Blask analyzed user interest in the ongoing football tournament and compared it between the group and playoff stages.
In most participating countries, interest in the FIFA World Cup rose as the tournament entered the knockouts. Blask found average daily demand in the playoff rounds 19.6% higher than in the group stage. And not all of that gain came from countries whose teams reached the round of 32.
Blask tracks World Cup-related search demand across countries and turns it into a daily country-level World Cup Index (WCI). The analysis covers 43 of the 48 participating countries; Iran, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Cape Verde and Curaçao are excluded because the Category feature the tracker relies on is not yet available there.
The comparison window runs from 11 June to 7 July: the group stage (11–27 June) against the playoffs — the round of 32 and the round of 16, played from 28 June to 7 July.
Two peak days
The biggest single day for World Cup demand in the 11 June – 7 July period was Saturday 4 July, when the combined World Cup Index (WCI) across the 43 tracked countries reached its highest level. The round of 16 opened that day.
14 markets hit their highest WCI on 4 July. Although it was a playoff date, the peak came even in several countries that did not reach the round of 32: Czech Republic, Jordan, Qatar, Tunisia and Turkey.
The second-largest cluster came on 27 June, the last day of the group stage: that day nine countries reached their highest WCI. For five of them, the tournament ended there. The other four went through and averaged a higher daily WCI in the playoffs than in the group stage: Argentina (+23.0%), Croatia (+8.9%), Ecuador (+9.1%) and Ghana (+6.7%). Yet none of them had a bigger day than 27 June in the period.
In 31 geos, the average daily WCI in the playoffs was higher than in the group stage, with the combined daily average gaining 19.6%.
Gains and declines after the group stage
Blask tracks WCI for 12 of the 16 nations that did not qualify for the playoffs (the fifth untracked geo, Cape Verde, qualified). Only five of the 12 showed a decline in average daily WCI on playoff days, with the steepest falls in Scotland (−56.3%) and Haiti (−49.1%). In the other seven it kept growing, from +1.1% in Jordan to +18.4% in Turkey.
Among 31 tracked countries that made the playoffs, seven showed a fall in average daily WCI. Six of them stopped at the round of 32; one reached the quarter-finals. That is England, where average daily interest in the World Cup surprisingly fell by 4.2%.
The biggest gain in average daily WCI was registered in Spain: +120.3%. The Netherlands is next at +80.1%, despite losing on penalties in the round of 32. Morocco, Egypt, Portugal and France all sit between +45% and +46%.
The three co-hosts went out in the round of 16 and ended above their group-stage levels: Mexico (+24.7%), the United States (+18.8%) and Canada (+13.7%).
Bottom line
The tournament lost five-sixths of its field, but kept its audience: average daily WCI grew in 31 of 43 tracked countries, including seven eliminated nations and all three co-hosts. Whether the biggest day is already behind remains the open question.
