A 90-minute preview: friendlies between 2026 group opponents
Some of the teams that will face each other in the group stage have already played warm-ups against each other. Here's what those friendlies looked like. And what they don't tell us.
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The Playbook - your daily World Cup dashboard
Per-country match tiles, team form streaks, top scorers, and match reads. Daily updates. A subscriber feature.
Open The PlaybookWhat each dispatch covers
Records on the line
Klose's 16 goals. Brazil's five trophies. Germany's seven straight semis. Which records actually break in a 48-team tournament — and which are now mathematically out of reach.
Dark horse picks
Form data from qualifying, head-to-head history, and a decade of WC matchups. Not who you'd guess — who the numbers say.
Format breakdowns
104 matches. 12 groups of 4. A new round of 32. How the new structure changes who advances, and why some favourites just got harder to back.
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World Cup penalty shootouts: who chokes, who delivers
Germany have never lost one. England have rarely won. Every World Cup penalty shootout since they were introduced in 1982, the team records they've built, and why 2026's larger bracket guarantees more of them.
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