If you’re interested in buying tickets for the World Cup, you might already be thinking hard about which of the six matches in the Bay Area you want to go to — even if those tickets are proving hard to get.
These are the six games scheduled in the Bay Area for the 2026 FIFA World Cup (here’s the full tournament calendar):
Saturday, June 13: Match 6 – B3 vs. B4
Thursday, June 16: Match 20 – J3 vs. J4
Friday, June 19: Match 31 – D2 vs. D4
Monday, June 22: Match 44 – J2 vs. J4
Thursday, June 25: Match 60 – D2 vs. D3
Wednesday, July 1: Round of 32 – 1D vs. 1 of 4 top 3rd-place teams
While we won’t know which teams will play in those games until after the group draw Dec. 5, we can already make some educated assumptions about the caliber of the teams that will compete at Levi’s Stadium.
The 2026 World Cup will be the first tournament with 48 teams. Of those, eight will come from the Asian region, nine from Africa, six from North and Central America and the Caribbean, six from South America, one from Oceania, and 16 from Europe. Two more teams will come out of a playoff with teams from most regions except Europe. (Here’s a list of the teams that have qualified so far.)
For the group phase, FIFA will sort the teams into 12 groups of four. While FIFA hasn’t published its official procedure for the group draw, for Qatar 2022 it organized teams in four pots based on their current FIFA ranking, which is due to be updated in the second half of November.
Under that model, the first pot for the 2026 group draw will include the three host nations plus the top nine ranked qualified teams; the second pot will include the next 12 teams based on ranking; the third will have the next 12; and the fourth will have the remaining qualified teams based on ranking, plus slots for teams that haven’t qualified yet.
“In total, 42 of the 48 teams that will compete in Canada, Mexico and the United States will be known by the time the draw is made, with the final six coveted berths to be determined via play-off matches in March next year,” according to FIFA.
Based on what we already know, here’s what we can expect from the six World Cup matches in the Bay Area:
Groups and team rankings
The Bay Area will have games from three groups: B, D, and J. Groups B and D already have a Pot 1 team assigned: the hosts Canada and the U.S., respectively, neither of which will play in the Bay Area during the group phase.
Even though we won’t know exactly which teams will play where until Dec. 5, FIFA’s match numbering system — used in 2018 and 2022 — and the known U.S. and Canada schedules help clarify which pot’s teams will play at which venues. For Group B, that means Match 6 on June 3 will feature teams B3 and B4. In Group D, we’ll see Match 31 with D2 vs. D4, and Match 60 with D2 vs. D3, each number representing which pot the teams belongs to. FIFA told this news organization it cannot confirm the matchups until after the Dec. 5 draw.
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And while the Bay Area is set to host two games from Group J, neither of these matches will feature the top-ranked team from that group, also based on how FIFA assigns numbers to each match. The logic suggests that Match 19, in Kansas City, Missouri, will be between teams J1 and J2, while Match 20 in the Bay Area will be between J3 and J4. Following this same reasoning, Match 44, also in the Bay Area, will be between J2 and J4.
All of this means no top-ranked team will play in the Bay Area. The best chance we have of seeing a Pot 1 team is in the Round of 32 match on July 1, when the top team in Group D faces one of the four teams that qualify for the knockout stage despite finishing third in their group. The USMNT would have to win its group to end up in this match, or a Pot 1 team would have to fall to third in their group and land in this match.
Because the 2026 World Cup group phase will have 12 groups and the Bay Area won’t get any team from Pot 1 during the group phase, that means no top-ranked team will play here, either. The current FIFA top 10 include teams such as Spain, France, Argentina, England, Portugal, Brazil, Netherlands and Belgium.
Meanwhile, the second pot might include teams like Morocco (currently ranked 11), Germany (ranked No. 12), Colombia (13) Uruguay (15), Japan (19), South Korea (23) and Ecuador (24). There will be three matches with Pot 2 teams in the Bay Area, and some of these potential teams on the list look appealing.
Pots 3 and 4 will include newcomers who have already qualified like Tunisia (46), Uzbekistan (54), Jordan (62) and New Zealand (83) and other many teams ranked 25th and below.
We also know that FIFA strives to limit each group to one team out of each region, with the exception of Europe. This means that groups B and D won’t have another team from North America, Central America and the Caribbean (three more CONCACAF teams are due to qualify directly, and another will join the playoff).
Also, groups B, D and J will have at least one European national team — although, as we already said, probably not a top-ranking team — with the slight chance that one of those might be a Pot 2 team such as Germany, Switzerland or Austria.
