Lionel Messi comes off the bench to score his sixth goal of the 2026 World Cup as Argentina beat Jordan 3-1 in Dallas and becomes the first player to score in seven World Cup games in a row.

⚽️ World Cup kick-off: 5pm EDT/10pm BST/7am AEST⚽️ Third-place table | Player guide | Golden Boot | Mail Will⚽️ Panama v England – live news from group’s other gameLuka Modric is yet to find his groove in this tournament. Maybe he will be afforded more time and space against Ghana, if they defend as deeply as we expect.Pre-match reading courtesy of our very own Adrian Chiles. Continue reading...

Two eye-catching last-32 ties offer hope of a winner from outside the traditional powers – Brazil and the Netherlands could be goneThe World Cup exists in a state of perpetual flux. It goes to new territories. It gets bigger. It experiments with second group phases and replaces playoffs for sides level on points with goal difference then head-to-head. And still one of the same eight countries from western Europe or South America wins it.Since Argentina in 1978, there have been two new winners, and those were France and Spain, from the heart of Uefa, their success based on maximising the advantages of being European and wealthy; no countries have been so successful at industrialising youth production, so much so that they now provide the models for every country seeking to invest in academy programmes. Continue reading...

Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now!The Geopolitics World Cup has its North Korea 1966, its Cameroon 1990, rank outsiders to revive hearts hardened by relentless cynicism. For Pak Doo-ik and Roger Milla, read Vozinha, and all his Cape Verde teammates, including Pico Lopes, a defender recruited while playing for Shamrock Rovers from the diaspora via LinkedChat. An archipelago nation with a population smaller than Bradford has negotiated a tough group including two former winners in Spain and Uruguay. They will next meet Argentina in Miami, the adopted city of Lionel Messi, where the fairytale likely ends. Though if not, then they would become the greatest World Cup story of all. “We are small but we have big hearts,” sobbed Vozinha following a 0-0 draw with Saudi Arabia and a quick check on the other Group H result from Guadalajara.Having sat through the first group games and fumed at the obvious lack of jeopardy, I decided my GWC experience would be significantly enhanced if I ignored some games and played walking football for the 60-plus generation instead. To my amazement, there is an entire new football language waiting to be discovered by anybody prepared to play the beautiful game at a sedate pace. For example, the walking football term used when a player scores three goals is ‘a gerihat-trick’. Come to think of it, this all isn’t far removed from descriptions of England’s performance against Ghana. Does anybody else have any walking football terms?” – Mike Towers.Re: tournament wording in different languages (Football Daily letters passim). I’d love to be the first of 1,057 Scots to tell you what ‘knockout stage’, ‘quarter-final’, ‘semi-final’, ‘final’ and the like are in our national tongue, but I don’t think any of us knows” – Peter Storch (and no other Scots).Leaving aside the £116m for Elliot Anderson (yesterday’s Beyond The GWC, full email edition), I’m concerned about a midfielder called Odysseas Vlachodimos being mentioned in passing. Is he the kind of player who gets lost in the middle of games, or does he tease the opposition till they lose control?” – Kev The Poet.This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions. Continue reading...

Uruguay are out of the World Cup again and it’s nobody’s fault but theirs. “3 million dreams,” the banner said high in the stand in Guadalajara; instead it was a recurring nightmare. Divided and dysfunctional, led by a man who barely even says buenos dias to his players, and unable to get beyond a draw against Saudi Arabia or Cape Verde, they needed something big against Spain but they could only manage two shots on target all night, neither of which came before the 80th minute or carried even the slightest threat.Spain meanwhile had just one, and that didn’t carry much of a threat either. But a dreadful mistake from Fernando Muslera allowed Alex Baena’s shot slip into the net just before a half-time break from which he did not come back. Uruguay fought but didn’t play much football and so they fell. For the second World Cup in a row they failed to get through the group and if four years ago that could be explained by the teams in their group – South Korea, Ghana and Portugal – and they had only been eliminated on goals scored, this time the list of opponents only made it worse, demanding a far deeper analysis. Continue reading...

The All Whites are in must-win territory as they take on Belgium in Vancouver.

⚽️ Kick-off time: 8pm local/1pm AEST/4am BST/11pm EDT⚽️ Third-place table | Player guide | Golden Boot | Mail us⚽️ New Zealand v Belgium – follow live with Sam LewisThere’s still plenty of time to catch up with Max and the gang.Feel free to keep me company by emailing your thoughts about today’s match, and anything related to the World Cup to [email protected] kits are way better than those of all other manufactures. Before the group stage I only fancied one of France, Spain, or Argentina to win the World Cup. I would now be comfortable adding Portugal to that list if Ronaldo wasn’t a guaranteed starter / or maintains the form he showed against Uzbekistan.This World Cup feels like a reckoning for South American football. Bolivia lost to Iraq in the pre-tournament playoff, Uruguay and Paraguay have been bad, Ecuador got lucky, Colombia are dull, and Brazil are reliant on an Italian conjurer. Argentina are the outlier and it is no surprise to see how much they dominated CONMEBOL qualification. Continue reading...

⚽️ Kick-off time: 8pm local/1pm AEST/4am BST/11pm EDT⚽️ Third-place table | Player guide | Golden Boot | Mail Sam⚽️ Egypt v Iran – follow live with Jonathan HowcroftHello and welcome to the final match day of Group G with New Zealand taking on Belgium at BC Place in Vancouver. Kick-off for today’s match will be 8:00pm local time (11pm EDT/4am BST/1pm AEST).This is the third and final match of Group G, with all four teams playing simultaneously to see who will qualify out of one of the tightest groups of this World Cup. Continue reading...

Every member of France's starting XI gets involved as a 17-pass move is put away by Ousmane Dembele to seal his hat-trick in France's 4-1 win over Norway in their final FIFA World Cup Group I match at Boston Stadium.

Substitute Pape Gueye scored a pair of sensational second-half goals from long range, and Senegal got a much-needed boost to their goal difference with a 5-0 victory over 10-man Iraq in their Group I finale on Friday.Ismaïla Sarr added his third ⁠goal of the tournament, ⁠the first ​of four after half-time for the Lions of Teranga, who sealed a third-place group finish and are vying for one ⁠of the eight third-place spots in the last 32. Continue reading...

Ousmane Dembele's first-half hat-trick helps France soundly defeat a Norway side without Erling Haaland 4-1 to top Group I at the World Cup.

Does anyone at the World Cup have the defensive strength to deny this hyper-mobile, supremely varied French attack? Not, it turns out, a second-string Norway, who were torn apart in the first half in Boston, as Ousmane Dembélé scored a beautifully precise 25-minute hat-trick en route to a 4-1 win. France now top Group I and will play their last-32 tie in New Jersey next Tuesday. Norway will play Côte d’Ivoire in Texas.This was a fun, freewheeling game, with the feel of a tournament formality, big third-place playoff energy. But it wasn’t quite that. Certainly nothing that happened here in the absence of the rested Erling Haaland will help nourish Norway’s late-stage tournament hopes, which are real but tentative, and which can only have been damaged by the sight of France’s attack using the corners of Egil Selvik’s goal for shooting practice in a jarringly open, defensively chaotic first half. Continue reading...

France forward Ousmane Dembele stuns Norway with an incredible hat-trick in the opening 32 minutes of their Group I World Cup clash in Boston.

⚽️ World Cup kick-off time: 3pm EDT/8pm BST/5am AEST⚽️ Third-place table | Player guide | Golden Boot | Mail Scott⚽️ Senegal v Iraq – live updates from the group’s other gameThis is how we saw it from the outset. Not much has changed. Yet. Reacquaint yourself with both squads, and let’s go.One of the tournament favourites meet perhaps the most transparently obvious of the dark horses. In purely reductive terms, it’s Kylian Mbappé versus Erling Haaland … and you know what, purely reductive terms are good enough to whet the appetite for this one. Mbappé and Haaland have already contributed four goals apiece in the first two matches; these teams have found the net 13 times between them already. So this could be a doozy, especially as top spot in Group I will at least theoretically prove beneficial come the knockout phase. Though it doesn’t always work out that way, of course. Let the good times roll at 8pm BST, 3pm EDT, 5am AEST. It’s on! Continue reading...