The 2026 World Cup is the first tri-nation tournament in FIFA history. Sixteen host cities — eleven in the United States, three in Mexico, two in Canada. The format expansion to 48 teams means 104 fixtures across 39 days, and the venue distribution shapes the bracket more than any prior edition.
United States — 11 cities
The US carries the bulk of the schedule. Eleven venues spread coast to coast: Atlanta, Boston (Foxborough), Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles (Inglewood), Miami, New York / New Jersey (East Rutherford), Philadelphia, San Francisco Bay Area (Santa Clara), Seattle.
MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford hosts the final on July 19. The semi-finals run at AT&T Stadium (Dallas) and Mercedes-Benz Stadium (Atlanta). Most knockout fixtures stay east — the bracket draw deliberately concentrates later rounds in higher-capacity east-coast venues.
Mexico — 3 cities
Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey. The tournament opens at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City — the only stadium in WC history to host three opening matches (1970, 1986, 2026). Mexico's draw is structured so the host nation plays its group-stage matches at home; their knockout path immediately exits Mexico unless they top their group.
Canada — 2 cities
Toronto and Vancouver. Both host group-stage matches and one knockout round each. Vancouver's BC Place is the largest indoor venue on the tournament's roster, which matters for any group-stage games scheduled into the rainy Pacific Northwest fall.
Why the venue list shapes the bracket
Three timezones, three climate zones, two languages — the venue spread imposes travel-and-recovery constraints the older 32-team tournaments didn't have. Group winners advance to the Round of 32; the bracket pairs them by venue cluster, so a team topping a Mexican group goes through a southwestern US knockout path, while groups based in eastern US venues feed an east-coast knockout track.
For predictions this matters. A team's third group match might be 2,500km from their first — and the round-of-32 fixture three days after that could be another 1,500km away. Cortex's international calibration band lifts the publish floor to 70 in part because travel-fatigue variance on a continent-wide tournament is harder to model than at a single-country event.
What we'll be tracking
Beyond the standard pre-match signal pack, World Cup reads weight three additional inputs: opponent club-form per starter (national-team minutes are too sparse alone), recent international-window results (WC qualifiers + UEFA Nations / Copa America games), and venue/travel context as outlined above.
The publish floor stays at 70 for the entire tournament. Anything below abstains. We expect roughly two to four reads per matchday during groups, fewer in the knockouts where variance climbs.