Happy Tuesday!
The World Cup officially came to a close on Sunday as Spain beat Argentina in extra time, their second title in history.
Today feels bittersweet. Going from 100+ hours of soccer over 40 days to nothing is jarring to say the least. But when you're a sports creator, a tournament like this can also feel like an ultra-extended work trip, and part of me is glad to be home.
In the end, the World Cup proved to be one of the most fruitful months in Sportsball history, slotting in just behind the last two Olympics in growth across all platforms.
It was a grind at times, lots of missed dinners and late nights, but events like these are a magnet for casual fans hungry for knowledge, and I couldn't put things out fast enough. So in today's newsletter: a recap of everything we made to teach people soccer, then some metrics on what it did for our pages.
Today’s newsletter brought to you by Hex
World Cup Catalog 🏆
The kickoff: How the World Cup worked ⚽️
Where do you even start with an event this big? I went with the age-old trick: write down every question you'd have, then answer them in order. How many games? When did they play? How did group stage work? Where? Who was actually good?
Simple stuff the analytics world passes right over, but the exact questions millions of people had while watching soccer for the first time in 4 years.
The answers, quickly:
104 games across 39 days, with 48 teams split into 12 groups
The schedule ramped up from 2 games a day at kickoff to 6 a day by the end of group stage
16 cities across 3 countries, with each group clustered regionally to cut down travel
France, Spain, Argentina, and England sat alone at the top of the rankings above 1,800 points - and sure enough, two of them played in the final
The most fun part was building it alongside Hex, an analytics platform that worked with me to create an app in parallel that updated as the tournament went on.
Same questions, same visualizations, but piped into live data sources instead of living as a moment in time on pen and paper. The barebones version launched at kickoff of the first game, then the Hex team kept shipping features based on DMs from the pages and things Claire and I wanted to see every day. A blend of project management, soccer, and b2b analytics - a young analyst's dream.
If you want to try building your own data app, whether for sports, business, or just for fun, above is a free 30-day trial on Hex.
Hometowns 🏠
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Even after just the first game, Claire and I kept noticing announcers mention hometowns that were sometimes across the world from the nation on the jersey. So I dug in (thanks to the random Reddit user who mapped birthplaces from Wikipedia). There were three ways a player could qualify for a nation:
Birthplace: born there, you were in (77% of players this year)
Family: a parent or grandparent born in the country got you a key, even if you never lived there
Residency: move there, live roughly five years as an adult, and earn citizenship the long way
Once I ingested all 1,248 birthplaces, the standouts were:
Nearly 1 in 4 players weren't born in the country they represented
9 nations had every single player born at home, including Brazil, Colombia, and Sweden
8 countries had more than half their squad born abroad
Every answer uncovered more questions, with so many of these stories dating back to geopolitics - war, families seeking a better life, the breakup of a nation. There was more I could have touched on, but I wasn't exactly a history major, if you couldn't tell.
How the knockout round worked 🥊
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As the group stage wound down, the question in my DMs changed from "how does this work" to "wait, how do 12 groups become a bracket?" Fair question, because the answer was a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine.
The top 2 teams in every group advanced automatically, then the 12 third-place teams got compared against each other, and only the best 8 survived. Tiebreakers went points, then goal differential, then raw goals scored.
The math ended up like this:
12 group winners, 12 runners-up, and 8 third-place teams made 32 of the 48
Two thirds of the field reached the knockouts, so finishing third was very much alive
All 8 third-place teams drew a group winner in the Round of 32
72 of the 104 total games were group stage - the last 32 were win or go home
This one was really a bridge video, catching people up right as the tournament got its teeth. It also somehow became the most viral video on SportsBall to date…
Messi 🐐
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For a lot of people, this World Cup was the most soccer they'd watched in years, which meant hearing "greatest ever" without the two decades of context behind it. So we drew the iceberg - the World Cup stuff everyone saw on top, and the 20+ years underneath, starting with a 13-year-old leaving home for the Barcelona academy.
The numbers are crazy:
Now 21 career World Cup goals
1.39 goals + assists per 90 across his career, the highest ever in modern top flight football
In 2011-12 he was involved in over 40% of Barcelona's goals
47 trophies, including 4 Champions Leagues and a World Cup
Then on Sunday he walked off one game short of the storybook ending, in what was almost certainly his last World Cup. Glad we drew it while he was still lacing up.
Offside Rules 🏳️
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This one came from lived experience: you scored, you threw your drink, you high fived your buddy, and by the time you looked back at the TV the goal was gone. Offsides was simple on paper - be behind the last defender when the ball is kicked - but modern strikers timed their runs so perfectly that the line was basically invisible. That's where the technology came in.
My favorite details from the research:
Dedicated cameras around every stadium tracked the game at 50 frames per second
Reviews froze the play at the exact moment the ball was kicked and built a 3D model of every player
Offside by an inch was still offside, but arms didn't count
Reviews could take 20 to 30 seconds, which was exactly why we all celebrated first and mourned a minute later
How time worked in soccer
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This video started with a genuinely confusing experience: the clock said 46 minutes, then 25 minutes later it said the same thing. Soccer's clock never stopped, so every injury, substitution, and goal celebration got tallied by the referee and tacked onto the end of the half as stoppage time. Then the second half started back at 45 like nothing happened. You weren't going crazy, it was just the rules.
Stoppage time usually added 4 to 10 minutes to each half
In the knockouts, ties went to two extra 15-minute halves, and extra time got its own stoppage time
Still tied after all that? Penalties.
Fitting that the whole tournament came down to this one. When Ferran Torres scored in the 106th minute on Sunday, anyone who watched this video knew exactly what clock they were looking at.
Worth it? 🤔
There have been plenty of days where I wondered if I really needed one more hour of research, one more storyboard, one more coffee, all to get one more video out the door. Sometimes it's all for nothing. Sometimes the outcome is 10x the input. This World Cup was the latter.
Many a late night, but here's what happened on Instagram alone since the tournament started.
One month accounting for almost 14% of all the growth this page has ever had. I can rest easy knowing I pushed to the limit and it paid off.
There’s been a bit of a breather this week on the content front, but excited to get back to the pen and keep the ball rolling.
Riley and Claire
