Fishermen, typhoons and financial turmoil: The teams already out of the 2026 World Cup

There are 976 days until the 2026 World Cup final on July 19, 2026, and right now that feels a long way off.

CONCACAF’s qualifiers don’t start until March 2024. Oceania’s get going in September next year. UEFA’s start in March 2025, and those nations have the European Championship to both earn a place in and play at first.

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The African qualifiers started on November 15, but there will be two AFCONs before they get to the USA, Canada and Mexico.

The South American World Cup qualifiers have begun, but since at least six and most likely seven of the 10 nations involved will go through, jeopardy is at a minimum and of more immediate interest is the 2024 Copa America.

For some though, the World Cup dream is already over.

The Asian Football Confederation’s qualifying process is multi-layered: ultimately the teams that make it will be decided by the top two finishers in three six-team groups, with third and fourth-placed teams getting a couple more chances via some repechage rounds.

But to even reach those groups you have to finish first or second in one of nine four-team pools. No second chances there: come third, and you’re out.

And yet, to even reach that pre-qualifying stage, 20 of the continent’s lowest-ranked teams met in 10 pre-pre-qualifying ties in October. Two legs, winner goes through, loser goes home.

All of which means 10 countries (11, if you count Eritrea, who have withdrawn) have already been knocked out of the 2026 World Cup, the best part of three years before the actual tournament starts and months before many nations have even thought about their own qualifiers.

Farewell, then, to Macau, Mongolia, Bhutan, Laos, Maldives, Brunei, Timor-Leste, Cambodia, Guam and Sri Lanka. We barely knew ye.

But the stories of the teams involved make you realise that the World Cup isn’t just about who’s there in the USA, Canada and Mexico in 2026. It’s about so much more than that.

English football fans of a certain age will remember Andy Morrison.

A robust Scottish centre-back, he joined Manchester City in 1998 and was a key man in their dramatic promotion from the third tier in 1999. These days though, he’s head coach of Sri Lanka.

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Not that he’s been able to do much coaching since taking the job in May 2022. When he arrived the country was in political turmoil, with anti-government demonstrations on the streets and a chronic shortage of pretty much anything, from food to fuel, for most of the population.

The domestic league had stopped that January and the national team hadn’t played a game since the previous November. They played three Asian Cup qualifiers in June, but that was it for the next 15 months.

Then in January 2023, FIFA announced that the Football Federation of Sri Lanka had been suspended, after finding there had been government interference in the Executive Committee elections earlier that month. That meant the national team were banned from playing any games, and even put their participation in the early World Cup qualifiers in serious doubt.

However, the ban was lifted after more suitable elections were held on September 29. A new committee was sworn in three days later, and 10 days after that, Morrison’s team faced Yemen.

“It’s been an eye-opening, challenging period,” says Morrison, deploying significant understatement. “I couldn’t have really walked into a more difficult situation. If you go back to May and June 2022, things were as bad as they can be, but the country has come a long way since then, as has the football.”

Day off yesterday , my left back Harsha Fernando 40 caps for Sri Lanka invited me to his for dinner with his family .
When our eyes and heart are open the world is a beautiful place 🇱🇰🙏⚽️⚽️

— Andy Morrison (@AndyMorri5on) September 24, 2023

Morrison had to gather his players together and not just prepare them for their first international match in more than a year, he had to prepare most of them for their first match of any description in that time.

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None of his team are currently professionals, so they came from their day jobs in the fishing industry or the Colombo markets. The first part of the preparatory camp, before any actual fitness work or — god forbid — tactical planning could take place, was to ensure the players lost the weight they had inevitably put on in their time away from the game.

“You could have conversations with players over the phone and send them some simple bodyweight exercises and running drills — that’s all we could do,” says Morrison.

“Two weeks before the game, the lads were getting to 35 minutes of a session and pulling up with cramp, such was the intensity of the training we had to put them through to get them ready. You had sleepless night as a coach, because you foresee the worst. We couldn’t even arrange a practice game in Colombo, because there was nobody to play.

“It’s impossible to get your head around how difficult that was.”

Taking all of this into account, it’s frankly a minor miracle that they got through the games at all, never mind play well. Yemen sit 46 places above Sri Lanka in the FIFA rankings. In one of the other qualifiers, Indonesia beat Brunei 12-0 on aggregate. By rights, this should have been a demolition.

It was not. Yemen won the first leg 3-0 and the second ended in a 1-1 draw. Morrison’s voice is rich with pride as he enthuses about his team.

“We were magnificent in the first game. For me, it was five times the performance of the second game. In terms of expected goals, we were above Yemen. We had six corners to their one. We had 11 chances to their five, and somehow lost the game 3-0. There was one free kick and a 30-yard drive into the top corner, then a very good individual goal.

“People will say, ‘Oh, 3-0, good effort’ — but it was so much more than that. Fifteen months without a game of football then going into a World Cup qualifier is unheard of. What the players and staff did was remarkable.”

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The future looks brighter, though. The new federation has been voted in for the next four years, which hopefully suggests stability of some description. The domestic league should be up and running again soon. Sri Lankan football has a relationship with the Aspire Academy, the facility in Doha headed by Tim Cahill that essentially built the Qatar national team from scratch, and they are offering support. Morrison has been working on recruiting players from the diaspora and with Sri Lankan heritage.

“The future is really positive and we’ve come through a really challenging period. It can only improve, and I firmly believe it will. We will be able to look back and say, ‘Do you remember just what we had to deal with?’. It will never get as bad as it was.”

Jason Cunliffe is frustrated.

It’s not just because the Guam national team, of which he is captain, are out of World Cup contention having lost 3-1 on aggregate in a couple of close encounters with Singapore. It’s more because he thinks there is more potential in his team than their results reflect.

“Call me naive,” he says, having interrupted a barbecue to speak to The Athletic, “but I’ve always thought that we are capable of something more. And I still think we are.”

He’s arguably not being naive, because they have been capable of more.

Back in the qualifying stages for the 2018 World Cup, they were in a lofty enough position to be given a bye past this initial qualifying round. They were drawn in a tricky group but beat Turkmenistan and India: it wasn’t enough to advance to the next stage towards the World Cup, but because of the way things were structured it did earn them a spot in the third qualifying round for the Asian Cup.

Those were relative glory years for Guam — a tiny island in the Pacific which is not an independent nation, rather an overseas territory of the USA — under English coach Gary White, about whom Cunliffe talks in glowing terms. Since then, things haven’t been quite as good: in the 2022 qualifiers, Cunliffe scored a hat-trick against Bhutan as they got through the first round, but Guam then lost all eight group games by an aggregate score of 32-2.

Broadly though, the problems have been off the pitch. In 2017, Richard Lai, the former president of the Guam FA, was involved in the FIFA corruption scandal and banned from football for life after admitting he accepted a bribe of nearly $1million (£825,000), including around $100,000 in return for voting for Mohammed bin Hammam in the 2011 FIFA presidential elections.

A year earlier, Guam had been forced to withdraw from the Asian Cup qualifiers, essentially because the federation said they couldn’t afford the travel expenses, which they said would have cost $1.2m, releasing a statement that said participating would place “strain on the organisation’s financial capabilities”.

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“That obviously set us back,” deadpans Cunliffe. “We found out through the press.”

It feels slightly absurd that the very participation of a nation in a World Cup could be prevented by finances, when the game is — at the top level at least — swimming in money.

But it remains a constant problem (they were unsure whether they would be able to participate in these qualifiers until fairly late in the day) for a team from a place as small as Guam, but Cunliffe expresses his frustration that, in his view, efforts to raise funds have not been up to scratch.

“If you’re not maximising these things, and then your excuse as to why we are not doing certain things is that we can’t afford it, that’s a problem to me. The fan shop (recently launched to sell replica jerseys and so forth) is great, but why weren’t we doing this in 2011?”

The Singapore tie was close, but also exposed some of the problems that a team like Guam faces that a nation higher up the food chain simply wouldn’t. In May, Typhoon Mawar swept across the island with winds of up to 140mph, leaving a trail of destruction that included the floodlights at the national stadium.

Of course, there wasn’t the money to replace them, so Guam had to face Singapore in the afternoon, which meant playing in the heat and that many fans weren’t able to head along and watch.

“We did enough to get a result,” says Cunliffe. “We had an early shout for a penalty. We had chances in the first half. If we get the penalty, I’m scoring. If we take those chances, we get the result. At this level, the margins are so small. I always believe, but unfortunately things didn’t go our way.”

Cunliffe is 40, and while he has no immediate plans to retire, his mind has been on improving his team’s lot beyond his contributions on the pitch. He has flirted with a couple of coaching roles within the national set-up, and has just run for a fourth time for a seat on the federation’s executive committee. He has been unsuccessful all four times.

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But despite his clear irritations, Cunliffe looks back on his career to date with pride.

“This was my third World Cup qualifying campaign,” he says. “Whether it’s two matches or 10, when it’s all said and done in the history books, our country is there and my name is there. I’ve got four goals, including a hat-trick. When you’re getting older, you definitely start to think about those things more. It definitely makes you proud.

“Guam in the Chamorro (native) language is ‘Guahan’ — the literal translation of that is ‘we have’. We have each other. We have enough.”

“I’m getting chills now just talking about it,” beams Niki Torrao, talking to The Athletic over Zoom from his day job as a sales director at the Sands Resort in Macau.

Torrao is surprisingly chipper for someone whose team has just lost their World Cup qualifier 5-1 on aggregate to Myanmar, all of those goals coming in the first leg.

But the reason Torrao is contented is that he was responsible for the one.

Born in South Africa, Torrao moved to Portugal when he was four, then to Macau when he was nine. At 16, he decided he wanted to try making it as a professional, so travelled on his own back to Portugal, where he was on the books of Primeira Liga side Estrela da Amadora.

After he was released by them, he dropped to the third tier, but the money was barely enough to live on so he went to university and played in the regional leagues. That was when he met his wife, and they decided to move back to Macau, a former Portuguese colony that is now officially a ‘special administrative region’ of China.

It is a tiny collection of peninsulas and islands not far from Hong Kong, with a population of about 680,000. You’ll probably know it more for its large number of high-end casinos than for its football.

At that point, Torrao had basically given up on football, but eventually started playing for local teams and made his international debut in 2011.

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This was his fourth World Cup two-legged qualifying tie, but his seventh actual game. They’ve only won one of those, at home to Sri Lanka in the 2022 qualifiers, but that game took place in June 2019, shortly after terrorist attacks in Colombo that left 269 people dead. The Macau federation decided it wasn’t safe to travel to the return, a second leg on neutral grounds was proposed but couldn’t be agreed upon by all parties, so Sri Lanka were awarded a 3-0 walkover.

Torrao still carries a sense of what might have been, but the goal against Myanmar was enough to ensure that he won’t retire unfulfilled.

“At the time I scored, it was the equaliser. It made us believe. It made me believe. Unfortunately, things didn’t go well after that, but football is about moments. That was one of the most important moments in my career. It’s like someone at Harry Kane or Cristiano Ronaldo’s level scoring at the World Cup.

“Up until now, it was the only competition I had played in when I hadn’t scored a goal. I had this as an objective: I can’t end my career without scoring a goal in the World Cup qualifiers. That was the reason that when I scored there was a lot of emotion.

“For a player like me… to reach a level where you can score a goal for a national team in a World Cup qualifier… it makes it all worth it. You try to tell your kids: I’m not Ronaldo, I’m not playing for Real Madrid or at the World Cup or whatever, but at the level I play, I’ve reached what I can. You have to be happy for yourself.”

The 10 teams already knocked out will now have to wait until next year and the Asian Cup qualifiers before they have any meaningful football. At least they are in those qualifiers, though. In past years these early elimination ties served both the Asian Cup and the World Cup, so the losers would be out of both tournaments in one.

And that is the main thing standing in the way of progress: games. Or lack of them. These teams all desperately need games to improve, and to perhaps not get knocked out at such an early stage next time.

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“Before, we had eight games in a year,” says Guam’s Cunliffe. “You could see the steady progress. But I’m in my 17th year and I have 66 caps. That says it all. If the big confederations and organisers say they want football for the world, there could definitely be more consideration for the smaller nations.”

Both he and Torrao express frustration that their campaigns are over after one tie, while teams in a similar position in Europe will get 10 qualifying games no matter what. They will still lose most of them, but they at least have scope to improve.

Luxembourg have won three games in the latest round of Euro 2024 qualifiers. Andorra have picked up results this year. The Faroe Islands beat Turkey last year. It’s not a guarantee of improvement, but it at least gives teams more of a chance.

“We only have one chance to do something,” says Torrao. “It’s two games. That’s it. There’s a lot of pressure. You have to be lucky with the draw. If you are unlucky with the draw, it’s goodbye.

“For us, maybe it would be a fair deal to have a group stage. Even if it was a group stage of lower-ranking teams, just to give more competition. Only with more competition… it would at least give us more possibilities, and we would grow for sure.”

At this point, Morrison says group-stage football would not be helpful for Sri Lanka. “We’re nowhere near (being able to compete): we don’t have the infrastructure, we don’t have the facilities, for those sort of competitive games.

“Further down the line, we will be in a position to compete. Maybe that knockout stage is to protect some of those countries who aren’t able to play six, eight games. I know how challenging it has been to just get to these games and play them, and not embarrass ourselves, never mind a group stage.”

There is a temptation to wonder why these teams bother, how they can muster the enthusiasm for another campaign that could be over in 180 minutes. But then you listen to Morrison talk about how magnificent his players were after 15 months without football, and Cunliffe talk about the brotherhood that exists between him and his team-mates and Torrao’s absolute joy at being able to say he scored a World Cup goal, and you remember.

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“When you’re in it… in football anything can happen,” says Cunliffe. “On any given day, anyone can lose. When I go into these qualifiers, I believe. It’s an amazing feeling, if I’m playing South Korea I will think I can sneak a 1-0. When we start these things, even against Singapore, until that whistle blew I thought we could find a way.”

(Top photo: Jill Espiritu/Guam Football Association)