How many points are needed to advance to the World Cup knockouts?

The expanded field of 48 teams at this year’s World Cup means that not only the top two teams from each of the twelve groups in the first round will advance, but also the best eight third-placed players.

As this weekend’s action in Canada, Mexico and the United States begins to give the group standings some shape, the calculators will begin to determine what the minimum requirement will be to advance to the last 32.

It is only the second time that a tournament organized by FIFA, world football’s governing body, has featured as many teams, so past experience is limited to last November’s U-17 World Cup in Qatar.

But it is far from the first time that third-placed players in the group stages of a tournament have been given the chance to advance.

This goes back to the 1986 World Cup finals in Mexico, the first in which the four best third-placed players from the six groups of four teams advanced to the knockout rounds, along with the top two teams in each group.

This was still in an era when two points were awarded for a win, rather than three, but a review of 38 FIFA tournaments and continental championships where there was a field of 24 teams and thus four places available for the best third-placed players to advance gives an indication of what it will take in terms of points to progress to the knockout stages.

HOW THE POINTS COUNT

*Five points: Never has a team collected five points from the three group matches that finished in the first two places in the group stage.

*Four points: Only twice has a team with four points failed to advance in third place in the group, ‌and both times were at the U-20 World Cup. But bizarrely, Norway finished bottom of the World Cup group with four points in 1994, and Ukraine did the same at the last European Championship in Germany two years ago.

*Three points: There is a success rate of just under 50% for teams that finish on three points, but almost all of those teams have a positive goal difference. Three points and a negative goal difference give a less than one in three chance of advancing. An exception was Norway at the 2019 Under-20 World Cup, which was eliminated despite a positive goal difference of eight. That included a 12-0 win over Honduras, where Erling Haaland scored nine goals. At the 48-team U-17 World Cup in Qatar last year, four of the six teams that finished third in their respective groups advanced by three points.

*Two points: In only two of the tournaments surveyed, with three points for a win, did a side finish among the top four third-placed teams with a paltry two points, most recently Tanzania at the Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco late last year.

Published on June 20, 2026