Get free access to the most comprehensive World Cup coverage in The Athletic app.What if you had to draft an all-time World Cup XI, containing any player who has featured in any of the tournaments between 1930 and 2022? Tricky.What if you had three colleagues doing exactly the same thing, eager to beat you to players you had carefully earmarked for your team? Difficult.And what if an annoying editor kept interjecting with spurious wildcard rounds to spice things up? Fiendish.Welcome to The Athletic’s World Cup draft.With World Cup fever building in traditional fashion ahead of the 2026 edition, we gathered four writers — Oliver Kay, Felipe Cardenas, Carl Anka and Jack Lang — and challenged them to do the above.They duly disappeared into their analysis bunkers and/or mind palaces, and some of them (clue: J*** L***) emerged with more notes than frankly seemed necessary. It was clear everyone was taking this very seriously, and rightly so.The Athletic’s writers took this process seriously (The Athletic)Gameplans/pre-draft tacticsJack: Drafts are dynamic, twisty things. They require agile thinking and flexibility. It doesn’t make sense to pick a formation ahead of time, so I didn’t do that. I did, however, study Drawmaster Duncan’s list of possible wildcard rounds like a monk would pore over the Bible. My system involved at least nine Post-it notes, an abandoned spreadsheet and 82 per cent of a mental breakdown.The resulting list reflects the fact that actually winning the thing is a huge deal — and winning it more than once is astonishing. I don’t mind a couple of brilliant nearly-men, but I want my team to be steeped in sweet, sweet glory.Felipe: I grew up playing in the era of the traditional 4-4-2. Two defensive midfielders would tackle, recover and distribute. A No 10 and another creative midfielder played behind two strikers. That was my original formation before the draft began. By the seventh round, I believe, it became clear that a 4-3-3 was more suitable.Oli: I was unsettled when Jack mentioned Post-it notes and spreadsheets. My prep was limited to 10 minutes on the train to the office, scribbling down my preferred choices in each position.What jumped out was that certain positions — notably centre-forward — had five or six roughly equal candidates, so if I couldn’t get Pele or Diego Maradona, who to me are the ultimate World Cup players (yes, above even Lionel Messi), then I was happy to focus on the spine of my team initially, knowing there would still be some great attacking players left on the table after that…Carl: Build around a 4-3-3. Try to remember how many German sides have made deep World Cup runs. Don’t let Italy’s recent lack of qualification cloud your memory of how good they’ve been at World Cups. Don’t panic in the wildcard rounds…Lionel Messi: a certain pick, but who for? (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)The rulesThere was a palpable air of tension as we gathered at The Athletic’s London HQ to conduct the draft. If you listened carefully you could hear World Cup icons being muttered. ‘Pele, Maradona, Cruyff. Pele, Maradona, Cruyff.’ Big names, but only one person would get their hands on them. Classic drafting.Here’s how we set up. Sat in a classic horseshoe formation (with Filipe beamed in from the US on the video screen), we made Jack and Carl — the two drafters sat at either end of the horseshoe — conduct some classic rock/paper/scissor to decide who would go first. The result was an early win for Jack. But would he make the most of getting to go first?The rules were simple, each drafter could pick any available player from any team from any World Cup — but to make things a little more interesting, 12 wildcard rounds had been devised to force everyone out of the comfort zone. I (Drawmaster Duncan, Commissioner Alexander, other monikers are available) was able to pick any of them to deploy at any point during the process, and in the end the four I chose were: