The FIFA World Cup final is the most-watched sporting event in the world, and an estimated 1.5 billion people tuned into the 2022 final in Qatar, with Sunday’s match between Spain and Argentina in New Jersey expected to surpass that figure, according to ESPN.
While fans will pack friends’ houses, bars and public screenings in major football cities such as London, Paris and Buenos Aires, the tournament also reaches far-flung corners of the globe. According to ESPN, among the billions watching are supporters in some of the planet’s most isolated locations.
At Rothera Research Station in Antarctica, isolation is stark: fewer than 1,000 people occupy 5.48 million square miles and just 26 people winter at the station, living in months of permanent darkness, ESPN reports. The World Cup has become a key social outlet there, with residents gathering around a projector and TV to watch games and, in some cases, attending most matches of the tournament.
Martin Kibble of the British Antarctic Survey told ESPN, “It’s like home from home.” Kibble said football has provided a “guaranteed backbone of daily life” and that his children ring him on FaceTime after England games. Scotland fan Scott Kelly said watching his nation’s first World Cup in 28 years from Rothera was bittersweet and will be “a story” to tell his family, according to ESPN.
Rothera residents have improvised ways to celebrate and play: the base’s aircraft hangar hosts five-a-side matches, and there was even a kick-around in deep snow after England beat Mexico. Plans for the final include bunting, traditional British pub food and a 3D-printed model of the World Cup, ESPN reports.
Elsewhere, the tournament reaches other isolated places such as Ascension Island, a volcanic island in the South Atlantic described by ESPN as a tiny dot midway between Africa and South America, almost 1,000 miles from the coast of Liberia and farther from Brazil. The island, home to a British Royal Air Force base, is nicknamed “The Mars of the Mid-Atlantic” for its barren, red volcanic landscape, according to ESPN.
