World Cup 2026: the saddest neighborhood in New York
Every time a team went out of the 2026 World Cup, grief blew in over the New York neighborhood where its people live. A weather radar of the tournament, built from the Census.
Press Play to watch the tournament pass over the city, or drag along the line beneath the map. Point at a neighborhood for its own reading.
tuning the radar…
How it works: a team's New York fans are the people born in that country, plus 40% of the US-born who share its heritage (immigrants are about twice as likely as the US-born to follow the World Cup), in their home census tracts. When the team goes out, a storm lands on them at the final whistle and loses about two-thirds of its strength each day. It lands twice as hard in a knockout match, and harder again when the loss was a surprise: a loss hurts about 60% more when a win was expected, with expectations taken from pre-match Elo ratings. Force 8, a gale, is a thousand grieving New Yorkers to the square kilometre, and each step up the Beaufort scale doubles it. Hatching marks a gale or worse that the Census can only see poorly, where the margin of error is more than 30% of the estimate.The bulletin follows the grammar of the BBC shipping forecast: whose grief it is stands in for the wind's direction, the force for its strength, and visibility for how well the Census can see. The United States is left out, because the host nation has no diaspora geography in its own city. The saddest neighborhood is the one where the most grief fell over the whole tournament.Evidence for the weights: Dolton and MacKerron on fans' happiness after wins and losses; Card and Dahl (2011) on games that matter; Pew Research Center (2026) on who follows the World Cup; for how long it lasts, Stieger, Götz and Gehrig (2015), Carroll and others (2002), Edmans, García and Norli (2007).Sources: Census ACS 2020–24 five-year estimates by tract (country of birth, B05006; Hispanic origin, B03001; ancestry, B04006; detailed Asian, White and Black groups, B02018, B02024, B02025); 2020 census tracts and neighborhood boundaries, NYC Open Data; results from FIFA match reports; pre-match World Football Elo ratings.
