World Cup 2026 Opens at Azteca Stadium: Shakira Performs, Ronaldo Turns 41, and Queens Is Already the Real Venue

Since the tournament's host cities were confirmed years ago, the 2026 FIFA World Cup has been building toward this moment. On June 11, it finally arrived.

Thousands of fans packed the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City for the opening ceremony. Colombian pop star Shakira headlined the show alongside local performers, according to BBC News. Mexico is co-hosting alongside the United States and Canada, making this the first World Cup held across three countries simultaneously. The U.S. and Canada are scheduled to hold their own opening events on Friday.

For Mexico City, the occasion carries extra weight. The country last hosted a World Cup in 1986, forty years ago. Getting here was not clean: Azteca Stadium and the airport required significant renovations, protests surrounded the event, and cartel violence in Mexico made international headlines in the months leading up to June. On Thursday, according to BBC News, those issues receded as the football took over.

Javier Pérez, attending with his family, told BBC News: "I have never been to a World Cup before so to bring my family is wonderful."

The Numbers Behind This Tournament

This is the largest World Cup in history by headcount. Forty-eight teams, 1,248 players, 104 matches across three countries, according to NPR. The majority of games are scheduled across 11 U.S. host cities.

The oldest player in the field is Scotland goalkeeper Craig Gordon at 43, according to NPR. He is not alone in the quadragenarian bracket. Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal is 41 and heading to his sixth World Cup, still without a title. Croatia's Luka Modrić and Mexico's Guillermo Ochoa are both 40. Uruguay's Fernando Muslera is scheduled to turn 40 on June 16, mid-tournament.

Ronaldo's inclusion stands out. He started all 44 club and country matches he played over the past 12 months for Al Nassr and Portugal, according to BBC Sport. At 41, that workload is remarkable. Whether it is sustainable through a six-week tournament is a legitimate question.

Fatigue Is the Tournament's Hidden Variable

BBC Sport ran the most detailed squad-fatigue analysis in the source set. France enters the World Cup as the most overworked squad among top-ten-ranked nations. French players collectively logged 98,895 minutes of club and country football since June 15, 2025, the day FIFA's expanded Club World Cup began. Crystal Palace defender Maxence Lacroix led with 5,009 minutes across 58 starts.

Portugal is second on that fatigue table, with 96,405 minutes across 1,299 matches. England is third. PSG midfielder Vitinha played 66 games in the past year, including a Club World Cup run and a Champions League title. Harry Kane's workload is flagged by BBC Sport as a specific concern for England manager Thomas Tuchel.

The fair counterargument: elite athletes train for exactly this kind of compacted schedule, and historically, tournament fatigue narratives tend to be overstated. Teams with deeper squads can rotate. Some of the most memorable World Cup performances have come from players written off as exhausted beforehand. The fatigue data is real. Its predictive value is genuinely unclear.

Queens Is Running Its Own Tournament

While the official host venue for the New York area is MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, the actual cultural center of World Cup 2026 for New York is a subway ride away. NPR reported from Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, where adult recreational soccer leagues were running full matches on a recent Sunday morning, with immigrant communities from across Latin America, Africa, and South Asia already deep into the tournament's orbit.

Some 1.2 million visitors are expected in the New York-New Jersey metro area over the tournament's 39-day run, according to NPR. The 7 train corridor, known locally as the International Express, passes through immigrant enclaves that have been playing serious recreational soccer for decades. For those communities, FIFA did not bring the beautiful game to Queens. The beautiful game was already there.

Coach Guillermo Andrade, who coaches Peruvian American Soccer at Flushing Meadows, told NPR he came to New York 25 years ago and found his footing through the park's soccer fields after a cold, disorienting first winter. His story is not unusual in that park.

One Side Note Worth Flagging

The BBC's spoiler-avoidance coverage, directing UK viewers to a dedicated no-results iPlayer page, is minor but notable. Roughly a third of the World Cup's matches are scheduled during overnight hours for British audiences. The BBC is explicitly engineering a time-delay viewing experience. FIFA has not historically accommodated viewing-window concerns for European audiences when scheduling a North American tournament. That tension is real, even if it is a secondary story.

What Comes Next

The tournament is 39 days long. The U.S. and Canada hosting ceremonies are scheduled for Friday, June 12. The first question that cannot yet be answered: whether the fatigue accumulated by France, Portugal, and England in the Club World Cup era will actually show up in results, or whether squads like Brazil and Argentina, who entered that same 12-month stretch with somewhat lighter loads, translate rested legs into an early-round edge.