New Zealand

The Story

New Zealand is back at a World Cup after 16 years. It's the gap that feels the most unfair in world football, because the 2010 team — the one that went unbeaten in South Africa and got sent home anyway — had earned something. They just hadn't earned enough points. Since then, four straight Intercontinental Playoff losses at the final hurdle. The pattern broke in 2025: New Zealand beat New Caledonia in the OFC final, then beat Saudi Arabia in the cross-confederation playoff, 1-0, on a late Chris Wood header.

Darren Bazeley, the English-born manager hired in 2023, has built this squad around a European-based spine deeper than any previous All Whites team: Wood up top, Stamenić and Sarpreet Singh in midfield, Cacace at left-back, Michael Boxall and Tim Payne in central defense, Max Crocombe in goal. The A-League fills the rest. It is not a team that will outscore anybody. It is a team that will defend for 90 minutes and hope Wood gets on the end of one cross.

Group K — Austria, Hungary, Chile, and the All Whites — is the most winnable group New Zealand has ever been drawn into, which isn't saying much for a country with three World Cup appearances. A point off any of the three would be the deepest the All Whites have ever been in a tournament.

3 Players to Know

Chris Wood

The captain, 34, New Zealand's all-time leading scorer, and Nottingham Forest's Premier League striker. He finished the 2024-25 season as the fifth-top scorer in the Premier League with 20 goals — a top-five finish in the best league in the world, which has, somehow, only partially been processed back home. A left-knee surgery in December 2025 ruled him out for five months; he returned in March 2026 and scored in his first match back, the Europa League quarterfinal. His World Cup fitness is the single biggest story hanging over this squad. If Wood is healthy in June, New Zealand has a striker who can punish any level of opponent. If he isn't, this is a very different team.

Marko Stamenić

The 23-year-old midfielder at Olympiacos in Greece, currently starting in Europa League football — the deepest European club run of any current All White. Born in Wellington to Serbian parents, came up through New Zealand's under-17 system, went to Red Star Belgrade as a teenager, and has now become the central midfielder Darren Bazeley builds around. He's everything Oceania Football hasn't historically produced: a technical, composed No. 8 who can genuinely keep up with top-tier European opponents. If the All Whites are going to nick a point off Austria or Chile in Group K, it goes through Stamenić.

Liberato Cacace

The 25-year-old left-back at Empoli in Serie A — born in Wellington, came up at Wellington Phoenix in the A-League, signed by Sint-Truiden in Belgium, then Empoli in 2023. He's a starter in Italian top-flight football and he's been the All Whites' most reliable defender since the 2022 Intercontinental Playoff. Left-footed, gets forward, capable of the occasional left-wing cross that nobody expects. Another player whose profile at home still hasn't caught up to what he's actually doing in Europe.

The Food

Signature Dish

The Kiwi meat pie is the sacred object — a palm-sized flaky pastry shell with steak-and-cheese or mince filling, eaten one-handed at a petrol station, a rugby match, or on the way into a soccer stadium. Sit-down-wise, roast lamb is the Sunday institution — New Zealand raises the best lamb on earth, and everyone involved knows it. Then the pavlova, a meringue dessert topped with cream and passionfruit or kiwifruit, which New Zealand and Australia will fight about ownership of until the end of time. The coffee, importantly: the flat white was invented here (depending on whom you ask, either in Wellington or Sydney; see the previous argument) and it is still the best in the English-speaking world.

Where to Eat in DFW

DFW does not have a Kiwi restaurant — the diaspora is small — so the move is The Aussie Grind (multiple locations, best is the Frisco flagship on Preston Road, with a second at 4887 Alpha Rd in Farmers Branch). Australian-owned, but the menu fully covers the shared Oceanic culinary space: proper meat pies, sausage rolls, lamingtons, ANZAC biscuits, and flat whites that will make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about coffee. The Frisco location stays open for Friday matches. For the lamb side of the Kiwi experience, any DFW steakhouse with a serious rack-of-lamb on the menu (Bob's, Knife, or Chamberlain's) will get the job done.

Fan Culture

All Whites support is modest, self-deprecating, and fiercely loyal — a fan base that for most of its history has been small enough that the players knew some of them by name. The "Yellow Fever" supporters group is the traveling contingent; it shows up in matching shirts, sings unreasonably through 90 minutes, and treats every draw as a moral victory. Home matches at Eden Park in Auckland or Sky Stadium in Wellington come with haka-adjacent energy — not the Maori All Blacks version, but a distinctly Aotearoa register of noise that includes every pre-match national anthem being sung in both English and te reo Maori. The smell at a watch party is a meat pie and a bottle of Steinlager, and someone is definitely watching the rugby on the side screen between halves.