There are projects that are born with everything defined, and projects that are built on the go, match by match, tournament by tournament. The Data World Cup belongs to the second category. And that, far from being a weakness, is precisely what makes it solid.

What starts now in the United States, Canada, and Mexico is the third phase of a strategy that began in November 2022, in Qatar, with an apparently simple question: Can we turn a Football World Cup into a real laboratory of sports analysis?

CHAPTER 1 · QATAR 2022

The Proof of Concept

On November 20, 2022, with Qatar transformed into the epicenter of world sport, Sports Data Campus launched its first analytical coverage initiative of a major tournament. The commitment was clear: to bring advanced data analysis closer to football, with rigor, with methodology, and with the energy of a community of students willing to prove it.

Nearly 100 students from the Sports Data Campus master's programs—Big Data Applied to Scouting, Sports Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence Applied to Sport—got to work with data provided by BEPRO. The result was an analysis guide covering the 32 national teams and more than 800 players in the tournament: over 125 pages and 130 infographics produced with real data and proprietary analytical insight.

WORLD CUP QATAR 2022

~100 participating students

+130 infographics produced

125 pages of analysis

It was a proof of concept. It worked. And it left something even more valuable than the analyses themselves: lessons on how to organize and work in student teams, manage deadlines, maintain visual coherence, and elevate editorial quality under the pressure of a real-time tournament.

CHAPTER 2 · EURO 2024 & COPA AMÉRICA 2024

The Cups of Data: Double Challenge, Double Learning

2024 brought a challenge of a different scale: two major international tournaments simultaneously. The Euro Cup in Germany and the Copa América in the United States. Two competitions, two continents, and an opportunity to take the project to the next level.

Sports Data Campus signed a collaboration with SICS—a company specialized in advanced sports data analytics founded in 1995 and a benchmark in match analysis and performance tracking—to launch The Cups of Data. More than 100 students from six different master’s programs worked with real data match by match, from the group stages to the finals.

"The aim was to provide comprehensive coverage of these sporting events, leveraging data analysis to offer an enhanced experience for both industry professionals and football fans."

Lucas Bracamonte, Academic Director of Sports Data Campus.

The results speak for themselves...

83 matches analyzed

+200 infographics produced

+300 pages of analysis

CHAPTER 3 · USA·CANADA·MEXICO 2026

The Data World Cup: Total Professionalization

If Qatar 2022 was the beginning and 2024 the consolidation, 2026 is the full culmination. The Data World Cup does not start from zero: it starts from four years of accumulated experience, from a community that already knows what it is to work under real pressure, and from a methodology tested and improved in every edition.

A formal multilingual structure in Spanish, English, and Portuguese; high analytical standards, data from an authorized professional provider; and, at the end of the tournament, a global digital magazine that will collect the best content produced throughout the competition.

But beyond operational improvements, what differentiates the 2026 Data World Cup is its strategic dimension. This project is an institutional declaration: Sports Data Campus not only trains analysts, it builds a culture of applied sports analysis for global events. And that culture is demonstrated with facts, tournament after tournament.

Qatar 2022 proved it was possible.

2024 proved it was scalable.

2026 will prove it is an international benchmark.

We don’t start from zero. We start from experience. And that, in sports analysis, changes everything...