Flight paths of each team
No air travel — every match within bus reach
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The team flights alone at the 2026 World Cup add up to almost five laps around the Earth — and it is on course to be the dirtiest World Cup in history by carbon footprint.
This project maps how every national team physically travels between host cities — from 1978, when squads first started flying to every match, through 2026 — and estimates the CO₂ of those journeys. Each red brushstroke in the animation is one team's flight; the white line is the champion's path.
The honest caveat. This is team travel only — a tiny slice of the picture. Add the flights of hundreds of thousands of fans and the real footprint is roughly a thousand times larger: independent estimates put the 2026 tournament near 8–9 million tonnes, against about 5,000 tonnes for the teams. The biggest source of a World Cup's emissions isn't the stadiums or the squads — it's the millions of fans flying in. Team travel is the part everyone argues about, yet it is one of the smallest pieces (~0.2% of the total). We map it because it is the part you can actually watch move across a map.
Squads moving between match cities during each tournament. The animated history starts in 1978: before then, teams largely reached the finals — and hopped between nearby venues — by train and coach, so flight emissions were minimal (the near-flat early bars above). Per-match city sequences come from official FIFA schedules.
National teams don't fly scheduled economy — they charter a full 737/A320-class jet for a ~35-person delegation. So we model the whole aircraft: ≈ 12.3 kg CO₂/km of fuel, ×1.9 for radiative forcing (contrails and NOₓ at altitude) and ×1.085 for real-world routing ≈ 25.4 kg CO₂e per flown km. Distances are great-circle between cities; ground transfers (Qatar 2022 ran entirely by coach) use DEFRA coach and rail factors. Charter flying is several times dirtier per head than a scheduled seat — and even so, our 2026 figure lands in the same band as Greenly's independent 2026 team-travel estimate (17,677 t), confirming the order of magnitude.
2026 is the first 48-team, three-country, 16-city World Cup. The group stage follows the real published calendar; the knockout bracket is a forecast — the 32 strongest qualifiers by FIFA ranking projected through the actual draw (round of 32 → 16 → 8 → 4 → final), drawn as a dashed line on the charts. The headline ≈ 5,077 t is already a tournament record before a ball is kicked.
Emissions track tournament size and geography far more than any single squad. Compact, single-country hosts with short hops stay low; sprawling hosts with long internal flights spike — USA '94 (2,485 t), Brazil '14 (3,282 t), Russia '18 (2,576 t). Qatar 2022 is the outlier in the other direction: one city-region, every match within bus reach, so essentially zero flight emissions. It is 2026's continent-spanning, three-nation format that pushes it to a record.
Charter usage by finalists is well documented, but not every historical leg has a single primary source; routing is reconstructed from official schedules. Delegation size is fixed at 35 and distances are great-circle (real routes add a few percent). Above all, this is team travel only — the dominant fan-travel footprint is out of scope by design, and is the figure that truly matters for the climate.