How long is a world cup soccer game? At the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the answer has become less theoretical than the knockout board: after the second of the three sets of group matches, seven teams had already reached the next stage and five had already gone home. Argentina, Colombia, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway and the United States moved on.
Lionel Messi, 39, sits on five goals and leads the Golden Boot race, with Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland on four. That scoring race has tracked with a round that has already pushed the tournament into a narrower, more exacting phase before the final group matches are played.
Lionel Messi sets the pace
Messi’s place at the top of the scoring chart gives Argentina a separate layer of leverage inside a tournament that is already sorting itself into qualifiers and eliminated teams. The numbers are tight behind him. Mbappe has four goals. Haaland has four as well.
The broader point is that the scoring load is spreading across the tournament while one veteran still holds the lead. At 39, Messi is not merely part of the story; he is the reference point for it, because the Golden Boot race has become one of the clearest individual threads left after round two.
Open games and hard edges
Oliver Kay said, “I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how open so many of the games have remained.” He also said, “There have been so many goals.” That matches the shape of the competition so far: the bracket is narrowing, but the scorelines have not tightened in the way a group stage sometimes does.
Jacob Whitehead added another layer by pointing to South Korea, saying they had been as bad as they were against Mexico after opening with an excellent display against the Czech Republic. The same round also produced Curacao’s first ever point at a World Cup in a 0-0 draw with Ecuador, after a 7-1 loss to Germany. Tomas Hill Lopez-Menchero noted that Sweden were thrashed 5-1 by the Netherlands after producing the same 5-1 scoreline against Tunisia in matchday one.
Senegal and the bracket
That looseness has not helped every side equally. Carl Anka said Senegal needed a four-goal victory over Iraq to have a chance of sneaking out of their group as one of the best third-place sides, and he argued that Pape Thiaw’s choice to pick Kalidou Koulibaly had backfired badly. It is the kind of selection call that looks different once the table starts to harden.
The immediate picture is simple. Seven teams are through, five are out, and the final group matches still have to be played. Haiti, Jordan, Panama, Tunisia and Turkey have already been eliminated, while the remaining teams now know the margin for error has shrunk to one last set of games.
How the final knockout bracket will look after the third set is still to be settled, but the field is already splitting fast. The teams still alive no longer have the luxury of waiting for help elsewhere; the cut line has already moved, and the remaining games now decide who joins Argentina, Colombia, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway and the United States.
