Every time a major tournament comes around, business owners seem to have the same conversation.
What if productivity drops?
What if everyone wants the same days off?
What if people spend half the day checking scores?
They're fair questions.
But they miss a bigger opportunity.
Because while some businesses spend the World Cup worrying about what it might cost them, others are quietly working out how much money they can make from it.
And they don't all sell beer, burgers or big-screen TVs.
The World Cup isn't a football event. It's a spending event.
Think about what actually happens during a tournament.
People meet friends they haven't seen in months.
They host barbecues.
They eat out more.
They travel.
They organise watch parties.
They spend hours scrolling social media.
They talk about the same thing at work, online and at home.
The football is the reason.
The spending is the opportunity.
The mistake many businesses make is assuming they have nothing to do with football.
You don't need to.
You just need to understand how your customers behave when football takes over.
Don't sell football. Sell what happens around football.
The local bakery isn't competing with the pub.
It's helping somebody feed ten people coming round to watch a match.
The florist isn't selling football.
It's selling gifts to somebody visiting friends for a barbecue.
The accountant isn't selling football.
But they might use the tournament as a reason to reconnect with dormant clients.
The businesses that benefit most are usually the ones that stop thinking about the event itself and start thinking about the behaviours it creates.
This is a perfect excuse to contact old customers
Most businesses have customers they've not heard from in months.
People who bought once and disappeared.
People who enquired but never quite got round to placing an order.
People who said, "We'll come back to that later."
The World Cup gives you a reason to restart those conversations.
Not with a hard sales pitch.
Just a timely offer, a promotion or even a simple email that feels relevant to what's happening.
Sometimes customers don't need convincing.
They just need reminding you exist.
Attention is expensive. Right now it's free.
Businesses spend thousands trying to get noticed.
The World Cup does part of that job for you.
People are already engaged.
They're already talking.
They're already looking at their phones every few minutes.
That creates opportunities to run competitions, share content, launch offers or simply increase visibility.
You don't need a massive marketing budget.
You just need a reason for customers to choose you instead of the business down the road.
Look at what your competitors aren't doing
Here's an interesting exercise.
Look at five competitors.
How many are doing absolutely nothing around the World Cup?
Probably most of them.
That's your opportunity.
You don't need to run the biggest campaign.
You just need to do more than the businesses sitting on the sidelines waiting for things to go back to normal.
Don't forget your team
There is one thing every business owner should plan for.
People will want flexibility.
Some matches will be impossible to ignore.
The businesses that handle this best tend to be the ones that treat their employees like adults.
A little flexibility often buys a lot of goodwill.
And goodwill is usually worth more than an argument about whether somebody checked the score during their lunch break.
The real opportunity
The biggest misconception about the World Cup is that it's only good news for hospitality businesses.
It isn't.
It's good news for businesses that understand attention.
For a few weeks, millions of people are focused on the same thing at the same time.
That doesn't happen very often.
The businesses that benefit won't necessarily be the ones with the biggest marketing budgets.
They'll be the ones that spot the opportunity hiding behind the fixtures list.
Because while everyone else is watching the football, smart businesses are watching their customers.
