World Cup 2026 schedule: every stage, every stadium

June 11 — Mexico vs South Africa, Estadio Azteca. The opener, and a rematch of the 2010 curtain-raiser, in front of the most intimidating home crowd of the group stage. The Azteca becomes the first stadium to open three World Cups.

June 12 — United States vs Paraguay, SoFi Stadium. The hosts' first World Cup match on home soil since 1994, followed the same day by Canada vs Bosnia and Herzegovina at BMO Field in Toronto — three host nations live within 36 hours.

Matchday one heavyweights. France vs Senegal in New Jersey, Netherlands vs Japan in Texas, England vs Croatia in Dallas — a 2018 semi-final rematch — and Belgium vs Egypt in Seattle. The expanded format was supposed to dilute the group stage; the draw had other ideas.

June 24–27 — matchday three. Final group rounds play simultaneously within each group. With eight third-placed teams advancing, almost nobody is mathematically dead — track the permutations on our groups page and the prices on the odds board.

A schedule is a staking plan in disguise. The five-match days of the group stage are where unit discipline matters (our betting guide sets out daily exposure caps); the gap days between knockout rounds are for reviewing futures positions, not inventing bets. Note the rest asymmetries the calendar creates — a Round of 32 side playing on June 28 after closing its group on June 24 has a very different fuel tank from one that finished on June 27 — and the travel map: a team bouncing between coasts pays a tax that never shows in the odds until kick-off. Every fixture below the marquee tier is priced thinner by the market, which is precisely why the attentive calendar-reader finds value there.

The tournament plays out across four North American time zones — Eastern (New York, Miami, Toronto, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta), Central (Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara), Mountain-adjacent altitude in central Mexico, and Pacific (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver). For viewers in Central Europe, that translates to a tournament of long evenings: Eastern afternoon kick-offs land between roughly 18:00 and 22:00 CET, Central slots run an hour later, and the Pacific night games stretch past 02:00. The marquee simultaneous kick-offs of matchday three are typically scheduled in paired afternoon and evening windows, which for Europe means back-to-back group finales from dinner until well past midnight.

Why this matters for betting rather than just sleep: line value decays through the day. Prices on a 02:00 CET Pacific fixture are posted while European traders are asleep and sharpened while they commute; the softest numbers of the day are usually on the late games, early. If you live east of the Atlantic, your structural edge is checking tomorrow's Pacific slate tonight. And during Ramadan-style compressed slates of the knockout rounds — one or two matches a day — the opposite holds: single-game days get maximum market attention and minimum softness, so the guide's advice to shift toward props and live betting applies doubly.