[OC] Norway's two roads to the 2026 World Cup final: as group winners (5,534 km / 3,439 mi) vs as runners-up (8,628 km / 5,361 mi) Comparison

What This Visualization Shows

This data visualization displays "[OC] Norway's two roads to the 2026 World Cup final: as group winners (5,534 km / 3,439 mi) vs as runners-up (8,628 km / 5,361 mi)" and provides a clear visual representation of the underlying data patterns and trends. The visualization focuses on Tool: Python for the geography (a custom Albers equal-area projection of the US state outlines and the real stadium coordinates, great-circle distances between venues), rendered as an SVG map; the round-by-round advancement probabilities come from a Monte-Carlo simulation of the bracket. Data: the World Cup 2026 fixtures, venue list and our match model. Source: [uanalyse.co.uk](http://uanalyse.co.uk)

Norway finished second in their group, which sent them down the lower bracket. The two maps show the venue-to-venue path each finishing position would have taken all the way to the final, with every stop tagged by round. The top map is the group-winner road (5,534 km / 3,439 mi). The bottom is the runner-up road they actually got (8,628 km / 5,361 mi), looping down to Texas, Miami and Atlanta before the New York final.

The point of the pair is that the football barely changes between them, the model has the two branches almost level all the way to the final, so the clearest, most concrete cost of dropping to second is the roughly 3,000 km of extra travel.

Full write-up: [https://uanalyse.co.uk/blog/world-cup-2026-norway-france-rotation](https://uanalyse.co.uk/blog/world-cup-2026-norway-france-rotation), which allows us to understand complex relationships and insights within the data through visual storytelling.

Deep Dive into the Topic

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