After just about two weeks of matches, everyone has played twice at the World Cup. Some teams have turned out better than we thought, some teams are much worse, and some teams are on notice.

We are 48 games through the 2026 World Cup, and a knockout bracket is starting to take shape. Six teams have clinched a spot in the round of 32, and five teams have been eliminated.

Aside from some of the very good teams like Spain and Argentina getting two chances to prove that they are in fact very good, here are some standout teams of trends through two rounds of matches at the 2026 World Cup.

They are who we thought they were (complimentary): The United States, Canada, Mexico

I am a USMNT fan, and like many of my fellow fans I experienced their 4-1 opening win with some degree of disbelief and slackjawed glee. 

In my lifetime I had never seen the USMNT handle business like that against a somewhat legit team. The game was effectively wrapped up by halftime, and it was extremely wrapped up when Gio Reyna capped a 26-pass move with a trivela into the far corner.

The game that followed, a professional 2-0 win over Australia, pushed this World Cup into truly unprecedented territory. Never before had the USMNT secured qualification for the second round without playing three games, nor had they won two group stage games.

But once the initial joy of the performances wore off, it all more or less makes sense. Heading into the tournament, I wrote that the USMNT were probably something like the 14th or 12th best team in the world, and that based on their last year or so of performances, they should be able to narrowly defeat anyone below them but would need some degree of luck to beat anyone above them. 

The dominance of the wins against Australia and Paraguay indicates the gap between the USMNT and the 24th and 26th best teams in the world is bigger than I thought it was, which to some extent is news.¹Paraguay and Australia, respectively, by ELO ranking at time of writing. But still. Thus far, the USMNT have confirmed they are a step above international soccer’s middle class. They still have time to prove they’re even better than that.

Fellow co-hosts Canada and Mexico, meanwhile, have also more or less confirmed that they are decent teams, which is what they projected to be before the tournament. 

Mexico have been decent, but not great. Not that they have really needed to be.

El Tri were able to keep both South Korea and South Africa at arm’s length for long enough to capitalize on terrible defensive errors. The real test will come in a round or two, when they play teams that won’t necessarily make terrible defensive errors. 

And Canada have in fact managed to channel their always slightly chaotic energy to their most successful World Cup showing ever, coming back from a goal down to secure a point against Bosnia before laying down the hammer against an slightly hapless and increasingly violent Qatar team. The best news for Canada is that they managed that 6-0 win without having to force Alphonso Davies back from injury early, and his return should make them even better.

All in all, the hosts were supposed to be pretty good and they have been that so far. 

The next step is to be better than that.

Fraud watch: Ecuador, Uruguay, Sweden

The three biggest disappointments of the World Cup that still have time to turn their tournament around are Ecuador, Uruguay, and Sweden.

Ecuador’s combination of young talent and a legendary experienced goalscorer projected to be a tough team to beat, and one that could make an impact on the later knockouts. And to be fair, they have been to difficult beat, only giving up 1 goal across two matches. But they have been simply unable to score.

Their second match against Curacao was particularly poor. Through a combination of Eloy Room’s heroics and then increasingly haphazard play in the final third as they were increasingly in their heads about Eloy Room’s heroics, Ecuador conspired to not put the ball in the net against a largely overmatched team.

There has definitely been an element of bad luck to these games, with Ecuador hitting the post a few times against Ivory Coast and severely underperforming their expected goals overall. But for a team that was incredibly hard to beat in qualifying, they have found it far too difficult to create enough chances to win.

Now Ecuador need to beat Germany in their final group game to have any chance at advancing. That’s an incredibly difficult spot for La Tri, who would have hoped to be playing with house money by the time the final game rolled around.

Uruguay have been similarly laborious, struggling to turn overwhelming possession advantages into clear cut chances against both Saudi Arabia and Cape Verde.

They did manage to score twice off of 2.23 expected goals in their second match against the Blue Sharks, but that progress was compromised by a fundamental flaw in their roster construction: They still start Fernando Muslera, who has been somewhere between not good and a liability at the international level for over a decade.

Despite a better performance from the team, two bad mistakes from Musclera and the two players in his wall on Cape Verde’s free kick screamer cost them the three points. Now, like Ecuador, they will head into a third match that should have been a shoutout for seeding needing a result to stay alive.

Finally, Sweden, who thus far have been unable to channel Zara Larson’s comeback summer into a successful U.S. tour of their own. Ahead of the World Cup, I wondered if the real Sweden was the team loaded with talent or the team that consistently lost matches in every conceivable way for nearly a year. 

By following a 5-1 win over Tunisia with a 1-5 embarrassment at the hands of the Netherlands, Sweden provided an answer: Why not both?

Fraud warning: Türkiye and Tunisia²The joke here is that a tornado watch is issued when there are the conditions for a potential tornado, and a tornado warning is issued when there is an actual tornado in the area.

Man what a bummer these two teams were.

Recent history suggested that Türkiye should have been at least okay. Not only do they start three incredibly talented players, they were actually pretty good at a major international tournament two summers ago. Drawn into a relatively forgiving group, this was a chance for some combination of Arda Güler and Kenan Yildiz and Hakan Çalhanoğlu to lead Türkiye on a run to the knockout stages at their first World Cup in a quarter century.

Instead, they turned in two absolutely idea-less performances against beatable teams and were eliminated before playing a third game. 

The most disappointing thing about the Turkish performances was how stale they felt offensively despite that talent. Against Paraguay, they generated 2.13 expected goals, but that was off of 31 shots. Roughly, that means the average Türkiye shot had a 6% chance of scoring. Far too often in both games, they got to the edge of the penalty area and decided to whip in a blind cross or shoot from distance. 

I was at the Paraguay game and what stood out to me, aside from an absolutely legendary kill-the-clock-by-any-means lead protecting performance from Paraguay, was how disconnected Yildiz and Güler were. Per FIFA’s match report, the two young superstars exchanged a total of 9 passes across the entire game. Turkiye had 66% of the possession and completed 594 total passes. And yet their two best players had basically nothing to do with each other. No wonder there was nothing creative happening around the penalty area. 

Tunisia, on the other had, were just kind of bad.

This was a team that had real World Cup experience, and did not concede a single goal across all of qualifying. They projected to be a savvy, tough-to-beat, squad, that would not necessarily score a ton of goals but might be able to frustrate their opposition and steal a result or two.

Instead they made an array of constant and comical errors against Sweden and then provided very little resistance as Japan carved them open constantly through midfield. Not even pulling the Hervé Renard emergency lever really did anything, as the French journeyman mostly yelled and clapped and sweated through his signature white shirts, without really instilling any kind of defensive structure or new attacking ideas. 

See you guys next time, but hopefully with new coaches and a few new players.