How Fans Watched the 2026 World Cup

20,253 printed schedules, 4,302 custom calendars, and one very busy night before kickoff

This site exists to answer a single question: when does the match start where you are? Between April and August 2026 we kept count — anonymously and in aggregate — of what people did with the answer. Not who they were. What they built, printed, and planned.

Here is what a World Cup looks like from the inside.

20,253
schedules downloaded. Every one converted to a specific timezone before it was printed — a wall chart for a kitchen, an office, a student flat. The printable schedule turned out to be the thing people wanted most.
4,302
custom calendars built. Fans picked their teams and their stages, then dropped the fixtures straight into their own diary with My Calendar — 426 into Google Calendar, 190 into Outlook.
1,041
live calendar subscriptions. Rather than a one-off download, these fans subscribed to a feed that kept updating itself as the bracket resolved and kickoff times firmed up.
453
personal watch windows set. People told the site which hours they were actually free, so it could mark the matches they had a realistic chance of seeing.
235
timezones overridden by hand. The site detects your timezone automatically, but these visitors changed it themselves — travelling during the tournament, or planning around somebody in another country.
215
countries and territories sent at least one visitor. A tournament in three host nations, watched from very nearly everywhere else.

The rush before kickoff

Downloads climbed gently through May, then went vertical in the first week of June. The single biggest day was 10 June — 2,129 schedules, the day before the opening match. 11 June came second with 2,091.

Put another way: roughly one in five of every schedule this site has ever produced was downloaded in that 48-hour window. The tournament had not kicked off yet, and people were already pinning it to the wall.

Schedules downloaded per day24 April – 31 July 202605001,0001,5002,000AprMayJunJul2,129 on 10 Junethe day before kickoff →⚽ myworldcuptime.com

There is a second, smaller spike at the end of June. That is 28 June — the first day of the round of 32 — when 471 people came back for a schedule that reflected who had actually qualified. Group-stage planning is one job; knockout planning is a different one.

Where fans were reading from

Visitors arrived from 215 countries and territories. The United States leading is no surprise for a tournament played across North America. Second place is the surprise.

Where visitors read fromshare of visits · top 10 of 215 countries and territoriesUnited States33.2%Japan19.6%United Kingdom7.1%Canada3.2%France3.0%Mexico2.4%Spain2.3%India1.8%Colombia1.5%Brazil1.4%⚽ myworldcuptime.com

Roughly one in five visits came from Japan. For a tournament kicking off in the Americas, Japan draws close to the worst kickoff times in the world — most matches land somewhere between 2 AM and 9 AM in Tokyo. That is exactly the situation this site was built for, and Japanese fans found it in numbers nobody predicted.

Nine languages

The site ships in nine language editions. Here is how they were actually used.

Which language edition people usedshare of pages viewed · nine editionsEnglish58.6%日本語 Japanese18.9%Español Spanish12.8%Français French5.5%العربية Arabic1.9%Português1.3%한국어 Korean0.6%Deutsch German0.3%Nederlands Dutch0.2%⚽ myworldcuptime.com

Japanese was comfortably the largest non-English edition, followed by Spanish and French. The German and Dutch editions launched partway through this period, so their share reflects a shorter run rather than a lack of interest.

Planned on a laptop, checked on a phone

DeviceShare of visits
Desktop / laptop59.2%
Phone39.6%
Tablet1.2%

Nearly six in ten visits came from a desktop or laptop, which runs against the grain for a sports site in 2026. The likeliest explanation is what people came here to do: printing a wall chart, building a calendar and mapping a month of football around work are laptop jobs. The phone traffic clusters around the matches-today page — the quick check on the way to the pub.

The teams people looked up

Team pages were a small corner of the site next to the schedule and the printable, so treat this as a curiosity rather than a popularity contest. Still, the order is telling:

  1. England
  2. Argentina
  3. France
  4. Brazil
  5. Netherlands
  6. Spain
  7. Canada
  8. Norway
  9. Portugal
  10. Colombia

England and Argentina at the top is predictable enough. Norway at eighth is not — a country of five million, back at a World Cup after 28 years away, punching far above its population. Their fans also had one of the roughest schedules at the tournament, which is presumably why they came looking.

How we counted

These figures come from aggregate site analytics covering 4 April to 18 August 2026. They describe what happened on the site in total — schedules generated, calendars created, pages viewed — not what any individual did. We do not sell visitor data and we do not build profiles of readers. Country and language figures are shares of visits, rounded to one decimal place. See our privacy policy for what is and is not collected.

Built by MyWorldCupTime.com — helping football fans around the world figure out when they can actually watch.