What all 48 World Cup teams have at stake
Only 7 teams have clinched advancement --- and almost everyone has a lot to play for in their final match.
It’s been a terrific World Cup — but the tournament will only accelerate from here, with the highest-stakes matches yet to come. Teams will play their third and final group-stage matches in simultaneous pairs; the structure is intended to reduce the informational advantage from knowing exactly what you’re playing for.1 Then we’ll have the first-ever 32-team knockout bracket.
This is going to be an extremely meat-and-potatoes article. (Thanks to the thousands (!) of you who have subscribed for our World Cup coverage.) I’m simply going to go through each of the 12 groups and describe what each of the 48 teams has at stake in its final match. Only 7 teams have officially advanced to the knockout round — these are, in alphabetical order: Argentina, Colombia, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway and the United States, each with 6 points.2 Not all of these teams have clinched their groups, however. Another 11 teams are sitting on 4 points, with a win and a draw so far. They are extremely likely to advance, although in some cases, whether they finish 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in their group makes a big difference.
Only 5 teams have been formally eliminated: Haiti, Jordan, Panama, Tunisia and Turkey. Because 3 points will often be enough to advance, especially with a favorable goal differential (GD), and because a win is worth 3 points (and every team has one more game to play), it’s actually pretty hard to have been strictly eliminated at this point.3
This late-night newsletter is intended as a companion to our World Cup predictions page, and it might be helpful to open another browser window and go back and forth between them. For your convenience, though, here are our current projections for each team’s odds of finishing in each slot (1 through 4) in the group stage.