The Ringer has published a complete ranking of all 48 teams headed to the expanded 2026 World Cup, offering the first comprehensive ordering of a field that has grown from 32 to 48 and will be played across three countries in North America.
The list frames the tournament around familiar storylines and new entries. At the top sit veterans whose last World Cups are expected to be Luka Modric, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo; Argentina arrives attempting to win back-to-back titles with a squad similar to the one that lifted the trophy in 2022. France is cast as an offensive juggernaut that can match Brazil’s 2002 side in firepower, while Spain is chasing a rare Euro–World Cup double but arrives without its best player: 18-year-old Lamine Yamal, who is currently hurt. Morocco is trying to reproduce its 2022 surprise run, and Germany, ranked in the top 15 in the author’s ratings alongside Ecuador, is still hoping to win a knockout match for the first time since lifting the trophy in 2014.
The preview also highlights likely spoilers and oddities the expanded field produces. Ivory Coast is listed as a popular sleeper, and Curacao — the smallest country ever to qualify with approximately 185,000 people — is framed as the tournament’s most remarkable debut. Curacao’s team arrived at its training site on Florida Atlantic University’s campus in an old-school bus with no windows, will be managed by Dick Advocaat, and will mark his place in the record books: at 78, he will be the oldest man ever to manage at a World Cup. The island side’s build-up has been rocky; Curacao lost 5-1 to Australia in March and 4-1 to Scotland in May, the latter match featuring a late sending-off that erased a 1-0 lead it still managed to enjoy before the red card.
Ranking systems and the preview also single out Qatar as a team in a precarious spot. Qatar, which failed to secure any points in its home tournament in 2022, did qualify for 2026 through Asian qualifying and has hired Julen Lopetegui — the Spanish coach who won the Europa League with Sevilla and has managed Real Madrid, Wolves, West Ham and the Spanish national team — to lead the campaign. Akram Afif of Al Sadd, the 2024 Asian Cup Golden Boot winner, is identified as Qatar’s primary chance creator. Yet multiple metrics — the Opta Power Rankings, Silver Bulletin projections and the author’s own ratings — placed Qatar into the weakest of the 12 groups, and the squad is listed as the lowest-valued in the tournament at $19.93 million and 91st in the world. Those figures underline the preview’s insistence that, however favorable the draw looks on paper, it will still be a big leap for Qatar to compete at the level the expanded field demands.
Tahith Chong appears in the preview as Curacao’s key player; he is currently on the books at Sheffield United and is earmarked to provide moments of individual quality for the islanders. That kind of single-player hope is common across lower-ranked teams in the list, which balances unmistakable favorites with national teams that arrive with fragile but plausible routes into the knockout rounds because the format now advances more sides from a larger pool.
The central question the ranking surfaces — and the one that will shape how fans and federations judge the tournament — is whether expanding to 48 teams improves the group-stage drama or simply dilutes it. The preview maps reputations and records, names likely dark horses and notes historical edges, but it cannot answer how many mismatches the new format will produce or whether the tournament’s early rounds will generate more memorable upsets. That question is the operative one as the calendar moves toward summer 2026: the rankings give bettors, fans and federations a snapshot of perceived strength, but the true measure will come when these 48 teams actually play under the expanded format.
