Does Hosting the World Cup Actually Help You Win?

I dug into 90+ years of World Cup history to see if hosting actually gives teams a competitive edge on the pitch. The pattern is stronger than I expected! Across World Cups from 1930–2022, 16 out of 19 host nations outperformed their usual tournament performance when playing at home. In several cases, the jump was dramatic, Uruguay (1930) and England (1966) both improved by the equivalent of multiple tournament stages and went on to win the whole thing. There are a few exceptions (Spain 1982 underperformed, while South Africa 2010 and Qatar 2022 roughly matched their baseline), but overall the