Nobody Is Working This Thursday

The most called-out work day in Corporate America is the Monday after the Super Bowl. Hangovers are contagious, apparently.

And that’s just one game in one country. In a couple of days, the whole world (almost) will call out at once. The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off this week hosted by the US, Mexico, and Canada with 48 countries playing and roughly six billion people are expected to watch some part of it.

That’s three out of every four humans alive, or the equivalent of 104 Super Bowls, with audiences in all 24 time zones. 

Football fans (real football, sorry America) all over the world are already doing the math: 

If my team plays at 3am, will the boss let me come in late? If we make the quarterfinals, can I get to Dallas to see it in person? People are never going to choose a spreadsheet over the match. They never have.

Most of the world has already made its peace with that. Brazil more or less closes when the national team plays. Scotland declared a national bank holiday for the day after its first World Cup match since 1998. Employers across Europe hand out flexibility for the month and get on with it.

The leaders who treat all of this as a problem to solve have it backwards. They see the hours around a screen as productivity leaking out of the building. What’s actually happening in those hours is the thing they spend the rest of the year trying to manufacture in offsites and all-hands meetings. A shared experience. 

Teams thrive in shared experiences. The hour everyone crowds around one screen and loses their minds over an epic corner kick does more for how they work together than a year of team-building exercises. You can’t schedule that feeling. The World Cup is handing it to you for free.

We’re not suggesting you give employees the summer off or fill it with game days and pizza parties. 

But you do have a choice: you can spend the next month fighting for your employees’ attention or you can use the world’s biggest shared experience to bring your people closer together. 

It’s counterintuitive, but giving people time off the clock usually doesn’t cost you the work. Often it protects it. The biggest four-day-week trial ever run put 61 companies on a shorter schedule for six months. Output held steady. Sick days fell by about two thirds. We count hours because they’re easy to count. It doesn’t mean it’s the metric that matters. 

People don’t call in sick to get away from a team they want to be part of. If you build one of those, the Monday after stops being a problem you have to solve.