World Cup: Grades for every eliminated team as they exit the tournament - ESPN

Soccer is a game of failure — especially this summer.

Each game at the 2026 World Cup has featured about 80 possessions per team. And each team has scored about 1.5 goals per game. Those teams, in other words, are failing to score goals with 98% of their possessions.

Those teams generate around only 12 shots per game, so 85% of those possessions don't lead to an attempt on goal. And even when they do, those shots fail to become goals 88% of the time.

But we all put up with the constant futility because there's a likely payoff hidden behind all of these hopeless statistics, right? Right?

Yeah, um, not quite.

The biggest World Cup in history brings with it an even greater avalanche of failure. Of the 48 teams attempting to win the World Cup this summer, 47 (98%) will fail. Add up all of the World Cups this century, and come the end of this summer, 240 different groups of players will have tried to lift the World Cup — and 233 will have fallen short.

Of course, not all failures are created equal. Injuries happen, refs make mistakes, arbitrarily drawn borders and random demographic patterns determine rosters, socioeconomic factors overwhelm tactics and the ball keeps bouncing.

So from now until the end of the tournament, we will grade the 47 failures — continually updating this page, with the most recently eliminated teams listed first — based on a combination of pretournament expectations, in-tournament performance and whatever else is worth considering.

The grades will be on a traditional A-to-F scale. Yes, you can get an A for failing or an F for failing. I can't think of a sentence that better sums up the World Cup than that.

All numbers come courtesy of the stats app Futi or Stats Perform data, unless otherwise noted.