How the World Cup reshaped the workday

Since 2020, work has quietly rewired itself around flexibility. Remote and hybrid schedules went from a perk to the default, the rigid 9-to-5 loosened into something people shape around their lives, and the second screen became a permanent fixture on most desks. Somewhere in there, the line between "at work" and "watching something" got a lot blurrier.

You can see it every time a must-see event lands in the middle of a workday. The Masters on a Thursday afternoon. The first rounds of March Madness, when a shocking number of people suddenly have a "dentist appointment." A royal wedding, a space launch, an election night. When something worth watching is happening live, people don't step away from work, and they don't ignore the event. They fire up a second (or third) screen and the work that can survive divided attention gets done. The work that can't gets moved.

The World Cup is about the biggest test of that behavior there is, a global event that runs for weeks and pulls in viewers across every time zone during working hours. So we looked at what actually happened to revenue teams' behavior during match windows. The pattern was consistent, and it maps almost perfectly onto how flexible work now operates. The live call gave way to the inbox. Meetings shifted around kickoff. And the tournament became the most reliable small talk on any sales call. The work kept moving. It just changed shape.

During match windows, completed calls ran about 12.9% below baseline, roughly 5.76 million against an expected average of 6.62 million during the same time period. Email went the other direction entirely, running about 92.2% above baseline at 145.3 million sent versus an expected 75.6 million.

Put those two numbers side by side, and a picture forms. A live call demands your full attention, which is exactly what you can't give when your team is a goal down with twenty minutes to play. An email can be written with one eye on the second screen. So when the match was on, reps and buyers seemed to have quietly agreed to take it offline and send the note instead.

The work did not disappear during the game. It moved to a channel you can do while glancing at the score.

When World Cup matches are on, teams shift work from live calls to email.

The tournament didn't just change how people worked. It changed what they talked about.

Mentions of the World Cup appeared 4.3 times more often in sales conversations during the tournament.

This is the human side of a sales call showing up in the data. It's the small talk before everyone's joined, the shared "did you catch the match last night" that warms up a conversation between a buyer and a seller who might otherwise have nothing in common. When something captures a whole culture at once, it becomes the easiest point of connection in the room. The numbers just make that instinct visible.

Not only are fans shifting channels, but they’re rescheduling their calendars.

With England kicking off at midnight, UK fans traded their Monday morning meetings for sleep, and they did it days ahead of time. Early-morning cancellations were 7.7 percentage points above a typical Monday, and UK teams booked roughly 30% fewer morning meetings than usual. Nobody wants to run a 9 a.m. discovery call on four hours of sleep after watching their team through extra time.

People weren't canceling at the moment because they got caught up in the game. They were planning around it in advance, clearing space so they could stay up late and still function. That's a workforce actively managing its calendar around something it cares about, not one abandoning its responsibilities.

For now, the story is more about flexibility than lost productivity. During matches, fewer live calls happened, and far more emails went out. Around late kickoffs, mornings emptied out because people planned for it.

However, the open question worth watching is how might this impact revenue. When a live call becomes an email, does that thread advance the deal as well as the conversation it replaced? Probably not. Async work is easier to fit around a match, but calls and emails aren't always interchangeable when it comes to moving a deal forward.

Whether you're catching the match on a second screen between calls or clearing your mornings to stay up for kickoff, enjoy every minute of it. Good luck to your team.

This analysis draws on aggregated, anonymized activity across more than 5,100 organizations' sales conversations captured and analyzed by the Gong Revenue AI OS. Results are reported only in aggregate and do not identify or report on any individual company, user, meeting, or email. Figures reflect behavior during World Cup match windows compared to expected baselines. Match periods analyzed include World Cup matches during US working hours from June 11–25, 2026, compared against a baseline period of May 28–June 10, 2026 (2 weeks prior to tournament).