{"id":12377,"date":"2025-03-26T13:11:37","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T13:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/world-cup-2026-who-has-qualified-and-how-do-qualifiers-work\/"},"modified":"2025-03-26T13:11:37","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T13:11:37","slug":"world-cup-2026-who-has-qualified-and-how-do-qualifiers-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/world-cup-2026-who-has-qualified-and-how-do-qualifiers-work\/","title":{"rendered":"World Cup 2026: Who has qualified – and how do qualifiers work?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Four teams booked their spot at the 2026 World Cup during the international break, despite some European teams not yet starting their qualifying campaigns.<\/b><\/p>\n

Japan were the first to seal their place, with three games to spare, by beating Bahrain 2-0.<\/p>\n

New Zealand followed them with a 3-0 win over New Caledonia in the Oceania final.<\/p>\n

Iran went through following a 2-2 draw against Uzbekistan, while defending champions Argentina were the fourth team to qualify before a 4-1 win over rivals Brazil.<\/p>\n

That is a total of seven of the 48 World Cup spots decided, with co-hosts the United States, Canada and Mexico all qualifying automatically.<\/p>\n

It will be more than a year before every single team is known.<\/p>\n

The expanded size of the World Cup means more teams will qualify from each continent than ever before.<\/p>\n

BBC Sport looks at how things are going in World Cup qualifying around the globe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four teams booked their spot at the 2026 World Cup during the international break, despite some European teams not yet starting their qualifying campaigns. Japan were the first to seal their place, with three games to spare, by beating Bahrain 2-0. New Zealand followed them with a 3-0 win over New Caledonia in the Oceania […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12378,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12379,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12377\/revisions\/12379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}