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Hector Vivas – FIFA/FIFA through Getty Photographs 
The draw will divide the 48 groups into 12 teams of 4. The groups will probably be pulled from 4 separate pots, that are decided by the groups’ rankings.
Pot 1 contains the three host nations — the U.S., Canada and Mexico — together with Spain, Argentina, France, England, Brazil, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
Pot 2 is Croatia, Morocco, Colombia, Uruguay, Switzerland, Japan, Senegal, Iran, the Korea Republic, Ecuador, Austria and Australia.
Pot 3 is Norway, Panama, Egypt, Algeria, Scotland, Paraguay, Tunisia, Côte d’Ivoire, Uzbekistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
Pot 4 is Jordan, Cabo Verde, Ghana, Curaçao, Haiti, New Zealand and the six remaining playoff groups that will probably be decided in March.
Groups in Pot 1 will probably be positioned within the prime place of the group they’re drawn into. Two groups in the identical confederation — the regional teams FIFA splits worldwide groups into — can’t be positioned into the identical group, aside from the European confederation UEFA, which has extra groups than there are teams.
In the course of the group stage, the groups in a given group play one another in a round-robin format. On the finish of the group stage, the highest two groups from every group and the highest eight third-place groups throughout all teams advance to the knockout stage.
The knockout stage is a single-elimination format, by which groups face off in a bracket format and should win to be able to advance to the subsequent spherical, with 5 whole rounds: the Spherical of 32, the Spherical of 16, Quarterfinals, Semifinals and the Remaining.
There’s additionally a third-place match performed between the losers of the Semifinals.
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