Turkey will try to steady itself at Mundial 2026 when it meets Paraguay in the second round, days after opening the tournament with a defeat to Australia. The matchup now carries more weight than a routine group game for Vincenzo Montella’s squad, because the next result will shape whether Turkey can turn a rocky start into a recovery.
The reason the search has turned to Turkey Vs Paraguay is simple: Turkey still has the profile of a side built to compete. The squad of 26 includes 16 players from the domestic league, plus eight representatives spread across major European clubs, and it mixes names from Galatasaray, Fenerbahce, Besiktas, Caykur Rizespor and Kasimpasa. Among them are Deniz Gul, Merih Demiral, Ferdi Kadıoğlu, Altay Bayındır, Hakan Calhanoglu, Kenan Yildiz, Zeki Celik, Ozan Kabak, Can Uzun and Salih Ozcan.
Arda Guler remains the face of that group. The Real Madrid midfielder, who arrived from Fenerbahce in 2023, finished the last season with 6 goals in 51 matches and already has 112 appearances for the Spanish club. He debuted for Turkey at 17 in late 2022, scored his first international goal in 2023 and then added a goal and two assists in four starts at Eurocopa de 2024.
That is what makes Turkey’s opening defeat harder to ignore. This is a team that once reached the third place at Mundial 2002 and did not return to a World Cup until the cycle now unfolding, so the expectation around Montella’s side is not built on nostalgia alone. It is built on the belief that Turkey can still assemble talent from its own league and from the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Portugal and Arabia Saudita into a side strong enough to recover quickly.
But the gap that still matters is the one left by the first result. Turkey now has to answer Paraguay on the field, with no date or venue specified in the available information, and the only certainty is that the margin for another slow start has already narrowed. For Turkey, the next match is not just another step in Mundial 2026; it is the first real chance to show that the opening loss to Australia was a stumble, not the shape of the campaign.
