Ranking the World Cup group games in Foxborough, from worst to best

The group stage of the 2026 World Cup will draw to a close this weekend, with the final one in Foxborough finishing with a 4-1 France win over Norway on Friday.

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With the five local group games in the books, here’s a ranking of the matches from worst to best after two big weeks at Gillette Stadium.

The weather was bad, the game was worse.

The 0-0 draw between England and Ghana is the obvious choice here, and not just purely because it finished goalless.

On a drizzly afternoon in Foxborough, the lack of energy in the crowd was only matched by the lack of energy on the pitch, where England had few ideas to unlock a Ghana team that was very happy to finish all square.

Throw in a shoddy refereeing performance — how England defender Ezri Konsa got away with that hip-high, flying tackle in the penalty box, we’ll never know — and you have one of the biggest duds of the entire tournament to date.

You can’t fault the atmosphere at the opener in Foxborough on June 13. The Scottish and the Haitians both brought the noise, particular during some rousing national anthems.

After that, it wasn’t a game with a ton of quality, with the only goal coming from a John McGinn mis-hit volley that deflected into the Haitian net.

Outside of the 90 minutes, though, it might have been the most fun day of this World Cup around these parts.

A game that probably deserved more goals than it got, Morocco’s 1-0 win over Scotland had a very good atmosphere — the Moroccans were every bit as loud as the Scottish — and two teams that put on a pretty good show on a sunny afternoon at Gillette.

In the end, the only goal came after 71 seconds on a brilliant finish from Morocco’s Ismael Saibari.

The rest of the game was pretty open (aided in part, perhaps, by some rather lenient refereeing) and could’ve produced further goals, but the finishing touches were lacking in a 1-0 result.

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Probably the game with the greatest homogeny of names on the backs of shirts, much of the crowd was there to see Erling Haaland, and Erling Haaland delivered.

Norway’s superstar striker scored twice on his World Cup debut, once in his typical poaching style, once in a less typical “scaring the daylights out of the goalkeeper” style.

The game also featured Iraq’s one high point of a very rough tournament, with Aymen Hussein’s equalizer in the 39th minute standing as the Iraqis’ only goal of the tournament. The roar when it hit the net was deafening.

The first half in particular was excellent and competitive, the weather was great, and the fans were fantastic, all for the cheapest ticket of any of the local World Cup games. What’s not to love?

If you can find it in your heart to forgive the fact that Norway played its B team, resting basically its entire starting lineup (including Haaland), it was a really lovely day out in Foxborough.

The weather was stunning, the atmosphere was great — the French never stopped singing, the Norwegians kept rowing — and the game had more quality than any other in the group stage here.

We saw genuine superstars, including Kylian Mbappé and Ousmane Dembélé, the latter of whom treated the crowd to a stunning first-half hat trick.

The Norwegians, despite playing a fully rotated team, still put in a pretty respectable performance. The lopsided scoreline, in the end, was more about French brilliance than Norwegian inferiority.

Was it worth the four-figure get-in price? If you’re French, probably. If you’re a Norwegian 10-year-old whose parents took out a second mortgage so you could see Haaland play in the flesh, perhaps not.

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