The Spanish basketball team already knows the match schedules for the group stage of the Women’s World Cup that will be played in 2026 from September 4 to 13 in Berlin, capital of Germany. Miguel Méndez’s team, who qualified for the Pre-World Cup through the fast track, faced their first obstacles on April 21 in search of the first World Cup title in their history: Germany, Mali and Japan. In theory, a somewhat affordable group.
But the schedules do not allow the Spanish women to rest as much as they would like. They will open the intercontinental event before the hosts on Friday, September 4 at 5:45 p.m. Not a day later, having rested just over 12 hours, our team will face Mali at 11:30 on Saturday the 5th in a match, a priori, affordable.
The Spanish national team players celebrate during a match.
The Hispanics will finish this group stage with the clash against Japan on Monday the 7th at 5:50 p.m. The qualifying schedules will be announced later, in case of reaching the final phase. Some crossings that have little to do with the difficulty offered by the first matches of this World Cup…
A path that hardens from quarters
The first phase leaves Spain with many options to advance to the next round, avoiding the quarterfinal qualification match. But all this becomes tougher from the direct qualifiers for the title: if they finish as first in the group, they would avoid having to face the classification match, but they could face, among others, in the quarterfinals against great teams such as Belgium, Australia, China or Italy, above ours in the ranking.
Groups A and B seem to have a more open path towards the round of 16 matches, but that implies that the next match will be much more demanding.
A cross that they would have to overcome to reach the semifinals, where the difficulty, far from becoming tougher, increases to the highest level: they would face the best in the world, the United States, with whom we already lost in the qualifying phase, which was the rival to avoid until the final.