SAILING 2026 will be the year that hosts the second edition of the SSL Gold Cup, the Football World Cup… in sailing. This edition will feature the participation of 67 nations, with 40 competing in the final series, and an expected audience of 10 million viewers.

Football has its World Cup, sailing now has its own: the SSL GOLD CUP, the ultimate challenge between nations to crown the Nations World Champion. Developed from an initiative by the best sailors on the planet and founders of the Star Sailors League (SSL), the SSL GOLD CUP will be raced in spectacular 14m yachts with a format modelled on the Football World Cup. Like that pinnacle event in football, national teams of 10 athletes will compete for the SSL Gold Cup, each wearing the colours of their country (affiliated with World Sailing: totalling 144 member national authorities).

    Like the Football World Cup, the SSL GOLD CUP will bring together sailing’s best athletes who, thanks to the support of the event’s organizers, will enjoy the use of the boats and the training centre for regular scheduled training and the competition. In short, this represents a giant first for sailing!

Sailing’s ‘Missing Link’ (P. Cayard)

    For Paul Cayard, legendary American sailor, world champion, and winner of both the Volvo Ocean Race and the Louis Vuitton Cup, the SSL GOLD CUP is precisely the event that sailing has lacked until now – the ultimate challenge, with national teams competing on a level playing field, to excite the general public.

    Dennis Conner, the “Pelé of sailing,” quadruple winner of the America’s Cup and an advocate for the groundbreaking new event, considers that the SSL GOLD CUP will, thanks to the new SSL organization, become a new pinnacle within the sport of sailing to rival the Olympics. And it’s in Switzerland, around Lausanne – the Olympic capital and world headquarters of the SSL circuit – that the training center of the SSL Gold Cup will take place over 2025 and 2026. The host venue for the SSL Gold Cup 2026 will be announced in January 2025.

Eliminations and a Grand Final

    Leading up to the summer of 2026, consecutive training sessions will be held for teams to familiarize themselves with the boat’s settings. Preparation days will be allocated evenly to all teams, with extra training sessions given to emerging nations.

    The SSL Gold Cup itself will be held in the second half of 2026 and will run for more than three weeks of competition. Similar to the Football World Cup, there will be two series: a qualifying series and a final series. The 40 teams of the final series will be divided into four groups and will take part in a succession of matches and playoff rounds culminating in the Grand Finale. Every five days, at the end of each round, half of the participants of that round will be eliminated, and eight new teams will join the series for the next elimination round.

    As in a tennis tournament, the order in which each nation enters the competition will depend upon its position in the world ranking. After three weeks of four round-robin series, the top eight nations will earn their places in the Semi-Final races, which will consist of one fleet race that qualifies them for the Petit Final and Grand Final.

The SSL Gold Cup will be contested with spectacular 14-meter boats, designed to excite the general public and thrust the heroes of sailing into the limelight.

        The Grand Final will comprise just one race, from which the winner will be crowned the Nations World Champion. The concept of the Grand Final has been adapted from other major sports and applied to sailing by the SSL, its conclusion celebrated with a spectacular champagne shower and huge media attention, similar to the Football World Cup.

Live Transmissions

    As at the Football World Cup, teams will only play one match per day, but spectators will be able to attend four matches scheduled daily and broadcast over the Internet free of charge in 27 languages throughout the competition.

“Panini” Stickers

    Finally, as is traditional before the Football World Cup, lovers of the famous Panini stickers will be able to expand their collection with brochures and stickers of all the top sailors.

With all of sailing’s great titans

 “The SSL Gold Cup is one of those simple ideas that everyone dreams about and is surprised they have not seen or imagined for themselves earlier.” Thus, as soon as it was announced, the SSL Gold Cup immediately sparked the enthusiasm of sailing’s international elite, all of whom have dreamed of representing their country at the pinnacle of their sport.

    Very quickly, all of sailing’s great champions – be it France’s Loïck Peyron, the USA’s Paul Cayard, or Brazil’s Robert Scheidt – embraced the SSL Gold Cup. More than 600 athletes have already joined their SSL national teams, and the process is continuing behind the scenes to finalize each team’s profile from around the world.

Universality with 67 Teams

    In summary, in 2026, the SSL Gold Cup will again bring together 700 athletes, 67 nations from five continents, dozens of Olympic champions and medalists, America’s Cup winners, and ocean racing heroes for a regatta that will be the most exceptional of modern-day water-borne battles!

Just as ATP revolutionized Tennis in 1973, SSL introduced a new era for the Inshore Sailing Circuit in 2022. SSL’s nations circuit, complementing the 20,000 races of the World Sailing inshore circuit annually, aims to honor the top sailing nations.

The SSL strategy has been to develop a global circuit culminating in the “SSL Gold Cup,” modelled after the Football World Cup, which bestows the official title of World Champion of Nations, recognized by World Sailing.

The SSL Gold Cup, occurring every four years between Olympic Games, aims to be the pinnacle of sailing, showcasing heroes to a global audience. Like Football’s World Cup, it represents the zenith for the 15 million athletes engaged in inshore sailing, while the Olympics remain the ultimate in the sport.

Qualification involves Continental Trials, hosted either within existing championships or as standalone events.

SSL RANKING OF NATIONS

To establish match seeding for the SSL Gold Cup, the first ranking of sailing nations has been created alongside the ranking of individual athletes. The Nations Ranking uses data from each nation’s top-ranked individual sailors, combined with an ELO rating system (similar to FIFA and Chess) based on each match sailed by the SSL National Team.