Japan have become the first team – not including the hosts Canada, Mexico and USA – to qualify for the 2026 World Cup, with their 2-0 win against Bahrain on Thursday confirming their progression to the main tournament next summer.
In doing so, Argentina and the winner of Oceania’s automatic qualification race have been spared the paradoxical ignominy of qualifying first for a World Cup, which hasn’t always been a good thing in the past.
With a 48-team tournament set to be introduced for the 2026 World Cup, though, Japan will be hoping they can dispel the curse nations before them – including themselves – have suffered at previous editions.
Japan will want to end World Cup qualifying curse
Indeed, of the last three nations to achieve the feat of qualifying first for a World Cup, Japan finished last in their group in 2014, Brazil lost in the 2018 quarter-finals and Germany went out in the group stage in 2022.
With over a year to start preparing for the tournament in USA, Canada and Mexico, manager Hajime Moriyasu will be hoping his side can stop the rot and progress further than the country’s best finish of the last 16.
Meanwhile, in Oceania, one country is guaranteed to qualify this month when a four-team finals tournament takes place to determine who will head directly to the World Cup.
New Zealand are hosting the tournament but even if they weren’t, they would still have been massive favourites to return to the World Cup for the first time since 2010, given that Chris Wood has scored 257 goals in the Premier League this season.
For the first time ever, Oceania has a place guaranteed, with no need to win a play-off against a stronger South, Central or North American nation. New Zealand, having ousted Vanuatu and Samoa already, will seal that place if they beat Fiji on March 21 and then New Caledonia or Tahiti five days later.
It isn’t the most difficult route to a World Cup we’ve ever seen… but there is a warning from relatively recent history.
New Zealand lost 2-0 to New Caledonia in their 2012 OFC Nations Cup semi-final – the ‘Horror in Honiara’ – which caused great national embarrassment and also resulted in Tahiti taking ‘their’ place at the 2013 Confederations Cup in Brazil.
