The 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup is just around the corner, with fans across the country ready for evenings spent cheering England on and watching the matches co-hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada.
The tournament is also popular with punters, with many fans looking to use betting sites to back the action.
Some of the available bets on the World Cup are self-explanatory, such as which team will win a match, and who’ll lift the Jules Rimet trophy after the final on 19th July. There are some lesser known ways to back England and the other teams throughout the tournament, though.
Here are some different ways you can bet on how the teams will perform at the World Cup.
Group Straight Forecast & Dual Forecast
These two bets are on which teams will finish first and second in a group, but with one key difference. A Dual Forecast bet is on which two teams will automatically qualify from a group in any order, while a Straight Forecast is a wager on the exact order of the top two teams.
For England’s Group L, for instance, a Dual Forecast bet on England and Croatia to qualify would just need those two teams to finish top in any order. A Straight Forecast bet on England to finish top and Croatia second would need the teams to finish in that exact order.
For backers looking to place these kinds of bets, or the more traditional ones such as backing England to win the World Cup, there is a special William Hill promo code for UK punters.
Stage of Elimination
Another popular way to bet on a team’s performance is the Stage of Elimination. This market is for backing when a team will be eliminated from the World Cup: in the Round of 32, Round of 16, quarter-final, semi-final, or be the defeated finalist.
This is an especially popular market for before the tournament even starts, as this is when the odds are typically strongest. It’s important to keep in mind that these markets are just for the knockout stages. To back a team to not make it out of the group, there’s a separate Group Not To Qualify market to use.
Highest Scoring Team
A particularly intriguing market is for the highest scoring team at the World Cup. There are always a lot of factors at play here, such as whether a team has a Golden Boot contender, are a naturally attacking team, and how deep into the tournament they’ll go.
Another major factor is whether a team is facing an opponent in the group stage who has a particularly leaky defence. In Group L, for instance, England face a Panama side who conceded 1.08 goals per game during qualification. Meanwhile, France play Iraq, who let in the most goals per game of any qualifier at 1.10.
The key to this market is balancing early games against opponents who can fall to heavy defeats, with the ability for a high scoring team to make a deep run.
These markets represent a range of different ways to bet on how the teams will perform at the World Cup. As ever with betting, it’s vitally important to always play responsibly. This means fully researching and understanding any new types of bet before placing them, and always sticking to your budget.
