Belgium 3 - 2 Senegal

The Round of 32 reaches Lumen Field (69,000 capacity) in Seattle on July 1, 2026, with kickoff at 1:00 PM PDT (UTC-7) as the winner of Group G meets one of the best third-place finishers.

Seattle has never hosted a World Cup match. The 1994 tournament went to nine American cities, and Seattle was not among them. The Sounders did not yet exist; MLS was not yet a league. The city’s football culture, now one of the most organised and sustained in the United States, was somewhere in the future. Today is Seattle’s first knockout World Cup fixture. The crowd at Lumen Field this afternoon has been waiting, in one form or another, for over thirty years.

Lumen Field holds the Guinness World Record for crowd noise at an outdoor sports venue. The NFL measured the decibel levels during Seattle Seahawks games and found nothing louder anywhere. The covered upper deck creates a bowl that bounces sound back down onto the pitch, and the effect is measurable: visiting teams make more communication errors, referees miss things, momentum shifts happen faster in this building than they do in open stadiums. That acoustic design was built for American football. It will apply equally today.

When is this match? A 1:00 PM PDT kickoff means 9:00 PM BST in London, 10:00 PM CEST in Paris, 5:00 AM JST the following morning in Tokyo, 6:00 AM AEST in Sydney, 5:00 PM BRT in Sao Paulo, and 1:30 AM IST in Mumbai. European viewers get a late-evening match to close the day’s football. Check Seattle time for local scheduling.

Group G features Belgium, Egypt, Iran, and New Zealand. The winner of that group arrives in Seattle knowing they topped a genuinely varied field. The third-place qualifier who meets them arrives knowing they have already beaten the odds once.

Group G’s best against a resilient third-place qualifier: Seattle’s World Cup debut, in the loudest outdoor sports venue on the planet.

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