Turkey went out of the 2026 World Cup on day nine, undone by a scoring drought that ran through two matches and never broke. Against Australia and Paraguay, it took 62 shots and still finished without a goal.
That is why the search terms around USA eliminated from the World Cup are colliding with Turkey’s exit now: the numbers are so extreme they read like a mistake. Since statisticians began keeping track in 1966, there is no record of a team failing to find the net with so many attempts over a two-match span, and Turkey’s return from the tournament was sealed by the kind of wastefulness that leaves a campaign looking larger on paper than it ever did on the field.
The scale of the miss was not hidden in the fine print. Turkey’s 62 efforts generated 3.6 expected goals, which means the chances were real enough to count even if the finishing never came. More than half of those shots, 51.4 per cent, came from outside the box, and 29 were struck from 24 yards or farther. That is how a team can keep forcing play forward and still end up empty-handed: volume without enough quality, or quality spread so thin that the scoreboard never moves.
The waste was spread across the attack, too. Arda Guler accounted for 11 shots that flew into the crowd or otherwise fizzled out, Kenan Yildiz took 12 and Hakan Calhanoglu added 11 more, with 14 players getting a go overall. Ugurcan Cakir did not take a shot, but he still joined the attack for a last-gasp free kick against Paraguay, a final gamble that summed up Turkey’s night better than any passing sequence could have. The chance came and went. The goal never did.
There was a route for Turkey to stay alive a little longer, and it came with a strange bit of timing. Miguel Almiron was sent off against Paraguay for breaching the new rule forbidding players from spea, leaving Paraguay with a 10-man side. Even then, Turkey could not turn the extra space into a goal. It ended up hanging on in the tournament for two and a half hours longer than Haiti, but the extra time only made the exit feel sharper, not kinder.
Turkey’s collapse matters because this was only its third World Cup appearance, and the tournament had already taught the team what its ceiling can look like. It reached the semi-finals in 2002, and Vincenzo Montella has the pedigree of a manager who has lived in bigger finals, from Italy in the final of the European Championship in 2000 to a Serie A title with Roma. None of that changed the basic fact of this campaign: Turkey generated enough volume to promise danger and not enough precision to deliver any.
The unanswered question is no longer whether Turkey can create shots. It is why so many of them were taken from low-value positions, and why a side with players like Guler, Yildiz and Calhanoglu could not convert even one of 62 attempts. For now, the record shows only the hard edge of the exit: a team that kept shooting, kept missing and went home with nothing to show for either match.
