The U.S. women’s basketball team will face China, Italy and the Czech Republic in the women’s FIBA World Cup in September, looking to win its fifth consecutive title.
The World Cup will be held Sept. 4-13 in Berlin, with the WNBA taking a nearly three-week break in its season to accommodate the event. The Americans have won the last four World Cups, dating back to 2010. They took bronze in 2006.
The U.S. squad could feature a lot of young talent, including Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese, to go along with veterans A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart. The young trio helped the Americans win a World Cup qualifying tournament in Puerto Rico last month.
The Americans are in Group D. They beat China for the gold medal in the 2022 World Cup.
Buoyed by the success of the 2022 World Cup in Australia, the field was expanded to 16 teams for the first time since 2018.
“We just finished qualifiers with 24 teams that had never happened before. We had played before with 16 teams,” FIBA Secretary General Andreas Zagklis said. “Women’s basketball has grown a lot and 12 teams didn’t fit the quality we had. Sixteen represents what we believe is today’s standards for our women’s game.”
The winner of each group will advance to the quarterfinals. The second- and third-place finishers in the four pools will play each other for the other four spots in the quarters.
Group A includes host Germany, which is playing in the World Cup for the first time since 1998. Germany will face Spain, Japan and Mali. France, which lost to the U.S. in the gold-medal game of the Paris Olympics, headlines Group B. Other teams in the group are Nigeria, South Korea and Hungary.
Australia, which hosted the 2022 World Cup, is the top team in Group C. Australia plays Belgium, Puerto Rico and Turkey.
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