FIFA set to announce that they are going back to 12 - 4 team groups to keep the final game day as it has been previously. Also they are allowing 8 3rd place teams to advance to the knockouts. Will increase the total number of games to 104 and will be longest duration World Cup ever.
https://theathletic.com/4307230/2023/03/14/world-cup-2026-format-usa/?source=user_shared_article
Edit- 104 games? My god that is going to be a glorious summer.
It's an OK format, but it's going to really emphasize the old adage that it's 2 tournaments smashed together to make 1. The group stage will be low stakes and one tourney, with the R32 (!) forward being a straightforward 5-round KO cup. My recollection of the '94 group stage was that you had a bunch of underperforming group stage bronze medalists getting unceremoniously dumped in the R16 (looking at you Argentina).
Looking at the '94 WC in more detail, let's focus on the 3rd place KO qualifiers: Argentina, Belgium, USA (USA! USA!), and Italy (!!!).
Argentina I remember vividly as these are my first sports fan memories. Argentina shellacked Greece 4-0 led by a Bati-gol hattrick and Maradona drug-infused strike (his goal celebration is what led, fairly, to investigating him for doping), followed by a hard-fought 2-1 win over Nigeria, before Maradona was suspended. Argentina never recovered and lost 2-0 to Bulgaria, before getting dumped by Romania in a highly entertaining affair.
Belgium was in one of those funny groups where the points after MW3 was 6, 6, 6, 0, with Morocco serving as the punching bag (how ironic now that they are world powerhouse Morocco lol). They played a decent Germany side in the R16, and lost 3-2 in a scoreline that flatters them IIRC.
I probably don't need to remind everyone about the USA's performance, but they earned a draw against an average Swiss side to open things, won that unforgettable (and terribly sad) Colombia match, before falling to Romania. They still earned the right to play Brazil in R16. My recollection of that game is that the US did very well to play physical and disrupt the Brazilians during the first half, and then Leonardo swung an elbow and knocked out Tab Ramos. The US continued to sit back and only came undone in the 70th minute by a Bebeto goal.
Finally, I didn't realize that Italy had snuck into the KOs as a 3rd place team as well. This was another funky group, where all teams finished on 4 points with GDs of 0 (yes, I didn't make that up). After GD, goals scored was the tiebreaker, with Mexico finishing 1st with 3, and Italy and Ireland tied at 2. But since the Irish had beaten Italy head-to-head, Italy finished 3rd. Italy then scraped by a really fun Nigeria team (Finidi George, Jay Jay Okocha, Sunday Oliseh, Daniel Amokachi, etc.) in the R16. Italy then beat a poor Spain side in the QF, scoring very late AGAIN to go through. Italy found its groove and beat an overmatched Bulgaria side in the semis before...well, you know the ending.
The big difference between '94 and '26 is that in the former you were still whittling the field down to 16 sides, whereas in '26 we're going to have 32 KO participants. While this last WC did show us (to my surprise) that there is enough quality and sophistication in the world game to have 32 decent sides, that doesn't outweigh a couple of big drawbacks to this format. First, I think we're going to see a lot of groups with 3 good sides and 1 punching bag. Not the worst thing in the world, but it does change the group dynamics quite a bit (for the worse IMO). In addition, some of the lower quality KO sides will have the chance to knockout some big fish or alternatively just be overmatched and get dumped out. Much like '94, I think we will see most 'big name' sides go through as a result and we won't have any huge upsets like in 2022 with Germany, and to a lesser extent Uruguay, Belgium, Denmark, and Mexico. Perhaps a team like '22 Germany squeaks into the KOs and goes on a run like Italy in '94.