The U.S. games in the World Cup were not among the top five with the most interest and the Super Bowl remains the country’s biggest sporting event, but data released by geolocation service GeoComply Monday shows American bettors embraced the soccer competition.
Argentina-Switzerland in the semifinals was the game with the most geolocation checks (15.2 million) for the tournament, followed by England-Norway (15 million) in the quarterfinals. Argentina was the only team with two or more games showing at least 13.2 million geolocation checks.
For comparison, GeoComply reported 81.4 million checks for the 2026 Super Bowl and 43 million for the 2026 NCAA men’s basketball championship.
The data revealed, not surprisingly considering the U.S. was a host country, that betting interest was higher than for the 2022 World Cup held in Qatar. That year’s final between Argentina and France netted 7.9 million checks compared to 14.7 million checks for Spain-Argentina Sunday. Twenty-two states had legal online wagering for that World Cup as compared to 33 today. In Canada, two provinces had live legal wagering for at least part of this World Cup as compared to one in 2022.
GeoComply collected data from U.S. state-licensed sportsbooks across the full tournament. According to the data, each legal wagering account it monitors recorded an average of 3.3 geolocation checks per game and there were 160.6 million checks across the 26 group-play matches.
What set the World Cup apart from U.S. events generally, according to GeoComply, was its staying power. The average number of location checks per game was 7.3 million, “which no U.S. sport is built to do,” the company said. In addition, GeoComply reported that some matches drew level national interest, while others drew “concentrated” interest. The reason, GeoComply believes, is that the World Cup “changes its lineup every day for a month,” which no U.S. professional league does.
Extra time revealed extra interest
The World Cup revealed what sportsbooks already know — interest peaks when a game is at its tightest point. In the case of the World Cup, GeoComply noted a spike in interest in the first five minutes after full time. The company was also able to pinpoint that the scoring of a goal did not immediately move markets, unless the goal came early in the game or was an own goal. Conversely, awarding of a red card caused instant reaction, usually to “cool a market rather than heat it.”
While Argentina’s Lionel Messi was not part of a second consecutive World Cup title, his effect on bettors was palpable. In the Argentina-Algeria group-play game, “His opening goal produced the cleanest reaction in the dataset: a surge five minutes later as bettors loaded scorer and hat-trick props at once.
“The hat-trick’s real signature came after the whistle. Settlement stretched across 25 minutes of repeated surges as anytime-scorer, brace, and hat-trick markets paid out, a far longer tail than an ordinary result produces. In the betting data, Messi does not just win matches. He keeps the market open after everyone else has gone home.”
