BRYAN AIR
BY BRYAN ROSEVEARE
World Cup 26 · Team Tracker
Same trophy, wildly different journey. How 48 teams shuttle between matches across North America — and why some fly 10× further than others.
Each team lives at one base camp and flies out to its group-stage match cities and back. North America only — pick a team, or compare the extremes.
All 48 teams, ranked by group-stage base-camp round trips (Opta/Squawka data). Click a row to plot it on the map above.
Each team lives at one base camp for the group stage. Under FIFA's matchday-1 / matchday+1 rule, they fly out to each match city and back again — roughly 3 round-trips, about 6 flight legs, before a ball is even kicked in the knockouts.
| # | Team | Base camp | Group-stage cities | Group round-trip km |
|---|
The burden gap. Curaçao racks up roughly 10,100 km of base-camp round-trips in the group stage — about ten times Mexico's ~1,000 km. Same tournament, wildly different flight diary.
FIFA says… no team flies coast-to-coast in the group stage, and 103 of 104 matches give at least three days' rest. (FIFA-attributed via ESPN — not found verbatim on FIFA.com.)
Distances are great-circle round trips from each team's base camp to its group-stage match cities and back (approx.).
The prologue: the teams whose arrival charters were publicly tracked on Flightradar24, ranked by distance flown in from home.
Aircraft photos via Planespotters.net, © their respective photographers.
The aviation details that make this tournament unlike any before it.
Based in Tijuana, Iran's 127-mile hop to LAX took five hours through security and immigration — then they flew straight back after the match. They're filing a formal FIFA complaint after being denied an early arrival. The enemy isn't distance, it's recovery.
Scotland, Norway and Sweden all used the SAME Icelandair Boeing 757 (TF-FIA) on rotating legs — a single airframe shuttling three nations into the tournament.
Brazil's chartered Boeing 767 (ZS-NEX) drew over a million live Flightradar24 viewers as it crossed the Atlantic.
Qatar Airways is FIFA's partner through 2030 and American is the official North American supplier — but federations charter and pay for their own jets.
The players' charters are roughly 0.2% of the tournament's carbon footprint. Spectators flying in are about 88%.
The FAA runs match-day arrivals on the same slot-reservation system as the Super Bowl, with 73,000+ private-jet flights forecast across the tournament.