The FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup is the world championship of women’s basketball and the sport’s biggest event outside the Olympics, held every four years. Berlin 2026 is the 20th edition.
16 national teams play 36 games over ten days, September 4–13. The format is short and unforgiving. The teams are divided into four groups, and in the first round every team plays the other three in its group. Win your group and you skip straight to the quarter-finals; finish second or third and you play an extra knockout game to reach them.
The United States have won 11 of the 19 World Cups, including the past four. The other contenders are France (silver medalists at the 2024 Paris Olympics), Australia (Asia Cup champions), China (2022 World Cup runners-up) and Belgium (EuroBasket champions). All of them return experienced lineups that have played together internationally. Every team’s full record is on its own page — see Teams.
56 current WNBA players are in this field, spread across 15 of the 16 teams. The US roster is the most star-studded, with A’ja Wilson, Breanna Stewart, Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers among its names. France, which nearly beat the US in Paris in 2024, returns a strong team headlined by Gabby Williams. Even the host nation, Germany, which has qualified only once before, carries 5 WNBA players on its roster.
| Difference | What changes |
|---|---|
| Five fouls, not six | Players foul out a full personal earlier, so foul rates and minutes lost to foul trouble are not like-for-like with WNBA numbers. |
| No defensive three seconds | A defender may park in the lane. Legal zone defense, and fewer clean rim attempts than the WNBA game trains you to expect. |
| The ball may be played off the rim | Once it touches the ring it is live. Plays that would be goaltending in the WNBA are legal here. |
| Possession arrow | After the opening tip there is not another jump ball all tournament. Held balls alternate. |
| Timeouts | Coach-only, dead-ball-only, one minute, and no mandatory TV timeouts. A trapped ballhandler has no bailout. |
| Court size and the three-point line | FIBA’s court is 3.9% smaller than the WNBA’s. The three-point arc is identical at the top, 6.75 m, but in the corners FIBA’s line sits closer to the basket — 6.60 m against 6.71 m, about four inches. That gap stems from FIBA’s narrower court, which means the sideline cuts into the arc sooner. |