May 21, 2026
21 days before the World Cup
The idea for theChant, why this World Cup is different, and what a real-time fan reaction layer actually means
FIFA World Cup 2026 starts June 11. This commit is a blank Next.js
scaffold with a README that hasn’t been written yet. The idea exists.
The code doesn’t.
But the idea is worth writing down.
What makes this World Cup different
WC 2026 is the first tournament co-hosted by three countries — the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Forty-eight teams, up from 32. Sixteen host cities spread across a continent. Matches happening simultaneously in venues thousands of miles apart.
The fan base for this tournament is genuinely global in a way that previous tournaments weren’t. There are significant supporter communities for essentially every participating nation on every inhabited continent. And almost all of them will be watching from home, from bars, from fan zones — not from the stadiums.
The gap
Social media during major sporting events is loud. It’s arguments about decisions, celebrations that drown out each other, discourse that starts before a match is over and continues after everyone has forgotten the score.
What’s missing is the sense of presence. Of being part of a moment with people across the world who are feeling the same thing you’re feeling, right now, not arguing about it.
theChant is the attempt at that. You pick your team allegiance before the tournament starts. When a match involving your team is live, you can react in real time — simple, expressive reactions, not text. Those reactions appear on a world map, grouped by location. You see where the energy is. You see that someone in Lagos and someone in São Paulo and someone in Jakarta are all feeling the same goal at the same time.
What it isn’t
It is not a score app. There are excellent score apps. It is not a prediction market or a stats platform. It is not a social network.
It is a presence layer for the experience of watching football collectively while being physically apart. That’s the full scope. Everything outside that scope belongs in a different product.
The scaffold is committed. The deadline is June 11. Ten days to build it.