The Death of the ‘Group of Death’

In January 2017, FIFA announced that the 2026 World Cup would be the first to implement an expansion of the World Cup Finals from 32 teams to 48. Since we’re now in 2026, and know how the groups look for this summer’s tournament, there is something that is pretty different about this tournament and some of our favourite iterations from the past.

In fact, this difference is shared in the UEFA Champions League too. In the 2024/25, the competition added 4 more teams (32 to 36) and ditched the initial group stage in favour of a league system, wherein teams will play 8 different teams and be pooled in a league-like system against the other 35 teams. The final standings would then determine who would move on to the knockout phase, with an additional playoff stage for those that finish between 9th and 26th.

But what this means for both the FIFA World Cup and UEFA Champions League is that there are no longer any ‘groups of death’. A group of death is just the name colloquially given to a group that contains two or more teams that fans or pundits believe are truly formidable.

In this year’s World Cup, the only group you might consider challenging for one of the top teams would be Group I, which features France, Senegal, and Norway. But that pales in comparison to some of the crazy groups we’ve seen in years past.

For many fans, this made the group stages of these competitions feel a little more exciting than they otherwise would if you just consider that nothing is one at that stage. Without these star-studded groups, the group stages, in their relative insignificance, can feel extremely mundane and narrative-less.

In the 2014 World Cup, Group B contained the defending champions Spain, a star-led Netherlands squad, and a very exciting Chile side. This made all of the Group B games at that World Cup high priority watches and covers for fans and industry members respectively. Ultimately, the defending champions were the ones to be bounced out in the group stage, which was almost as exciting and newsworthy as anything else that happened at the tournament.

Such entertaining groups were harder to come by in the Champions League due to the way that UEFA would build the groups, with considerations made to same country matchups and group balancing. However, if a fringe-good team caught a perceived good team on a bad night, the entire group could be up for grabs. For example, in 2014-15, Group B was comprised of perennial European favourites Real Madrid, Liverpool (who had just been inches away from winning the Premier League the season before), FC Basel, and Ludogorets Razgrad. To most, this group looked like a forgone conclusion; but a poor showing from Liverpool, along with a surprising FC Basel side, saw the Premier League being eliminated from the competition as the Swiss team was the one to finish behind Real Madrid in second.

With the new formats, these early stage storylines are all but lost as the big teams are split so thin in the World Cup groups, and in the Champions League, any slip up from a big team can be rectified as they now have much more margin for error than they did before.

What this means is that the idea of a ‘group of death’ is all but dead in modern football, and we can now only reminisce over some of the most memorable early-tournament storylines that we saw in the past. It’s a shame of course, and we may never see any groups as entertaining as those in years gone by, but we can still revel in the entertainment of their chaos well into the future.