Can hosting the World Cup make a city happier?
The 2026 tournament is being played across 11 American cities right now. We're measuring what it does to the people who live there — not the economy, their wellbeing. Scroll to see how.
People tell Google how they feel
Every week, millions of searches — love, stress, party, anxiety — trace a city's emotional weather. Research by Greyling & Rossouw shows baskets of these terms track survey-measured happiness. This line is that signal for Dallas–Fort Worth, one of the 11 host markets, over five years.
Meet Dallas's digital twin
From 176 non-host metros, we build a weighted blend that has matched Dallas's signal for years — a synthetic control. The orange line is that twin. No single city behaves like Dallas, but the right mix of them does.
Five years of agreement
Through seasons, elections, and a pandemic recovery, the twin tracks the real Dallas with an average miss of about 1–2% — including on data it was never fit to. That agreement is the whole method: when the lines split during the World Cup, the gap is the effect.
We tried to fool ourselves first
Before trusting any "effect," we ran the machinery on summers when nothing special happened — 2023, 2024, 2025 (shaded purple). Properly compared against matching seasons, the method correctly finds nothing. (It even caught a hurricane and a different tournament contaminating 2024.)
Now the real test is running
The tournament window (orange) opened June 11, 2026. Match by match, weekly data accrues. If hosting genuinely lifts — or dents — a city's wellbeing, it will appear right here, measured against eleven digital twins at once.
What happens next?
The answer arrives over the coming weeks. Be there when it does — or help us get it right.
One more thing —
Want the technical version? Methodology · Diagnostics · Explore the live results