The 2026 FIFA World Cup runs June 11 to July 19 across three countries: the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Forty-eight teams, 104 matches. It is the first World Cup to span more than two nations.
The United States is hosting most of it. Eleven American cities are on the fixture list: New York/New Jersey, Los Angeles, Dallas, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Kansas City, and Philadelphia. The final is at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Semi-finals in Atlanta and Dallas. The US has never won a World Cup and only reached its first one in 1990, so the fixture allocation says something about what FIFA thinks the American market is worth commercially, whatever it means for the sport there.
Mexico's part of this is mainly about the Azteca. The Estadio Azteca in Mexico City opens the tournament on June 11 and becomes the only stadium to have hosted World Cup matches in three different tournaments: 1970, 1986, and 2026. The 1970 final was Brazil against Italy. In 1986 Maradona scored the Hand of God and then the Goal of the Century against England in the same quarter-final, six minutes apart. Guadalajara and Monterrey are also on the list. No country has hosted three World Cups before Mexico will have after this.
Canada gets Toronto and Vancouver. Both cities have real football followings, and Canada qualifying for Qatar 2022 was the first time they had been at a World Cup since 1986. Their place in this bid was always going to feel more political than the other two, part of the continental package, and it does. That is not a complaint about the cities. It is just the honest read on how the hosting rights were divided up.
The cross-border setup is a genuine problem for traveling fans that FIFA has not sorted out. Follow a team through the group stage and you might cross between the US and Mexico, or the US and Canada, within a few days. None of those borders work the way internal borders do in Europe. Visa requirements go in different directions depending on your passport. Costs are different. The 2006 experience in Germany, where you could take a two-hour train between host cities without thinking about it, is not a useful comparison here.