Montevideo, Uruguay — Uruguay’s national soccer team will travel to Mexico on Tuesday night, flying to Cancun before heading to Playa del Carmen, where they will set up their base camp for the 2026 World Cup, the Uruguayan Football Association (AUF) announced Sunday.
The delegation will depart from Carrasco International Airport at 11:00 p.m. local time (02:00 GMT Wednesday) and is scheduled to arrive in Cancun at 6:15 a.m. on June 10 (11:15 GMT). From there, the team will travel about 68 kilometers to Playa del Carmen, a resort city in the state of Quintana Roo on the eastern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.
On Sunday, the 26 players selected by coach Marcelo Bielsa had no scheduled activities at the Celeste Complex. Over the previous two days, they trained and bid farewell to fans in two public events. On Friday, an open training session was held in the city of Pando, where 600 children shared the field with their idols. A similar event took place the following day in Canelones.
“It was a very long and exhausting season for some players, and we thought spending the preparation time here in Montevideo would be pleasant,” Bielsa said.
“We had the idea of playing one match in Montevideo and another in a city inland, but arranging that became complicated. It was hard to find opponents. The rivals we could face did not meet the expectations we had,” the coach explained.
Bielsa added that the preparation time for the World Cup was also reduced from three weeks to two. “We had one week less, many players were recovering, some had played too many minutes, others had too few,” he said.
The Argentine manager noted that balancing all these factors while trying to play two friendlies created many difficulties.
As a result, Uruguay’s next match will be their World Cup debut on Monday, June 15, against Saudi Arabia in Group H, which also includes Spain and Cape Verde.
