England and Scotland will discover their 2026 World Cup groups on Friday teatime.
The draw for the group stage will be made in Washington D.C., with proceedings set to get under way at 5pm UK time. The permutations are seemingly endless and very complicated.
England's dream group
Rather than rely on gut feeling about which sides might be better or worse, we're going to go off the FIFA World Rankings and give England the lowest-ranked possible sides at each step.
England are in pot 1, so will need to be drawn with sides from pots 2, 3 and 4. The first two are easy: it's Australia and South Africa, respectively.
That would however rule out the possibility of England drawing either of the inter-confederation play-off winners, as they would already have both an AFC and a CAF team in their group (because Australia are part of the Asian confederation, for those of you confused).
There's a possibility that a CAF team (DR Congo) could win one of the inter-confederation play-off paths, and an AFC team (Iraq) could win the other.
That means that FIFA would automatically skip England's group when drawing the as-yet undetermined inter-confederation play-off winners, because there can't be two countries from the same confederation in one group, with the exception of UEFA.
None of the UEFA sides that might make it via the play-offs will be the next-lowest ranked side in pot 4. That should be New Zealand...but our dream Scotland draw is a bit more complicated, so we're going to reserve them and give England Haiti instead. They're only two places above New Zealand, anyway.
England's dream 2026 World Cup group
- England (World ranking: 4)
- Australia (26)
- South Africa (61)
- Haiti (84)
Scotland's dream group
Scotland have been allocated to pot 3, and there's an obvious answer as to which of the pot 1 sides they will want to go up against: co-hosts Canada.
They are ranked at 27 in the world rankings, by far the lowest in pot 1. In fact, they're ranked lower than any of the pot 2 sides; they only get pot 1 status by virtue of their shared hosting duties.
From pot 2, we've already allocated Australia to England's group in this hypothetical scenario, so we will have to go for the next best thing. Austria it is. Looks similar enough, anyway.
Scotland couldn't then get Curacao, Haiti, or an inter-confederation play-off winner in their group, because Canada are already there to represent CONCACAF (and both inter-confederation paths have a CONCACAF side in them).
With two UEFA sides in the group already, we can't allocate a third from their play-off winners either...but that's immaterial, as all of them are higher ranked than our actual selection.
And that's why we've kept New Zealand away from England: they round out Scotland's group nicely, and it means we don't need to give them the much higher-ranked Ghana, Cape Verde or Jordan. Plus, we feel like the Scots should get on well with Canadians and New Zealanders, which is nice.
Scotland's dream 2026 World Cup group
- Canada (27)
- Austria (24)
- Scotland (36)
- New Zealand (86)
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