Ordinarily, waking at 5am is a chore. But for one Australian correspondent, the 2026 World Cup turned the early alarm into a portal. From his living room, he watched not just football but a parade of places he barely knew. “I have to admit that I needed to Google Cape Verde at the beginning of the tournament to find out where it was,” he wrote afterwards. He was not alone. Across the globe, millions of viewers reached for their phones not to check scores, but to type the name of a tiny Atlantic archipelago into a search bar.

The numbers that followed were startling. Expedia reported an 800 per cent increase in searches for Cape Verde from the United States; Latin American travel agency Viajes Falabella recorded a 3,191 per cent jump, from 128 queries to more than 4,200. Google Trends showed spikes of over 5,000 per cent at certain moments. The catalyst was a team of underdogs, the Blue Sharks, and their 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha, whose Instagram following rocketed from 50,000 to more than 20 million in a few weeks. Yet Cape Verde was no blank slate. It had already welcomed 1.25 million visitors in 2025, drawn by volcanic islands, year-round warmth and a reputation as one of Africa’s safest destinations—the US State Department rates it at Level 1, the same low-risk category as Japan or Australia. The World Cup did not invent the destination; it simply shone a light on it.

Uzbekistan understood this dynamic and turned it into a strategy. While its team made a debut appearance, the state tourism committee launched a campaign that generated over a billion views and 52 million social media interactions. Searches for “Uzbekistan Colombia World Cup 2026” rose 450 per cent, and general queries about the country climbed 40 per cent. A Colombian tourism consultant observed that the tournament does not directly cause bookings; rather, “it generates that one investigates and can then decide to visit.” The World Cup, in this reading, is less a sales pitch than a spark of curiosity—one that can take years to convert into a plane ticket.

For host nations, the economic effect was more immediate but uneven. In Mexico, small corner shops saw sales rise 10 to 15 per cent during national team matches, according to the Alianza Nacional de Pequeños Comerciantes, with beer, snacks and ice flying off shelves. Yet the anticipated flood of foreign tourists did not materialise: the sector reported barely one million visitors against a projection of five million, a gap that left hoteliers questioning the initial forecasts. In Colombia, bars and restaurants adapted their spaces, created “World Cup combos” and saw customer stays lengthen from under an hour to more than two hours, with sales up 30 to 60 per cent on match days. The most lucrative fixture, according to one pop-up bar in Bogotá, was a Saturday game against Portugal, when alcohol consumption far outstripped weekday matches. The tournament proved a boost for domestic consumption even when international arrivals disappointed.

Perhaps the most enduring image of this World Cup effect is not a balance sheet but a moment of collective reorientation. In Boston, Scottish fans turned a baseball stadium into a choir, singing “500 Miles” and creating what one Australian correspondent described as the best atmosphere the MLB had ever seen. In Kansas City, Algerian supporters became adopted locals, their chants echoing through fan zones. And in living rooms from Sydney to São Paulo, people typed the name of a country they had never thought to visit. The correspondent who once Googled Cape Verde now lists it among the places he is keen to explore. The World Cup had done what no tourism campaign could: it made the unfamiliar feel like a story worth pursuing.