They're one of the favourites. They've based themselves in Palm Beach, Florida. Two of their three group games are in Houston. The optimal base camp was Houston. That's 7,556km of unnecessary travel before a ball is kicked.
The tournament hasn't started yet. We don't know if it will matter. We won't know until the trophy is lifted in New Jersey on 19th July. But the question is already answerable — and the answers are worth watching.
For the first time, the World Cup spans three countries — the United States, Canada and Mexico — across a geography wider than any previous tournament. Every team chose a base camp and returns to it between every single game. The fixtures are fixed. The knockout paths are probabilistic. The distances are calculable.
That's the instrument. Define it first. Then see what it shows you.
What it shows you is that Austria — playing in San Francisco, Dallas and Kansas City — based themselves in Santa Barbara and added nearly 10,000 km to their expected travel compared to the optimal facility available to them. That Portugal put their camp in Palm Beach for a schedule that pointed north and west. That France — ranked 14th worst — were far from optimal despite being praised for their location.
None of this answers whether those choices were wrong. Teams weren't picking bases on distance alone. They were weighing facility quality, climate, familiarity, privacy, sponsor logistics, proximity to airports. The data can measure what the choice cost. It can't measure what it was worth.
And the six teams that ended up at their statistically optimal base? They aren't necessarily the smartest planners. They may simply have had fewer options — or their fixtures happened to cluster near the best facility available. The absence of a trade-off isn't always a decision.
Are good facilities the price of distance?
We can calculate the cost. The verdict waits until July 19th.
Two separate analyses. One dataset. The same methodology running without editorial interference.
I build data instruments for a living. This is what happens when I point one at the World Cup.
The Sandbox is where the same methodology runs without a client brief. No commercial outcome. No softening. The question is defined, the instrument is built, and whatever it shows — it shows.
The World Cup 2026 project started as a single question about travel distances. The base camp analysis came from asking what the data implied about decisions that had already been made. That's the move every time: build the instrument first, then see what it reveals.
The main body of work — corporate failure, dental technology, British music — lives at The Unanswered.
This project was built before the tournament. It will be more interesting after it.
"The frameworks that enterprise businesses spend millions getting wrong — built for founders, at the stage where they actually change everything."
Other Sandbox projects: No Guilty Pleasures (400 British acts, 70 years, scored by AI with no agenda), No Soft Opinions (1,188 films, every score arguable), The Field (300 wrestlers, 40 years, the buried careers), Eurovision (strip out the bloc voting, see what's left).
Every one of them starts the same way. The right question was always there. It just went unanswered.