EP 02 — The Receipts
Every chart, map replay, and clip we made for the World Cup episode, in one place. Take them, share them, check our math. If you post one somewhere fun, tell us.
The world learns football — Elo map replay
Every country is blank until it plays its first international, then it wears its Elo rating: blue above the 1500 starting point, orange below. Gold fireworks are World Cup titles, all 22 of them. Around 1992 you can watch Yugoslavia split into seven colors. The first frame is the first match in the data: Scotland 0–0 England, November 1872.
Method, if you want to check it: ratings are Elo in the eloratings.net style — everyone starts at 1500, K scales with match importance (World Cup highest, friendlies lowest), updates scale with goal margin, home side gets a temporary +100 inside the calculation. The map repaints from quarterly snapshots; dead states hand their colors to their successors. Rendered with plain SVG and ffmpeg from the public dataset.
Been here before — the pedigree funnel
Each 2026 knockout team, by how many of the last 10 World Cups (1986–2022) it reached each stage. The dataset has no round labels, so rounds are counted from games played: every team plays exactly 3 group games in this era, so a 4th game means the round of 16 and a 5th means the quarterfinal — exact for every cup in the window. It's how you can see that Norway and Switzerland arrived at their first quarterfinals in decades while Brazil, 10-for-10 in round-of-16 trips, went home.
Clips
The teaser
Thomas's methodology
The three themes that guide the vibes bracket, in his own words. Theme one involves an accusation against FIFA.
The numbers behind both brackets
The raw material is all public: every international match since 1872 (49,477 of them), the Elo snapshot, and the attack/defense ratings the bracket engine actually runs on — one parquet file away on the EP 02 data page, queryable from a URL with DuckDB.
Reuse
The underlying results data is martj42/international_results (CC0). Our charts, renders, and clips on this page: share them anywhere, no permission needed — a link back to mathvsvibes.com is appreciated. Found an error in any of it? Bring receipts to the comments.