With the 2022 World Cup finally getting under way in Qatar, all eyes will be on who can hit the ground running and give themselves an easy route through the group stages and into the knockout rounds. Brazil are currently favourites to lift the famous trophy with most bookies, but they haven’t actually won the World Cup for 20 years. Argentina are also high up in the favourites list, but they haven’t won the tournament for 36 years.
Reigning champions France have some injury concerns but will still be heavily fancied by some, and then you have other contenders such as Spain, England, Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands and of course Germany. Get our brilliant 48-page Wales at the World Cup souvenir guide to the tournament.
So what will actually happen at the World Cup, and who is likely to face who as we progress beyond the group stage and into the second round, the quarter-finals, the semi-finals and the final itself? Let’s take a look at the likely scenarios as we head through the tournament.
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The group stage gets under way on Sunday (November 20) and each team will play three games, with the top two in each group going through to the next round. The groups are as follows:
Group A: Qatar, Ecuador, Senegal, Netherlands
Group B: England, Iran, USA, Wales
Group C: Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Poland
Group D: France, Australia, Denmark, Tunisia
Group E : Spain, Costa Rica, Germany, Japan
Group F: Belgium, Ghana, Morocco, Croatia
Group G: Brazil, Serbia, Switzerland, Cameroon
Group H : Portugal, Canada, Uruguay, South Korea
Groups A and B will be ‘paired’ together when it comes to sorting out who plays who in the second round, and the same will apply to groups C and D, groups E and F, and groups G and H - this means that the winner of the first group in the pairing will play the runner-up of the second group, so the winner of group A will play the runner-up of group B, and the runner-up of group A will play the winner of group B, and so on, starting from December 3.
Now, obviously, betting odds and world rankings are never 100 per cent accurate in predicting what is going to happen, and one of the best things about World Cups is that they always tend to throw up a couple of shocks. Nevertheless, if we look at the current and latest odds, supplied by Betfred, this is how World Cup 2022 is likely to pan out.
According to the favourites list to win the World Cup outright, the eight group winners will be Netherlands, England, Argentina, France, Spain, Belgium, Brazil and Portugal , while the eight runners-up will be Senegal, USA (sorry, Wales fans), Poland, Denmark, Germany, Croatia, Switzerland and Uruguay . If all of that comes to fruition as the betting odds suggest, the second round fixtures will be as follows:
Netherlands v USA
Argentina v Denmark
France v Poland
England v Senegal
Spain v Croatia
Brazil v Uruguay
Belgium v Germany
Portugal v Switzerland
The quarter-finals of the World Cup will take place on December 9 and 10. Looking at the order of second-round fixtures noted above, the first quarter-final will be between the winners of matches five and six, the second quarter-final will be between the winners of matches one and two, the third quarter-final will be between the winners of matches seven and eight, and the final quarter-final will be between the winners of matches three and four.
With that in mind, again looking at the latest odds, the quarter-final line up would be:
Spain v Brazil
Netherlands v Argentina
Germany v Portugal
France v England
Some very tasty-looking fixtures there, with some big names having exited the tournament by this stage even if we’re just going on the betting odds. All eight teams by this stage would fancy their chances of winning the World Cup, but the opposition is not going to get any easier by the time we get to the semi-finals, which will be played on the evenings of December 13 and 14. Again, according to the latest odds, those fixtures will be:
Brazil v Argentina
Germany v France
Another couple of potentially incredible fixtures, especially the first one as arch-rivals Brazil and Argentina battle it out for a place in the World Cup final in what promises to be the last tournament on the world stage for Lionel Messi and possibly Neymar. According to the likely pathways and expected form of both sides, it is the semi-final where they are most likely to meet, rather than the final itself. Speaking of the final, that will be held in Lusail on December 18, kicking off at 3pm (UK time), and will consist of a seismic battle between:
Brazil v France
These two titans of world football have won the World Cup seven times between them - Brazil with a record five wins and France with two, most recently taking home the trophy in Russia four years ago. They have played each other four times in previous World Cups, with Brazil winning 5-2 in a quarter-final encounter in Sweden 1958 when a youngster named Pele scored a hat-trick.
They met again in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico when France won on penalties after a 1-1 draw. Their next encounter was the World Cup Final in Paris in 1998, which France won comfortably 3-0, and their most recent World Cup clash was in 2006 in Germany, when a Zinedine Zidane-inspired France won 1-0. They have met in three friendlies since then, with France winning one and Brazil winning the other two.
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According to the betting odds, it will be Brazil taking home the trophy for a sixth time, pushing them further ahead of Germany and Italy who have both won the tournament four times apiece, and Argentina and France who have both won it twice. But as we know in football, things don’t often pan out exactly as planned. Brazil are often favourites before the start of a World Cup given their rich pedigree in the tournament, but they’ve only reached one semi-final (which they lost 7-1) in the last twenty years. It will be up to them this time around to prove the bookies right.
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