Forget the Spreadsheet, Part Two: The Hosts, the Dark Horses and a Borrowed Cathedral

Part two of two. The six who could make a mess of all those neat predictions, starting with the three countries actually throwing the party.

The World Cup starts in less than twenty four hours. The players have arrived (some forced to stay in a neighbouring country) and one unfortunate match official, Omar Artan, has returned home because of stupid politics. According to sources, Artan was denied entry to the U.S. at Miami International Airport on Saturday over unspecified “vetting concerns.

Back to the football.

Part one looked at the six nations everyone expects to win the thing. This is the other half of the field, the six who could yet turn all those tidy forecasts to dust, and it begins with the three countries actually putting the tournament on.

Here is the strange truth about hosting a World Cup in 2026. You do most of the work and you watch the best of it happen somewhere else. The United States have the final, the semifinals and the lion’s share of everything that matters. Canada and Mexico got the rest and a commemorative photo. Three host nations, three completely different moods, and not one of them is quite the mood you would expect.

Let’s start with the hosts proper, the United States, because they hold the final, and they have spent most of the last two years behaving as though they had forgotten the World Cup was coming at all. This was meant to be the great American football awakening.

They hired Mauricio Pochettino in 2024 precisely because he was box office, a serious European coach with the charisma to sell the game to a country that keeps not quite falling for it. Then the team lost friendlies to Belgium and Portugal, Pochettino spent the spring making headlines for the wrong reasons, and the crowds stayed at home. For the longest time only one home friendly topped thirty five thousand. For the hosts of a World Cup that is not apathy exactly. It is closer to forgetting.

Then, late, something turned. A 3-2 win over Senegal, a narrow 2-1 loss to Germany, both in front of sold out crowds, and Pochettino admitting the excitement he expected eighteen months ago is only turning up now. The American mood is that of a country waking on the morning of a party it agreed to host long ago and realising the guests are already at the door. They reached the last sixteen in Qatar. Anything less on home soil would feel like the sport stalling. Christian Pulisic carries most of the hope. The rest of the country is only just beginning to look up.

Canada are the opposite, and it is rather lovely. There is no baggage here, no sixty years of hurt, no curse, just a country that has never really had this before and cannot quite believe its luck. Jesse Marsch has called this the best squad Canada have ever assembled, which is not a towering historical bar but happens this time to be true. They are hard to beat, light on goals and drama, and they have Alphonso Davies, their one genuine star, racing to be fit after a hamstring problem in time to be the face of all of it.

The draw was kind, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Switzerland and Qatar, and with eight of the twelve third placed teams going through, a single win probably does the job. Canada open against Bosnia on June 12 in Toronto, the first men’s World Cup match the country has ever staged. The mood is pure uncomplicated hope, the rarest mood in the whole tournament, and you find yourself quietly willing them to hold on to it for as long as they can.

Which brings us to Mexico, and to the most loaded mood of the three, because Mexico are hosting a World Cup in the one stadium that has done this before and they have just watched the best of it handed to somebody else.

The Azteca staged the finals of both the 1970 and 1986 World Cups, and this summer it becomes the first stadium on earth to feature at three. Pelé’s Brazil won there in 1970, beating Italy 4-1 in what plenty still call the finest team ever assembled.

Sixteen years later Maradona beat West Germany 3-2 on the same turf, and in the quarterfinal before it he produced the Hand of God and the Goal of the Century inside five minutes against England. Maradona’s goals are the two most famous goals ever scored at one end of one pitch. This is not just a stadium. For a certain kind of football romantic it is the closest the sport has to a cathedral. It should be hosting the final, but it isn’t.

In 2026 the cathedral gets the opening match and not a great deal else. The Azteca hosts Mexico against South Africa on June 11, a couple of group games, an early knockout tie if the draw is kind, and then the whole circus packs up and heads north.

The final is in New Jersey, in an NFL car park across the water from Manhattan. The semifinals are in Dallas and Atlanta. Every quarterfinal is on American soil. The country that gave the World Cup two of its defining nights gets the prologue and then watches the ending on television like the rest of us.

It gets worse, or funnier, depending on how much you enjoy watching FIFA at work. The Azteca is not even called the Azteca any more. To help fund a renovation built on a nine figure bank loan it sold its name and became the Estadio Banorte, which landed with Mexican supporters about as well as you would imagine. Then FIFA, which does not allow sponsor names that are not its own sponsors, stripped that off too and decreed the ground be known for the tournament as the Estadio Ciudad de México.

So the most sacred name in Mexican football has been taken away twice over, once by a bank and once by FIFA, while the residents of Santa Úrsula who actually live in its shadow spend the build up insisting they are not the stadium’s backyard and box holders of forty years standing drag FIFA to court over seats it simply took. National pride and commercial reality have rarely been forced into a smaller room.

And yet the team itself feels oddly settled. Javier Aguirre, who was on the pitch the last time any of this meant something, was sent off in that 1986 quarterfinal defeat to West Germany. He is back for a third spell and has proudly built something solid if not thrilling.

Mexico are unbeaten in seven, six clean sheets, holder of the Nations League and the Gold Cup. He calls home advantage priceless and says the tournament is sitting on a silver platter. He needs it to be.

Mexico have gone out in the last sixteen at seven World Cups running and have not reached a quarterfinal in forty years. The only two times they managed it were 1970 and 1986. The same two tournaments the Azteca hosted the final. The stadium’s glory days and Mexico’s glory days are the same photograph, and both have quietly been moved to the cheap seats.

So much for the hosts. The party runs across three countries and the best room is locked to two of them. Next come the gatecrashers, the three outsiders who could make every word of this irrelevant by July.

Start with Morocco, because Morocco changed what a dark horse even is. In Qatar they became the first African nation ever to reach a World Cup semifinal, knocking out Spain and Portugal on the way and losing only to France, and in doing so they stopped being a surprise.

That is the trouble with fairytales. You cannot tell the same one twice. The Atlas Lions arrive ranked eighth in the world, with Achraf Hakimi fresh from winning the Champions League with PSG, Yassine Bounou still magnificent in goal, and one of the most gifted generations Africa has ever produced. Nobody is calling them plucky any more. They are expected to go deep, and expectation is a far heavier coat to wear than hope.

And they are wearing it through a storm of their own making. Walid Regragui, the man who masterminded Qatar, walked away in March, only months before the tournament. He was replaced by Mohamed Ouahbi, a coach whose headline credential is steering Morocco’s under twenties to a youth World Cup and who has never managed at a senior tournament in his life.

A new manager, a settled squad, enormous expectation and very little time to make it all fit. Morocco are in Group C with Brazil, Haiti and Scotland, which means the Tartan Army gets a proper look at them, and a Morocco that clicks is good enough to trouble anyone alive. A Morocco still learning its new manager’s voice in late June is another thing entirely. Which version turns up is the question nobody can answer, Morocco least of all.

Croatia are the opposite sort of dark horse, the kind that has been quietly excellent for so long that the rest of us keep forgetting to be surprised by them. Runners up in 2018, third in 2022, and back again for one last chapter of a golden generation that simply refuses to leave the stage.

At the heart of it, as ever, is Luka Modric, forty years old now, in his fifth and final World Cup, still conducting matches for AC Milan every week, and arriving in a protective mask after fracturing his cheekbone in the spring. There is something almost stubborn about it, a great player declining to go quietly, hauling a nation along behind him one more time.

The worry is at the top end, where Croatia have never quite replaced a proper goalscorer, and the legs in midfield are not as fresh as once they were. But England supporters should pay close attention here, because Croatia are the very first name on the fixture list, the opening opponent in Dallas on June 17. England have run into Croatia before and it has rarely ended in comfort.

Croatia are a side that keeps being written off and keeps reaching the last four, precisely the side you do not want to meet while you are still finding your feet. Modric, you suspect, would like nothing better than to remind everyone of exactly that on day one.

Colombia are the romantics’ pick, a side returning from the cold with a story to tell. They missed Qatar altogether, watching the World Cup from the sofa like the rest of us. Néstor Lorenzo’s side is one of the most dangerous teams nobody is talking about. They finished third in South American qualifying, above both Uruguay and Brazil, beat Argentina and Brazil along the way, and put together a twenty eight match unbeaten run that only ended in the Copa América final against Argentina in 2024. This is not a team making up the numbers.

The emotional centre is James Rodríguez, who twelve years ago lit up the 2014 World Cup, won the Golden Boot and earned himself a move to Real Madrid. Aged thirty four and seeing out his days in the MLS, James gets one last stage to dance on. Around him hums the real engine of this side, Luis Díaz, who tore through the Bundesliga and the Champions League this season with Bayern Munich. Just imagine if Liverpool could field a player of his calibre.

Colombia land in Group K with Portugal, which hands part one a sequel, Ronaldo and James, two men chasing one final act in the very same group. If you like your dark horses with a little poetry, this is the one.

A word, before we finish, on who is not here. The obvious omission is the Netherlands, and it is a fair challenge. The Dutch have a magnificent squad, Virgil van Dijk marshalling the back, Frenkie de Jong running the middle, three World Cup finals in their history and a quarterfinal as recently as 2022. So why not them?

Because a dark horse, by definition, has to be capable of surprising you, and the Netherlands reaching the latter stages would surprise precisely no one. They are not an outsider. They are a heavyweight who happened to miss the cut for our top six, parked in the no man’s land just below the favourites.

The Netherlands are too good to shock anyone and not quite trusted enough to be named among the best. Even their own supporters see it. One recent poll found only eight in every hundred Dutch fans actually expect to lift the trophy.

A dark horse needs a country willing to dream a little. The Dutch, sensibly and rather typically, are keeping both feet flat on the ground, and that is exactly why they are not on this list.

So there it is, the whole field laid out by feeling rather than by formula. Twelve nations, twelve different moods, from Spanish dread to Canadian delight to a Mexican cathedral watching the big night unfold up the motorway. Somewhere in all of it sits the team that will actually win this thing, and the lovely truth is that the mood can no more tell you which one than the spreadsheet could. That was always the point.

Predictions are for people who think football can be solved. The spreadsheet still says Spain. The mood says hold on tight. For once, I think I’d trust the mood.