The World Cup is a planning problem, not a surprise
The 2026 World Cup kicks off on 11 June. Your operation will feel it whether you plan for it or not — so this issue is about being ahead of the pattern rather than reacting to it on the day.
The tournament is already on the schedule — is it on yours?
Every major tournament does the same handful of things to a contact centre. Volumes shift around match times. Absence spikes around the big games. Swap requests pour in. Attention drifts. The only real variable is whether the planning team saw it coming.
I've just published Planning your contact centre during the 2026 World Cup, and the part most teams miss is the time zone. This tournament is hosted in North America, with kick-offs set for US TV — afternoon and evening Eastern. For a US or Canadian operation that lands in the heart of the working day: a 10–25% volume collapse during high-interest matches, and direct, substantial schedule pressure they haven't felt since 1994.
For UK and Irish operations it's almost the mirror image. A 6pm Eastern kick-off lands at 11pm BST — outside core hours. The disruption isn't in your daytime volume; it's on your evening shift, in the swap requests, and in a quieter, grumpier morning-after as tired customers call in late. Western Europe, add an hour. The same match is a queue emergency for one operation and a non-event for another. Time zone is the planning variable, and it decides which levers you actually need.
Five minutes, one tool
The within-day shape is where this bites, so model it before it arrives. Open the Intraday Profile calculator, take a normal day's curve, and drop a 10–25% dip into the match windows that fall in your hours. You'll see immediately whether it's a shrug or a problem — and whether the recovery wave after the final whistle is the interval you actually need to staff for.
The takeaway
The article lists six levers worth pulling in the next ten days — tag the match calendar, allocate match-day leave with intent, pre-agree swap rules, decide the watching policy explicitly, brief real-time, and plan the cultural side. But the one that costs nothing and matters most is communicating early. Agents who know the watching and leave rules before kick-off respect them; agents who learn them on the day push back. Ambiguity damages culture far more than any policy you'd actually pick.
Until next time,
John ccPlanning
