Winning the 2026 World Cup: Colombia’s North American Takeover

Written on 12/28/2025
Luis Felipe Mendoza
The 2026 World Cup is going to be a home tournament for Colombia, is a unique advantage it must exploit in its quest for glory. Credit: AP/ColombiaOne.

The 2026 World Cup is going to be a home tournament for Colombia. As of December 2025, the Colombia vs. Portugal match in Miami is already the most requested World Cup group stage game in the entire tournament, and as a whole, Colombians have requested more tickets than almost any other nation for the summer tournament. 

More than 30% of the Colombian diaspora in the United States lives in Florida, and the hyper-concentration of Colombians in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, as well as Colombia’s proximity to the U.S. and Mexico, is a unique advantage that fans must exploit to help the team perform as best as it can. 

Scientifically speaking, Colombian fans can especially make their presence felt inside Miami’s Hard Rock stadium, where La Tricolor will face Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal on June 27.

It is expected that most fans in the stadium will be Colombians, and the Hard Rock Stadium’s acoustic canopy is capable of trapping noise levels exceeding 130dB, which is about the equivalent of a military jet taking off.

Colombian fans have the unique opportunity to help the national team win a crucial group stage game against Ronaldo’s Portugal, which could very well decide the team’s fate in the tournament, as topping the group would give Colombia a more ‘comfortable’ path to the quarter finals.  

Why playing at home is worth +0.6 goals and how Colombia can use the advantage to win the 2026 World Cup group 

In football, it is often said that the fans of a team can count as the “12th” player, who can push a team to pull off the impossible. Soccernomics validates this myth, but in the book’s unique style, it adds data to back up the story.

Extensive regression analysis of international matches presented in Soccernomics revealed that playing at home is worth a statistical lead of approximately two-thirds of a goal (0.66) per game.

The statistic claims that playing at home provides a goal’s head start in two out of three matches played, and is presented in the book as the most important factor after experience, outweighing population size and GDP in determining match outcomes. 

The fact that the 2026 World Cup is going to be played in the United States, Mexico, and Canada offers a unique opportunity for most teams. Soccernomics details that due to the U.S.’s massive immigrant population, it is the only country in the world where the “home team” is usually the team playing against the United States, which represents the heritage of a local diaspora.

Italians and Mexicans already weaponized this unique advantage in 1994, with Italy getting to the tournament’s final before losing on penalties to Brazil. Colombia will play most of the tournament as the home team, giving them a significant statistical advantage in almost every single round of the tournament they play. 

For 2026, the Colombian fan must undergo a fundamental evolution from a consumer of entertainment to a producer of tactical advantage.

Soccernomics proves that home advantage is real, quantifiable, and worth approximately +0.6 goals per game, but this advantage is derived from referee bias and crowd intensity, not magic.

If the diaspora treats the Miami games as a “holiday” or a passive social gathering, this statistical edge evaporates. The mandate is clear: Fans are not there to watch history; they are there to help make it happen by manufacturing the noise that tilts 50/50 decisions in Colombia’s favor.

Avoiding a 1994 repeat  

Colombian football’s history is haunted by a recurring psychological pathology described as lacking “five cents for the peso,” the inability to complete the journey and actually deliver in the most demanding stages.

The ghost of this pathology returned in 2024, in Miami, when Colombia lost its second Copa America final of the 21st Century to Argentina at the Hard Rock Stadium.

The 1994 World Cup is the ultimate example of this concept, as a team that arrived with a winning mentality and as one of the favorites to win the tournament crumbled into a circus of pressure, with threats being made against the players and staff, as well as some sort of paralysis once games started. 

It is often said that Colombia has a debt with destiny, but how is such historical fatalism installed into the minds of almost 50 million people fought? Soccernomics once again provides the clues through the sociological findings regarding social cohesion presented in the book.

The book shows that during major international tournaments, suicide rates in countries such as Germany and France drop by as much as 14% in. This is, the book argues, a reflection of Emile Durkheim’s theory of social integration, where international football tournaments like the World Cup force a nation to pull together, creating a temporary but powerful support network that reintegrates individuals into the collective. 

Colombia is a fragmented country, and it has been difficult for this sort of mentality to be implemented in the Colombian psyche. It would remain to be seen what effect the presidential elections, which will take place during the World Cup, will have on national unity, if any.

But during the 2026 World Cup, Colombia’s supporters must create an atmosphere of unconditional support for the players. Instead of importing the tension or political chants sometimes heard at the Metropolitano, and creating chaos as it happened in the 2024 final, Colombian fans must create an atmosphere that feels the players are supported and in optimal conditions to deliver their best possible performances. 

The scientific validity of using the crowd to boost player performance is found in the Köhler Effect, a psychological principle detailed in The Numbers Game, which establishes that struggling individuals perform significantly better, holding a weight longer or working harder, when paired with a stronger partner than when working alone.

In the context of the 2026 World Cup, the massive Colombian diaspora filling the stadiums in North America becomes that 12th player, creating a festive atmosphere that may get into rivals’ heads.

When a player’s confidence wavers, the relentless auditory support of the crowd triggers the perfect conditions where the fear of letting the group down forces the athlete to exceed their perceived limitations. By functioning as an external psychological safety net, the fans effectively prevent the collapse of the team’s morale, integrating the players into a collective force that refuses to allow failure.