Football has a way of bending a city around it. Long before kick-off, flights start landing earlier, hotel districts fill up, train stations get busier than usual, and roads nobody normally thinks twice about suddenly matter enormously. Multiply that by a World Cup Final, and it's the kind of thing we couldn't resist mapping.
So for Icon Map, we built a crowd movement simulation around one simple question. What would it actually look like if 82,500 fans travelled across the New York region towards MetLife Stadium for the World Cup Final?
It's not a finished operational model, more a proof of concept built to see what's possible once open data, routing and Power BI are brought together properly.
What the demo actually shows
The simulation covers the three hours before kick-off through to full-time. At the start the map is quiet, barely anything moving. Then activity starts to build across the wider New York area. Cars work their way along the road network, trains follow their lines, pedestrians appear as people finish the last stretch on foot. As kick-off gets closer, the stadium fills and everything around it concentrates, and after the match it all plays out in reverse.
You don't need to be a transport planner to follow it. People are coming from different places, using different routes, arriving at different times, all converging on the same spot. Try explaining that in a spreadsheet and you'll struggle. Put it on a map and it explains itself.
How it was actually built
The road and rail network came from Overture Maps open data, processed locally with DuckDB to keep things lightweight. Each trip follows the real network using shortest time paths rather than a straight line between two points, so the cars stick to actual roads and junctions and the trains follow the real lines into the Meadowlands.
From there, we distributed 82,500 spectators across plausible starting points, Manhattan hotels, the big rail gateways, airports, New Jersey suburbs, Long Island, and gave each one an arrival time and a way of travelling. As the simulation runs, those travellers get placed into H3 hexagons and counted by density, which creates the changing surface you see in the animation. The whole thing is rendered in Icon Map inside Power BI, with a time slider driving the playback.
Why this matters beyond football
A crowd simulation only really earns its place if it helps someone make a better decision. For a stadium operator, that might mean knowing when to open the gates or where to put staff. For a transport authority, it's spotting which stations or junctions are likely to come under the most pressure. For a council or police team, it's road closures and stewarding, and for someone planning infrastructure, a map showing a station tipping over capacity tends to land harder than a table of numbers ever could.
The same thinking applies well beyond football. Concerts, festivals, marathons, conferences, airport expansions and town centre redevelopments all create similar patterns of arrival and departure, and the underlying questions don't really change. Where are people coming from, when will they arrive, where is pressure likely to build, and how do you explain all of that clearly to someone who isn't a GIS specialist?
Why we built it in Icon Map
Most organisations already do their reporting in Power BI. Their operational data, their finance data, their customer data, it's all already sitting there. Location shouldn't need to live somewhere completely separate from that. Icon Map brings proper geospatial capability into the same environment, so something like this crowd simulation can sit naturally alongside the rest of an event planning dashboard rather than existing as its own standalone GIS exercise.
This demo is also a small, early look at where we're taking Icon Map AI, making this kind of location intelligence workflow easier to put together without needing specialist GIS skills to do it. Join the waitlist and find out more - Icon Map for Microsoft Fabric — Join the Wait List
Interested in exploring this properly?
If you run events, manage infrastructure, plan public services, or have a location problem that is hard to explain clearly, we would be very interested to talk.
We are looking for partners who want to explore this properly, using real data, real constraints and real operational questions.
Get in touch support@icon-map.com and let’s see what we can build.