The teams that moved the Internet: Argentina, followed by France and Norway

One of the most compelling aspects of the World Cup is seeing which storylines and teams capture the attention of fans across the world. We’ve discussed how regional traffic patterns change as a result of matches. But who are they watching? Which matches made the most impact on Internet traffic? Here's how we calculated this: for each match, we took the two-hour window after kickoff and, for every country with enough baseline traffic to give stable measurements (small, noisy markets are excluded), computed how far traffic strayed from normal.

We then took the absolute value of each country's deviation, so we're measuring how much traffic changed, not in which direction (a surge and a drop both count as impact), and for each match we took the median of those absolute deviations across all countries. Because several group-stage matches were played simultaneously, making it impossible to attribute a country's traffic swing to one game or the other, we dropped those concurrent matches to avoid ambiguity. The result is this ranking of the matches that moved the Internet most, worldwide. And there's a surprise: the very top spot wasn’t snagged by a final or semifinal. It was Argentina vs.

Switzerland on July 11, a quarterfinal that saw Argentina win 3-1 — and that moved Internet traffic by a factor of about 1. 26. That put it ahead of the France vs. Spain semifinal, which had a factor of 1. 21.

The rest of the top matches were a mix of quarterfinals, round-of-16 and even round-of-32 ties.