Thursday 11th June 2026, 8pm KO to Sunday 19th July 2026, 8pm KO
Everything gets underway in Mexico City on Thursday 11th June at 8pm with Mexico v South Africa as the first match of the 48-team Group stage. The teams are in 12 groups of 4 playing to qualify for the last 32 on either highest points, best goal differences and/or total goals scored. For all fixtures throughout the competition see Links #1 or #3 below.
England is in Group L, the 12th group, along with Croatia, Ghana and Panama with matches on the 17th, 23rd and 27th June against them respectively.
The top two teams from each of the 12 groups automatically go to the knock-out stage joined by the 8 best third-place teams. Together they make up the full “Round of 32” first knock-out stage which is played from Sunday 28th June through to Sunday 4th July. Link #2 below has the last 32 qualification rules.
The “Round of 16” starts on the Saturday 4th July and ends on the Tuesday 7th followed by the quarter finals on Thursday 9th, Friday 10th, Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th.
The semis are Tuesday 14th, KO 8pm, and Wednesday 15th, KO 8pm. The play-off for third place is on Saturday 18th KO 10pm and the final on Sunday 19th July starting at 8pm.
While everyone will have their favourite online resource for the latest scores, draws, news and gossip here are the links to the official FIFA pages covering much the same bar the gossip (each link opens in a new tab):
1) FIFA All matches – Fixtures (of those to play) and Scores (of those played)
2) FIFA All Groups’ points tables + the rules to be in the 32 which go to the knock-out stages
3) FIFA’s Entire Match Schedule PDF Download
Note – each match of the tournament has a serial number being the nth one played. That is done so that the pre-competition fixtures for the knock-out stages can specify meaningful things like “Winner of Group L vs 3rd-place team from Groups EHIJK” or “the winner of match #80 vs winner of match #79”.
Once the competition is underway the upcoming fixtures for the knock-out phase will start to make sense as proper team names can appear in the schedules instead of these current placeholder references.