The 26 Standings

The group stage is done. All 72 matches have been played across 36 days, and the bracket for the knockout rounds is now fixed — no more permutations to argue over, no more goal-difference arithmetic to run at midnight. What the tournament has produced so far is a record for another pipeline to parse; what matters this Friday morning is that the calendar has gone quiet for a day, a rare pause before elimination football begins and the margin for error drops to zero.

It is worth sitting with that briefly. The group stage at a 48-team World Cup is a sprawling, occasionally maddening thing, and its completion is its own kind of landmark. From here, every match ends with someone going home. The bracket will carry its own logic now, and the next few days will clarify it considerably.

— the morning line, generated from the day's data