This Panama, right now
Almost every side at this tournament arrives mid-renewal, one generation handing off to the next; Panama is the conspicuous exception, and the refusal to renew is precisely what defines it. This is the oldest squad the country has ever taken to a World Cup, an average a shade past thirty and among the very oldest of all forty-eight, and it is a choice rather than an accident of the calendar. Christiansen has declined, for one more cycle, to hand the team to its under-twenty-fives, and the clearest evidence of the decision is the names he left at home.
Seven survivors of Russia remain — Aníbal Godoy, Fidel Escobar, Eric Davis, Amir Murillo, Yoel Bárcenas, José Luis Rodríguez and Ismael Díaz — but they are no longer the wide-eyed debutants of 2018; they are the load-bearing spine of the thing. Around them sits not a youth wave but a band of seasoned professionals collecting, at last, the World Cup their best years were denied by the Qatar miss: roughly nineteen of the twenty-six will play their first World Cup despite all the grey at the temples, an entire cohort that came of age in the gap between tournaments. The genuinely new faces are quality rather than projects, José Córdoba — the Norwich centre-back, the squad's most valuable footballer — chief among them.
Held against the team that went to Russia, the surprise is how little has actually turned over, and that stillness is the point. The golden generation that defined 2018 is gone to a man, but the side that succeeded it has been kept together so faithfully — through the Gold Cup final, the Copa América, the Nations League run — that the 2026 list reads as the 2024-25 team plus a year of mileage. The churn lives only at the margins: the sentimental recall of 38-year-old Alberto Quintero, robbed of Russia by a broken foot in a pre-tournament friendly and finally getting his World Cup eight years late; the cold omission of teenage prospect Kadir Barría; the injury loss of Edward Cedeño from the midfield depth. As Díaz framed it, the mentality is what has moved, not the personnel — they no longer come to live the experience, they come to compete in it.
The manager
Christiansen is a Spanish-Danish coach of a particular hybrid lineage — born in Hadsund to a Danish father and a Spanish mother, raised in Copenhagen, but football-formed in Catalonia after Barcelona signed him as a young striker in 1991 and set him to learn the game under Johan Cruyff. As a player he was a poacher of some pedigree across fifteen years in Spain, Greece, Denmark and Germany, the high-water mark a 2002-03 season at VfL Bochum in which he shared the Bundesliga's top-scorer award with Bayern's Giovane Élber. His coaching carried him from Cypriot football — a league title with APOEL — through a brief, unhappy Championship interlude at Leeds United, who sacked him in February 2018, and a season at Belgium's Union Saint-Gilloise, before Panama, his first national job, hired him in 2020.
It has become, by a distance, the finest and longest chapter of his career: six years, more matches than any coach in the country's history, and the distinction of taking Panama to a second World Cup after surviving the failure to reach the first of his tenure. His football descends from that Cruyffian schooling — clean build-up, defined roles, a side that wants the ball against lesser teams — but it bends hard toward caution against better ones, into a compact block, quick vertical transitions and well-drilled set-plays. His creed is stated without ornament: 'lo más importante es ser efectivo y sumar resultados,' he says, and if you do not gather points you do not progress. He picks on merit and marries himself to no player, a meritocracy that occasionally costs him in the dressing room and in the press box, and one that produced the squad's defining row. His contract expires after the tournament, with reported interest from Mexico, MLS and Spain leaving his future genuinely open — so this World Cup doubles as a verdict on the whole six-year project, and on the man who built it.
How they play
Panama under Christiansen is a side with two faces, and which one shows depends on the company it keeps. Against weaker opponents it wants the ball, building cleanly from the back in a four-based shape its coach calls home. Against the better ones — and in Group L that is all three — the local consensus is that he reaches for the back-three he drilled most recently and used to clinch qualification: a 3-4-2-1 that folds into a deep, compact 5-4-1, content to cede the ball, defend the box in numbers and live off the transition.
In possession. In the back-three the three centre-backs and the double pivot of Godoy and Carrasquilla carry the first phase, Carrasquilla — when his groin allows it — dropping between the lines to receive, turn his man and clip the pass that breaks a line. The shape is deliberately lopsided. Amir Murillo flies forward from right wing-back as the chief outlet and crosser, the whole right flank handed to him, while the left wing-back — Eric Davis or César Blackman — stays deeper to keep what is effectively a back-four rest-defence behind the ball. Ahead of them, two inside forwards, José Luis 'Puma' Rodríguez with Bárcenas or Díaz, play off a single mobile striker in Fajardo or Waterman, and the cleanest service tends to arrive from Murillo's overlap and from Davis's deliveries into the area.
Out of possession. There is no high press here, and the absence is a matter of identity, not nerve. Panama defends in a compact mid-to-low block, cedes the ball by design and waits for its moment, Godoy screening in front of a physical, experienced line. Against the group's heavyweights the back three becomes a back five as the wing-backs retreat and the two inside forwards tuck in, funnelling the opponent toward the touchlines to keep the central lane sealed — the mode local analysts judge Panama's most dangerous against bigger sides, because it asks them only to do the thing they do best. The hazard is the familiar one for an ageing team: being pulled apart if the first wave of pressure is broken, and fading in the legs late, as the second-half unravelling against Brazil laid bare.
The wrinkle. The defining wrinkle is who patrols the wide channel, and it is a confession about the whole approach. Christiansen has taken to fielding Cristian 'Fulo' Martínez — a central midfielder by trade — as a nominal wide forward purely for the defensive grid: 'hemos jugado con Fulo como extremo para tener orden y trabajo defensivo,' he explained after the Bosnia draw. Order over flair, function over fantasy, and exactly why the average-position map blurs between a 5-4-1 and a 4-4-2 from one phase to the next. The live tactical question that hangs over everything is no longer whether the system holds but how sharp its conductor is. Carrasquilla is the one player in the side who carries the ball through pressure and threads the pass that springs the wide men; he missed all three warm-ups with an adductor strain and, expected back for Ghana, will arrive a month short of competitive rhythm. With a rusty Carrasquilla, or without him, Panama becomes markedly more reactive — a team that defends well and creates little, leaning on its set-plays and its transitions to find the goal its open play struggles to.
On the projected XI — A consensus projection, not a team sheet — Christiansen names his XI about an hour before kickoff and has deliberately kept the shape ambiguous. This is the back-three 'best mode versus better teams' that he used to seal qualification and rehearsed in the Bosnia send-off; against an equal or lesser side he can revert to a back-four 4-3-3. Two rings mark live questions. Carrasquilla's is now about sharpness rather than availability: his adductor strain was diagnosed as mild with no rupture and a roughly two-week prognosis, he has resumed individual work, and both Christiansen and Mosquera publicly expect him for Ghana — but he had not rejoined full group training as of 7-8 June, the staff carried Cristian Martínez as the in-line replacement, and a month out of football leaves the start, as opposed to the squad place, genuinely open. Escobar's ring is fitness too: back surgery cost him most of 2026, his match-readiness is the staff's stated 'gran preocupación,' and Carlos Harvey is ready to take the third centre-back berth. At least eight slots are truly contested — the third centre-back, left wing-back (Davis or Blackman), the creative pivot, the left inside-forward (Bárcenas or Díaz) and the No. 9 (Fajardo or Waterman, close to a coin-flip). Godoy was rested through the warm-ups as a precaution and is reported fit for the opener, so he carries no ring.
The ceiling
The optimistic case opens with the format and ends with a dream Christiansen has said out loud more than once. Panama does not need to finish in the top two: the forty-eight-team World Cup sends the eight best third-placed sides into a new Round of 32, which converts 'win the group' (fantasy) into 'be a competitive third' (plausible) as the route into the knockouts. And that route runs through a single fixture — the opener against Ghana at BMO Field, framed across the Panamanian press as the must-not-lose hinge of the whole adventure, and a genuine coin-flip rather than a write-off, the one game in the three in which Panama are nobody's clear inferior.
The pedigree to take it is real, not wishful. This same core has reached a Gold Cup final, a Nations League final and a Copa América quarter-final, beaten the United States in a knockout and got out of a group containing better teams than itself. It defends in a block as well as anyone in CONCACAF; it carries genuine aerial size that makes a set-piece a live route to goal; and in Carrasquilla, when he is right, it has a midfielder good enough to control passages against quality. There is even a soft edge to aim at within the group — an ageing Croatia which, should it have already qualified by the second matchday in Toronto, may rotate and leave a door ajar.
So the summit is the one the coach keeps naming: be, in his phrase, the Morocco of this World Cup. Beat Ghana, prise a point from a second-string Croatia or a complacent England, and ride a best-third place into the last thirty-two, which the local press would rightly file among the greatest results in the country's footballing history. It would need a Carrasquilla who is not merely available but sharp, the veteran spine standing up across three games in ten days, and the set-pieces converting the half-chances that open play will not always provide. A long shot, all of it. But, for the first time in the country's history, a real one.
The floor
Dread has a case every bit as concrete, and it starts with the arithmetic of the dressing room: this is the smallest squad in the group by an order of magnitude — a little over thirty-four million euros of market value against an England side worth some forty times as much — and the talent gap is not a rumour. The warm-ups left their warnings scattered about. Brazil were superior almost throughout in a 6-2 win at the Maracanã, and the shape of the night told more than the scoreline did: Panama held them for a half and then faded physically after the break, the exact failure an old team fears across a compressed tournament. The 1-1 with Bosnia in St. Louis that closed the window was scratchy enough to leave the local word incertidumbre hanging over how this side will cope with real quality, even as Christiansen took comfort from a sharper second half.
The creative dependence is the next fault line, and it has only half-resolved. Carrasquilla missed every friendly and is expected back, but a month without a competitive minute is its own kind of doubt, and Panama's invention is thin enough that a blunted version of him narrows the path to goal as surely as his absence would. The defensive weakness is specific and cruelly timed: against Bosnia they conceded to a header from a cross, Nikola Katić rising to an Amar Dedić delivery, and now face Croatia and England, two of the most accomplished set-piece and aerial sides they could have drawn. An older back line exposed to pace in transition, in the acres behind an advancing Murillo on the right, is the other recurring soft spot.
The floor, then, is the ghost of 2018: three defeats, a heavy concession or two, and home before the knockouts, which remains the single likeliest path for a side ranked where this one is. The saving difference is organisation — this team is far better drilled than the one that shipped six to England — so the realistic bad outcome is less 'humiliated and pointless' than 'competitive, a goal or two of its own, and out.' Measured against a country that now expects to compete rather than merely attend, even that quieter exit would sting in a way Russia never did.
Realistic aim
Set the dream beside the dread and the honest expectation lands where the Panamanian press itself plants it: finish third in the group and chase the best-third backdoor from there. The Ghana opener is the swing — a point or a win and a knockout berth becomes a live pursuit; defeat and the group is all but gone before Croatia and England raise the level. The baseline most analysts privately hold is to win Panama's first World Cup match, score its first points, be competitive across all three, and clear the very low bar of Russia. The single thing that will tell us most is the opener: whether 'third' becomes history, or another group-stage exit dressed in better organisation.
Where it's won and lost
Strengths. Where Panama win their games: organisation and cohesion above all — a settled, battle-tested block, seven survivors of 2018 and years under one coach, drilled to defend deep, funnel play wide and strike on the transition through the pace of Murillo, Puma Rodríguez and Díaz; genuine aerial size in Córdoba, Andrade, Escobar and Fajardo that makes a set-piece a real avenue to goal; and, when fit and sharp, a top-tier CONCACAF midfielder in Carrasquilla alongside a born screen and leader in the record-cap captain Godoy.
Weaknesses. Where they come unstuck: a heavy reliance on Carrasquilla's fitness and rhythm, with little invention behind him; the oldest legs in the tournament, prone to fading late as they did against Brazil; a defence vulnerable to crosses and set deliveries — the precise threat Croatia and England carry, and the one Bosnia exposed with Katić's header — and one that can be hurt by pace in the space behind the advancing right wing-back; and, against elite opposition, a plain shortage of individual quality to turn a half-chance into a goal.
The squad
Goalkeepers
The undisputed goalkeeper, and the one position Christiansen never has to think about. Mosquera, known at home as 'Kuty', started the El Salvador clincher and all three June warm-ups, and he will be in goal against Ghana — a reliable shot-stopper rather than a sweeper who plays out from the back, which suits a side that intends to defend its box rather than dominate the ball. At 31 he is squarely in his goalkeeping prime, settled in Saudi Arabia with Al-Fayha, where he was a near-ever-present across the 2025-26 Saudi Pro League season. This is a first World Cup for a player who came of age in the long gap between Russia and now, and given the depth of the goalkeeping pool he should own the gloves through the tournament; behind the veteran spine he is one of the steadier, less-heralded constants of the Christiansen project.
The senior goalkeeper and the reassuring presence behind Mosquera, a veteran of 56 caps now at Nacional in Uruguay. His spring was disrupted by a torn right hamstring suffered against South Africa in late March, but he recovered in time to be named in the 26, and his sharpness after so few competitive minutes is the only real question hanging over him — one that matters little while Mosquera holds the position. At 35 this is, in all likelihood, a farewell tournament for a goalkeeper who has spent years as a dependable understudy and occasional starter. A long-serving squad man rather than a headline name, he is exactly the kind of experience a low-scoring underdog wants on the bench.
The third goalkeeper, who won the last gloves spot over the standby John Gunn after a quiet season at Marathón in Honduras with only a handful of league outings. At 32 and on four caps he is firmly squad depth, unlikely to feature unless misfortune strikes both men ahead of him; he kept goal in the rotated 4-2 win over the Dominican Republic, which is about the extent of the football he can expect here. A first World Cup all the same, and a reward for years in the wider pool.
Defenders
The clearest case of a Russia 2018 squad kid grown into the team's standout, and the engine of the whole lopsided plan. From right wing-back Murillo bombs forward to deliver the crosses and lead the counters down a flank that is effectively handed to him, the chief attacking outlet in a side that otherwise cedes the ball and waits. At 30 he is in his peak years and a second World Cup man, one of the squad's most valuable footballers; a January move from Marseille to Beşiktaş, however, left him light on minutes this spring — twelve Süper Lig appearances, a single goal and a single assist across under a thousand minutes — and his match-sharpness is a live concern. So too is the ground he leaves behind him: the space in behind an advancing Murillo is Panama's softest point in transition, and Ghana, fast and direct, will go looking for it. He is, regardless, indispensable to the way this team attacks, the bridge between the 2018 generation and the present one made flesh.
The future of the defence and, already, its present cornerstone. A left-footed, front-foot centre-back, quick across the ground and aggressive in the duel, he is the man tasked with leading the holding when Croatia and England load their crosses and corners into the box. At 24-25 he is the squad's most valuable footballer and the only one based in England, and his rise has been steep: two seasons ago a centre-back in the Bulgarian league with Levski Sofia, this past campaign a praised near-ever-present at Norwich City across a full Championship season — twenty-eight appearances, twenty-four starts, some 2,250 minutes, the local press calling it a drastic step forward. A first World Cup for the youngest senior figure in the back line, and the one most plausibly destined to anchor the next Panama as well as this one; his box discipline against the group's aerial heavyweights is close to the whole of Panama's defensive hope.
The last survivor of Panama's 2018 central defence and the organisational reference of the rebuilt line, now at Saprissa in Costa Rica. He is projected into the third centre-back berth, but his place is the most fragile of the back three: back surgery cost him most of 2026, his match-readiness is openly described by the staff as their great worry, and the in-form Carlos Harvey is ready to take the slot if he is not sharp enough to start. At 31 he is a seasoned international finally collecting the World Cup his cohort was denied by the Qatar miss, one of seven holdovers from Russia carrying the side's institutional memory. Whether his body holds across three games in ten days is one of the quieter questions of the group; on standing alone, he starts.
A composed, left-sided centre-back who reads the one-against-one well and brings the ball out cleanly from the back, at LASK in Austria. He has become a fixture of the back three across this cycle and is also a genuine aerial threat at the other end, getting on the end of Eric Davis deliveries from set-pieces. At 27 he is in his prime and a World Cup debutant, part of the band of seasoned professionals who matured in the gap between tournaments rather than the wide-eyed first-timers of 2018. A first-choice defender doing unglamorous, reliable work, he is among the more settled names on a teamsheet full of live calls.
The first-choice left wing-back and one of only two home-based players in the squad, back in Panama with Plaza Amador after years in Europe. In a deliberately asymmetric shape he is the quieter flank — holding deeper to keep what amounts to a back-four rest-defence behind the ball while Murillo flies up the right — but he is also the side's principal set-piece deliverer and a penalty taker, his crossing the cleanest route into the box from the left. At 35, with more than a hundred caps, he is among the elders of the older core, a 2018 holdover for whom this is in all likelihood a last World Cup. César Blackman pushes him for the role, but Davis's delivery and experience keep him narrowly ahead; a veteran whose value is now as much in his right boot as in his legs.
The athletic alternative on both flanks, and the chief competitor to Davis at left wing-back as well as cover for Murillo on the right, now at Slovan Bratislava. He started and scored in the very match that sent Panama to the World Cup, the 3-0 win over El Salvador, while Murillo was absent — a reminder that he is far more than a passenger. At 28 he is in his peak years and a World Cup debutant; the trade-off against Davis is the familiar one of legs versus delivery, and he played the Bosnia send-off at left wing-back on his weaker foot. A first-choice-adjacent rotation option whose pace gives Christiansen a different gear should a game open up.
A centre-back providing depth to the back line, at Puerto Cabello in Venezuela, who featured in the rotated friendlies and stabbed home Panama's equaliser against Bosnia from a corner scramble — a small but real reminder of his aerial threat at the other end. At 29 he is squarely a squad player and a World Cup debutant on twenty-odd caps, behind the settled trio and the versatile Harvey in the pecking order. Cover rather than a contender for a starting place, but a useful body in a unit built on size and set-pieces.
A vastly experienced centre-back now plying his trade at Turan-Tovuz in Azerbaijan, called on for the rotated Dominican Republic friendly and otherwise providing senior depth at the back. At 34 and on the wrong side of fifty caps he is a veteran squad man rather than a starter, his role to steady the second string and offer cover should injuries thin the line. A first World Cup at the close of a long career, and one of the elder presences holding the dressing room together rather than a name expected to feature.
A defender on the fringe of the squad, at Deportivo La Guaira in Venezuela, who appeared in the wholesale-rotated win over the Dominican Republic. At 27 and on a modest seventeen caps he is squad depth, behind a deep and settled defensive group, and unlikely to feature barring misfortune. One of the genuine reserves of the 26, here on merit through the cycle but well down the order.
At 24 the youngest defender in the squad and one of its few genuine youth picks, a centre-back at Pari Nizhny Novgorod in Russia who played the líbero role in the back three against Bosnia. He is emerging rather than established, with sixteen caps to his name and a World Cup debut ahead of him; in a squad built so pointedly on experience, his selection over the omitted teenagers is a quiet nod to what comes next. Depth for now, behind the settled trio, but among the handful of names with their best years still in front of them.
Midfielders
The captain, the all-time record cap-holder, and the emotional and positional spine of the older core — the living bridge from 2018 to now. He sits in front of the back line, reads the danger a beat before it forms and keeps the side compact; the whole defensive structure is built around his screening. His club season was a steadier affair at his age — some fourteen appearances and ten starts for San Diego FC in 2026 after a near-ever-present inaugural campaign that carried the expansion club to the Western Conference final — and he was rested through the warm-ups as a precaution, reported fit for the opener. At 36 this is, beyond reasonable doubt, his final World Cup, the closing act of a career that outlasted the golden generation he once played alongside and gave way to the side around him now. The last of an era and its anchor at once; when he steps away, an entire chapter of Panamanian football closes with him.
The creative hub of the midfield, and the single factor on which Panama's whole tournament most plainly turns. Known universally as 'Coco', he is the one player who carries the ball through pressure and threads the pass that releases the wide men; without him, or with a diminished version of him, the side becomes reactive and short of ideas, leaning on its set-pieces and transitions to find the goal open play struggles to provide. At 27 he is entering his peak in a first World Cup that should have been his stage to seize — but he left the Liga MX final on 24 May with a left adductor strain, missed all three warm-ups training alone, and arrives a month short of competitive rhythm. The medical picture has softened from genuine doubt to cautious optimism: a mild strain with no rupture, a roughly two-week prognosis, and both his coach and his goalkeeper publicly expecting him for Ghana, though he had not rejoined full group training as of early June and the staff carried Cristian Martínez as the in-line replacement. His club form before the injury was solid rather than spectacular — across the Liga MX Clausura with Pumas UNAM, twenty-one appearances, eighteen starts, two goals and two assists in around 1,600 minutes — but his importance to Panama dwarfs the numbers. The live question is no longer whether he plays but how sharp he can be after a month away; on that hangs the difference between a Panama that can control passages against quality and one that merely survives them.
Known as 'Puma', the chief dribble-threat and the most direct of Panama's attackers, a left-sided forward who beats his man, runs the channel and either crosses or cuts inside. He is projected to start as one of the two inside forwards and is a set-piece taker too — his corner led to the Bosnia equaliser. At 27 he is in his prime and a 2018 holdover finally getting meaningful World Cup minutes after watching from the margins as a young man in Russia. His club season was a full and productive one at FC Juárez in Liga MX — sixteen starts, two goals and four assists across the Clausura — and he was joint top scorer of qualifying. One of the seven survivors and a genuine first-choice piece of the attack, his pace is among the few things in this side that can hurt a better team on the break.
A two-footed wide attacker and free-kick taker, projected as the left inside forward in the asymmetric front line, at Mazatlán in Liga MX. He drifts inside off the flank to combine and takes set-pieces, and his place is one of the genuinely contested ones — the in-form Ismael Díaz pushes him hard for the same slot. At 32 he is a veteran in his last peak years and one of the seven Russia returnees, a player whose international standing has outlasted a club career spent largely between Spain and Mexico. This is, in all likelihood, his last World Cup. A first-choice-or-thereabouts attacker whose experience and delivery keep him in the frame even as the younger, hotter Díaz presses the case for change.
Known as 'Fulo', a central midfielder by trade, at Ironi Kiryat Shmona in Israel, whose role in this side tells you much about its priorities. Christiansen has taken to fielding him as a nominal wide forward purely for the defensive grid — 'order and defensive work', in the coach's own words — and he is also the in-line replacement at the creative pivot should Carrasquilla not be fit to start, having played there against Bosnia. At 29 he is in his peak years and a World Cup debutant, a useful, disciplined squad piece whose stock has risen precisely because of his willingness to do the unglamorous job. More important to the balance of the team than his profile suggests, he is the man the whole shape leans on if its creative hub is missing.
The polyfunctional swing piece of the squad, a defensive midfielder by trade at Minnesota United who is just as often pushed back to fill the right-sided third centre-back role in the back three. That versatility is precisely his value: he is the first man into the defence if Escobar's back does not hold up, and a pivot alternative alongside Godoy if Christiansen reverts to a four. At 26 he is rising into his prime and a World Cup debutant, one of the younger pieces Christiansen has kept and trusted. He is also an aerial presence on attacking set-pieces. Closer to the eleven than his squad-depth caps suggest, he is the kind of multi-position insurance every tournament side wants.
An attacking midfielder at Cobresal in Chile, and one of the squad's mild surprises alongside Quintero — a player who has held his place in the wider pool without ever being a fixture. At 30 he is in his peak years and a World Cup debutant on the fringe of the side, called on for the rotated friendlies and likely to be a bench option rather than a starter behind the settled creative names. Squad depth in a forward-light 26, here on merit through the cycle but some way down the attacking order.
At 24 one of the youngest players in the squad, a wide attacker at Universidad Católica in Ecuador, where he plays alongside Panama compatriots. A muscle injury threatened to cost him his place in late May — its resolution is, in fact, the reason the teenage Kadir Barría was left at home entirely — but he recovered and came off the bench against Bosnia. He is emerging rather than established, on around ten caps, and offers attacking depth from wide. A World Cup debut for one of the few names here with the bulk of his career still ahead of him, a glimpse of the future on an otherwise veteran list.
The most sentimental selection of the lot, and the emotional surprise of the squad reveal. Quintero, at 38 the oldest man in the squad, was named to the 2018 delegation but ruled out of Russia by a broken foot in a pre-tournament friendly, then drifted out of Christiansen's plans for years — only to be recalled now to finally play the World Cup he was denied eight years ago. A winger at home with Plaza Amador, one of only two domestic-league players in the 26, he is squad depth in footballing terms and an outspoken defender of the maligned Panamanian league off the pitch. This is unambiguously his last dance, a redemption granted late; he comes, in his own phrase, to compete, but his place here is as much a closing of a circle as a tactical choice.
Forwards
Panama's hottest attacker and its joint-leading scorer of all time, and the man pressing hardest to force his way into the starting line. He attacks the channels, runs in behind and presses from the front; in a side this short of cutting edge he is the likeliest to punish a loose moment from a bigger team, which is exactly why his name and Bárcenas's sit on the same contested slot. At 29 he is in his peak years and a third-time World Cup figure in a sense unique to him — the only Panamanian to have represented the country at under-17, under-20 and senior World Cups. His club season at Club León was the best in the squad — fifteen appearances, thirteen starts, five goals and five assists across the Liga MX Clausura, a team-best rating — and he took the Golden Boot at the 2025 Gold Cup with six goals, a tally that included a nine-minute hat-trick. Seventeen goals in fifty-odd caps make him, with Fajardo, the joint record marksman. A 2018 returnee now at the height of his powers, he is the side's most reliable source of a goal and arguably its most in-form footballer; that he is not a guaranteed starter says more about Christiansen's caution than about Díaz.
Projected to start as the lone striker, though the call is close to a coin-flip with Waterman. Fajardo is the mobile option up top — a No. 9 who presses the centre-backs and runs in behind rather than holding the ball up — and he started the two A-team warm-ups in the role. At 32 he is a seasoned international in his last peak years and a World Cup debutant, the joint all-time top scorer alongside Díaz on seventeen goals, and a joint top scorer of qualifying. His club football is in Ecuador with Universidad Católica, where he managed a modest three goals in fifteen league outings across a season interrupted by injury, with further goals in the Copa Libertadores. He is an aerial target on set-pieces as well, which matters in a side that treats them as a real route to goal. Whether he or the physical Waterman leads the line against Ghana is one of the last things Christiansen will settle; on the warm-up evidence, Fajardo holds the narrow edge.
The physical alternative at centre-forward, and the man whose late winner against the United States in the 2025 Nations League semi-final sent Panama to that final — a goal that sits among the most cherished of this whole era. He is the hold-up target to Fajardo's runner, and the striker race between them is genuinely open; Waterman started the clincher and the Bosnia send-off. At 35 he is a veteran for whom this is surely a last tournament, his career a late-blooming story: a pillar of Coquimbo Unido's first Chilean league title in 2025 before re-signing with the newly promoted Universidad de Concepción, where he opened the 2026 top-flight season with three goals in his first eleven appearances. A rotation striker with a knack for the decisive moment, he is exactly the kind of body Panama may want to throw on against a tiring defence.
A forward providing depth to a notably thin attacking unit of only four, at Saprissa in Costa Rica, who featured in the rotated win over the Dominican Republic. At 27 and on a dozen caps he is squad depth and a World Cup debutant, behind Díaz, Fajardo and Waterman in the order and unlikely to start; in a 26 that drew fan criticism for carrying only four out-and-out forwards, his selection was about balance as much as expectation. A reserve striker here to round out the squad rather than to lead the line.
- The squad's defining controversy was the omission of Kadir Barría — the 18-year-old Botafogo forward widely seen as the country's brightest prospect — kept only as a reserve and, in the end, not even travelling onward once Azarías Londoño recovered. Pressed on it by RPC's Edgardo Vidal, the usually unflappable Christiansen snapped back: 'Si meto a Kadir, dime un jugador que tengo que sacar.' A clear vote for trusted experience over youthful upside, in a squad already the oldest at the tournament.
- The sentimental counterpoint: the recall, at 38, of Alberto Quintero — named to the 2018 squad but ruled out of Russia by a broken foot in a pre-tournament friendly, and out of Christiansen's plans for years since. His selection to finally play the World Cup he was denied was the emotional surprise of the list.
- Edward Cedeño, a regular through the cycle, was ruled out by injury — a quiet but real subtraction from the midfield depth behind Carrasquilla, and part of why the staff carried extra cover in that position to Toronto.
- The genuinely live battles run the spine of the side: the No. 9 (Fajardo versus Waterman, near a coin-flip), left wing-back (Davis's delivery against Blackman's legs), the third centre-back should Escobar's back not hold up, and the left inside-forward slot (Bárcenas against the in-form Díaz) — none of them settled by warm-ups too rotated to settle anything.
The group
Where they come from
For most of its footballing life Panama was a baseball country with a national team that lost the matches that counted. The isthmus learned its sport from the canal-zone Americans, and the diamond, not the pitch, is where a Panamanian boy still dreams of the major leagues; the Sele grew up in that shadow, a second sport in its own land. Ten World Cup campaigns came and went without a single qualification, and the wound that a whole generation still carries was inflicted not by a defeat but by a goal scored a thousand miles away — the night in October 2013 when the United States, already eliminated, struck twice in stoppage time in Panama City to send Mexico to the intercontinental play-off in Panama's place. They call it el Aztecazo, and it is shown still, on slow news days, the way a country worries an old scar. The breakthrough, when it finally came, was worth every year of the wait: on 10 October 2017 Román Torres bundled in the winner against Costa Rica, the whole country exhaled at once, and the government declared the following day a national holiday. A nation of a little over four million had reached the World Cup, and it simply stopped to weep.
Russia, in the event, was a chastening education dressed as a fairy tale. Panama lost all three — 3-0 to Belgium, 6-1 to England, 2-1 to Tunisia — and flew home bottom of the group with eleven goals conceded and the gentle condescension of the wider game ringing in their ears. Yet the image that survives is not a scoreline; it is Felipe Baloy stretching to turn in Panama's first-ever World Cup goal against England, the veteran in the captain's armband wheeling away with his arms wide in a stadium that knew, even as the goals piled up at the other end, that it was watching a thing that could never happen for the first time again. That 2018 side was a romantic, veteran-built team of low blocks and bared teeth — the golden generation of Jaime Penedo, Baloy, Torres, Gabriel Gómez, Blas Pérez and Luis Tejada — and almost all of them stepped away in the weeks after Saransk, a coordinated farewell that left the cupboard looking suddenly bare.
What the federation did next is the true story of this team, and it is a story of patience that Panamanian football had never before been able to afford. They hired Thomas Christiansen in 2020 to rebuild from rubble, watched him fail to reach Qatar — a fifth-place finish in the Octagonal that critics still toss back at him like a stone — and then did the thoroughly un-Panamanian thing of keeping him anyway. That single decision underwrites everything that has followed. Continuity ripened into the deep runs the country had only ever read about in other nations' histories: runners-up at the 2023 Gold Cup, a first Copa América quarter-final in 2024, and the 2025 Nations League final, reached by beating the United States in the semi, Cecilio Waterman's late goal at SoFi Stadium sending the Marea Roja through. The ranking that had loitered in the high eighties climbed into the low thirties; a team that once celebrated its brave defeats simply stopped suffering them.
Christiansen, who passed Hernán Darío 'Bolillo' Gómez in 2025 to become the most-capped coach in Panama's history, has tugged the side away from the old canon of the Panamanian game — the heart-on-sleeve, all-or-nothing football of the golden generation — toward something more structured and more European, the inheritance of his own Cruyff-and-Barcelona schooling, while remaining coldly pragmatic about where the points come from. Qualification for 2026 was the proof of concept: top of the final CONCACAF group, unbeaten through the round, the ticket stamped with a 3-0 home win over El Salvador in November 2025. This time the country did not need a public holiday to be told that it belonged.
What it means back home
For a country of four and a half million that greeted its second World Cup as a cue for a near-national exhale, the mood is euphoria tempered by an unfamiliar, grown-up realism. The federation handed the squad the national flag in a formal ceremony before departure; the Marea Roja flooded Tocumen to see them off; president Manuel Arias told the players they carry 'en sus pies, en su alma y en su corazón la ilusión de cuatro millones y medio de personas.' It is treated as a state occasion because, in a small nation that waited a century to qualify once, that is exactly what it is.
And yet the dominant register is ilusión without the weight of expectation, and the local press knows the difference precisely. Nobody beyond Panama's borders is forecasting points, which the camp openly treats as a freedom rather than a slight — 'ya no van de novatos,' as Christiansen puts it, no longer rookies, no longer the whipping boys of Russia. But the bar has crept upward with the team's own stature. A repeat of 2018 — three defeats, bottom of the group, the only goal in the country's World Cup history still Baloy's consolation against England — would now read at home as a disappointment rather than an achievement, and that quiet shift is itself a measure of how far the project has travelled. The deeper pressures are the ones that do not make the back pages: the weight of a small country's hope, the coach's own redemption arc and uncertain future, an ageing core's last dance together, and the held breath over one groin. The dream is stated, and quotable — be the Morocco of this World Cup. The fear, just as clear-eyed, is simply not to be the pointless team of 2018 again.
Team news
- doubt Adalberto Carrasquilla — Left adductor strain from the 24 May Liga MX final (subbed 59'); kept in the 26 but missed all three warm-ups and trained individually through the camp. The picture has improved since: medical exams diagnosed a mild strain with no rupture and a roughly two-week prognosis, he has resumed differentiated work with the medical staff, and both Christiansen ('creemos que puede llegar') and Mosquera ('esperamos tenerlo para el primer partido') publicly expect him for Ghana. He had not rejoined full group training as of 7-8 June, however, and the staff carried Cristian Martínez as the in-line replacement — so the live question is now match-sharpness after a month out, not availability. Christiansen still refuses to guarantee the start ('no soy médico ni tengo la bola mágica').
- doubt Fidel Escobar — The 2018 holdover and lone survivor of that central defence, but his match-fitness is the staff's stated 'gran preocupación' after back surgery cost him most of 2026; he is in the squad and projected into the third centre-back berth, with Carlos Harvey the in-form alternative if he is not sharp enough to start.
- monitoring Aníbal Godoy — Captain rested from the Dominican Republic and Bosnia warm-ups as a precaution while integrating late; reported to be doing everything in training and available for Ghana as the first-choice holding midfielder.
- monitoring José Córdoba — Deliberately rested for the Bosnia friendly — Christiansen's call, not an injury — which the staff treated as confirmation of his fitness ahead of the opener rather than a doubt over it.
- monitoring Amir Murillo — Fit, but light on club minutes at Beşiktaş this spring (957 across 12 league games); his sharpness, in a system that asks him to run the right flank end to end and leaves space behind him, is the variable worth watching.
How we built this
Assembled from the outlets and analysts that cover Panama closely, then fact-checked. The probable XI is a consensus projection — the official team is only named on matchday.
- La Prensa — Deportes (prensa.com) · Spanish
- La Estrella de Panamá — Deportes · Spanish
- Fútbol Centroamérica · Spanish
- TVN / TVMAX 'Somos La Sele' (tvn-2.com) · Spanish
- RPC TV 'Marea Roja' (rpctv.com) · Spanish
- TUDN / Mediotiempo · Spanish
- Crítica / Panamá América / Infobae · Spanish
- Federación Panameña de Fútbol (fepafut.com) · Spanish
- ESPN Deportes / El Informador (fixtures) · Spanish
- Transfermarkt · FotMob · The Pink Un (club form) · English/Spanish