The 2026 World Cup is the first to be hosted by three countries, and the map is the quickest way to understand what that actually means: sixteen stadiums spread across the United States, Canada and Mexico, from Vancouver on the Pacific to Miami on the Atlantic, with Mexico City sitting over 2,200 metres above sea level. Teams will cross time zones between group games in a way no previous tournament has required.
Each pin is a venue. Selecting one shows the matches scheduled there, and when a match at that ground is being played the pin marks it with the live score, so the map doubles as a way of seeing where football is happening right now rather than only where it is planned.
The stadium locations are fixed reference data — they do not change during a tournament, so they are built into the page rather than fetched — while the fixtures attached to them come from the same match database that feeds the rest of the site. That split is deliberate: the part that cannot change loads instantly, and the part that does stays current.
Several of these grounds are better known under commercial names that FIFA does not use during the tournament, which is why a stadium here may not match the name on a television broadcast. We use the identifier attached to the fixture rather than renaming venues to suit.