you even make it out of your group.
To help you sort this out, we generated every possible group of the 2026 World Cup and calculated the average strength of each possible group, using FIFA’s own measure of team strength. The “weakest” groups are those whose average strength is significantly lower than the majority of all possible groups; the “strongest” are the opposite.
How the draw works
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To aim for competitive balance, FIFA places the 48 qualifying teams into four pots of 12 teams each. The three host countries — the United States, Canada and Mexico — are all in the first pot. The other qualified teams are slotted in based on their FIFA rankings, with the top teams joining the hosts in the first pot. (You can find a deeper explanation here.)
Each group will include one team from each of the four pots. But as you can see, there is a wide variation of strength in each pot.
Every team in the World Cup draw
Weaker teams
Mais forte teams
Each square is a country (or placeholder for teams yet to qualify), organized by pot and FIFA’s measure of team strength.
Here is the United States. They are in Pot 1. To fill out their group, FIFA will draw one team randomly from Pots 2, 3 and 4.
If the United States got their easiest possible draw, they’d be placed in a group with .
On the flip side, their hardest possible draw would be a group with .
Your team’s hardest possible draw might not be quite as simple as pulling the highest-ranked team from every other pot, since FIFA applies additional constraints to the draw procedures. The biggest constraint is geographic: there cannot be more than two European teams or more than one team from any other continent in the same group — and each group must have at least one European team.
It is unlikely that one group will feature only the strongest or weakest teams from each pot; a more balanced mix is what you should expect. But the range of possibilities between “good draw” and “bad draw” for any given team can be quite wide.
The difficulty of all possible draws for
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Now, let’s look at all possible draws for your team.
Here is a view of the difficulty of all possible group draws could get on Friday. On the left side is its easiest possible draw; on the right side its hardest, with color representing difficulty amongst all possible draws for all teams.
A mostly orange chart means it’s on the harder end of all possible draws (with a more challenging path out of the group stage); a mostly purple one means it’s on the easier end.
Explore the possibilities yourself or use the button below to highlight an individual draw at random.
Your team:
Easiest draws
Mais difícil draws
Every team, every possibility
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Below you’ll find a version of the chart you just saw, but in miniature, for all 42 teams that have already qualified (and the equivalents of the six who have yet to do so). Taken together, they show the main contours of how difficult each country might expect its group to be.
Distribution of draw difficulty for all pot 1 teams
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The U.S., for example, has fewer possible “easy” groups than most other Pot 1 teams because geographical constraints prevent matchups with Haiti, Curacao or the intercontinental playoff winners — four of the weakest teams in Pot 4. And the requirement that all groups must include at least one European team makes it probable that the U.S. will draw one of the four European playoff winners — the four strongest teams in Pot 4 by far.
Spain, France and the other European Pot 1 teams, on the other hand, cannot draw two fellow European teams, per FIFA’s rules; they are, therefore, less likely to draw a European playoff team and much more likely to draw Haiti, Curacao or an intercontinental playoff winner from Pot 4.
In general, the possibilities move from easy to difficult — from left to right and purple to orange — as we move down the list. Pot 1 teams get “easier” draws because the opponents they face are from the three weaker pots and all rated lower. Conversely, your draws are generally “harder” if you’re in lower pots — because the teams you’ll face are mostly rated higher.
The winner of intercontinental playoff No. 2 (labeled below as “FIFA Playoff 2”) — Bolivia, Iraq or Suriname — has the most challenging set of possibilities because, due to geographical constraints, it must go into a group with two European teams and an African team.
About the data
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As you play with this comparison tool, it’s worth a small measure of caution: don’t interpret these measurements with too much precision. The data used for the calculations — an empirical measure of individual team strength — is useful but imperfect.
Quantifying team strength for international soccer teams is challenging for lots of reasons. There are relatively few international tournaments to choose from. Teams don’t always field their best lineups depending on injuries, the match calendar or a host of other factors. And, of course, we don’t even know which players will be named to the rosters for next year’s tournament.
The measures here are based on FIFA’s “World Ranking” measure, something akin to their version of an Elo rating — and the measure they use to arrange the teams into the four pots for the draw. There are other ways of measuring, including World Football Elo ratings, FIFA’s ordinal world ranks or even betting odds or prediction markets. These measures differ from country to country, even significantly. But they’re all instructive for an exercise like this, and perhaps worth considering more once you’re ready to dissect the real draw come Friday.
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