What this site is
The World Cup 2026 Bracket Explorer is a free, independent fan-made tool that lets anyone explore the 48-team, 104-match schedule of the 2026 FIFA World Cup — held jointly across 16 host cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, 2026.
It is built as a single static web page that runs entirely in your browser. There is no login, no account, no database, and no tracking of what you click. The tool is designed to answer three specific questions that most existing schedule pages don't:
- Where, exactly, will each match be played? A sortable table of every group-stage and knockout-stage match by team, city, stadium, and date.
- Where could my team end up if they finish 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in their group? A full bracket path from the Round of 32 all the way to the Final, computed deterministically from the published bracket structure.
- If I pick two or more teams, where could they actually meet? A pairwise grid that shows the earliest possible meeting round and city for every combination of group finishes.
Where the data comes from
All match, group, and venue data is drawn from publicly available sources covering the 2026 FIFA World Cup:
- The official FIFA World Cup 2026 tournament page and final-draw results published on December 5, 2025.
- The 2026 FIFA World Cup Wikipedia article, which mirrors the official schedule and bracket structure.
- Independent reporting from ESPN, MLSsoccer.com, and the official host-city schedule sites (e.g. nynjfwc26.com, atlantafwc26.com, kansascityfwc26.com) for the city-by-city match assignments.
We make a best effort to keep the schedule accurate, but FIFA reserves the right to reschedule individual matches. If you spot an error, the easiest way to flag it is to open a GitHub issue.
How the permutation calculator works
For every group G and finish position (1st, 2nd, or 3rd),
the published bracket assigns the team to a specific Round-of-32 match. Once
that R32 match is known, every subsequent venue — Round of 16,
Quarterfinal, Semifinal, Final or 3rd-place playoff — is also fixed,
because the bracket structure is deterministic. The Round-of-16 city is
determined by which R32 match feeds into it, the Quarterfinal city by
which R16 match feeds into it, and so on.
This means we can show, for any team:
- The single deterministic path of cities if they finish 1st and keep winning.
- The single deterministic path if they finish 2nd and keep winning.
- Multiple possible paths if they finish 3rd, because only the eight best third-placed teams of the twelve advance, and FIFA's third-place assignment table routes them to different R32 slots depending on which eight groups produce qualifiers.
For the multi-team "where could they meet?" view, the tool walks each team's bracket path stage-by-stage and finds the earliest match where their paths share the same match ID. If two teams are in the same group, it shows the actual group-stage fixture and city. If their bracket halves never intersect before the Final, the cell shows "Never (opposite halves)" — meaning, structurally, the only place those two teams can meet at the World Cup is the Final itself.
Who made it
This site was built by Kesav Mohan as a personal project. It is independent: it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by FIFA, the U.S. Soccer Federation, the Canadian Soccer Association, or the Mexican Football Federation. All trademarks, team names, and tournament names belong to their respective owners and are used here descriptively for the purpose of presenting publicly available schedule information.
Open source
The complete source code is available on GitHub: github.com/KesavMohan/world-cup-2026-bracket. Issues, corrections, and pull requests are welcome. The site is one HTML file with no build step, no server, and no external dependencies beyond Google's AdSense and font-rendering services.
Contact
The best way to reach the maintainer is by opening an issue on the project's GitHub repository. See also the Privacy Policy.
Last updated: May 6, 2026