Workers eye “World Cup sick days” as June nears

As the World Cup runs from June 11 to July 19, employers brace for absences, schedule reshuffling, and productivity dips—while some workers look for ways to watch matches during the workday or use volunteer time-off to do it.

The text came with a screenshot of a match—and the question was simple enough to sound harmless: Should we plan some potential World Cup sick days?

The person sending it wasn’t trying to be reckless. The tickets in question were over $1,000 each. The plan wasn’t to disappear forever, either. It was to buy a day—or more—when the games arrived, in the hope that prices would drop as the event got closer.

That impulse is spreading in workplaces that now have the FIFA calendar on their radar. From June 11 to July 19, the World Cup will take over attention globally during work hours, with what the article describes as “104 global Super Bowls,” many of them happening during the workday.

Bosses are already thinking about what that means on Monday mornings after kickoff: traffic jams and tangled commutes in host cities. Employers across the country are bracing for the possibility that workers will try to watch games—either on the sly or because TVs appear at the workplace when higher-ups decide the tournament is too big to ignore.

A key estimate in the reporting puts the cost of soccer-watching-related productivity dips at $4.5 billion in the United States alone. The logic is straightforward: time gets pulled from desks. meetings get rearranged. and the attention span of entire teams can fracture in predictable waves when match time hits.

Some workers will take paid time off in the normal way. Others may try to find loopholes. The reporting describes one variation bluntly: a “Cough, cough, I’m sick” call that is less about illness and more about last-minute tickets—like those for the Argentina-Austria game in Dallas.

Even how much disruption companies can expect is shaped by where they sit. Work can effectively come to a standstill in Brazil when its national team plays. Mexico floated the idea of ending the school year early for the World Cup. then faced backlash and ultimately decided against it. Workers in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom often get flexibility from their employers. In Scotland. a bank holiday was declared for the Monday after the team’s opening match. based on the assumption many citizens would spend match day celebrating the country’s first World Cup appearance since 1998.

Absence and schedule strain isn’t just a theoretical problem for HR teams. It has numbers behind it. A survey from workforce software provider UKG questioned 8. 000 workers across eight countries—Australia. Germany. the UK. France. the US. Mexico. Canada. and the Netherlands—and found that a third of workers say they’ll likely take at least one day off because of the World Cup. while a quarter expect to miss part of a workday.

The same UKG survey found that 25% of workers say they’ll “push the limits” of what managers would tolerate. and 37% say they will try to adjust their work schedules around the event. Managers. in turn. were more likely to say they planned to do some World Cup-related “finagling. ” and UKG’s chief product officer. Suresh Vittal. said managers likely feel “a higher degree of freedom.”.

The appetite for time off varies sharply by country. Forty-two percent of Mexican workers say they expect to take at least a day off for the tournament. compared with 23% of Dutch respondents. More than a third of Americans said they would miss part of a day, compared to a quarter of Germans. And 52% of Brits said the country whose team wins should get a national holiday to celebrate.

Time zones are another wrench in the machinery. James Lewis. 37. who works in customer service in the United Kingdom. says he plans to watch every single match if he can. Because many games will be overnight, he says his plan requires adjustments that go beyond flexible hours. He says he’s set to take the first two weeks of the tournament off from work entirely. “I can stay up through the night and then just sleep,” Lewis said. “Otherwise, I’d be a zombie at work.”.

He’s also taking the day of the final off in case England wins. “I’m going to be celebrating if that happens,” he said. If England gets knocked out, he says he can reverse course on the time-off request—but he might not. “I’ll just not go to work and get over my misery of losing,” he said.

Host countries could see elevated absenteeism, the reporting notes. The logic extends beyond football alone: in the US, millions skip work the day after the Super Bowl, and Canada and Mexico can see work disruptions around major hockey and soccer games.

There is also precedent outside the World Cup. The HR and payroll platform Deel found that Germans used more sick time when Germany hosted the UEFA European Championship in the summer of 2024 compared to 2025. and sick rates peaked the day after the tournament ended. The pattern didn’t show up in non-host countries.

Deel’s in-house economist. Lauren Thomas. said the trend may reflect more than invented ailments—it could also be genuine illness. She pointed to visitors converging on Germany and bringing “new germs along with them.” Millions gathering in stadiums. bars. and public transportation. she said. means lots of people are probably getting sick. “People are going to these huge crowds, and therefore a lot of them are probably getting sick,” Thomas said.

Not everyone is thinking about faking illness. Some companies are pushing people toward a different kind of workaround—one that stays inside workplace policies while still giving employees time during games.

Heineken launched a “fan volunteers” campaign that encourages workers to take advantage of their employers’ volunteer time-off benefits—during World Cup games. Through Heineken’s portal. people can sign up for volunteer opportunities during normal working hours that the company says will “possibly” allow them to watch soccer together while giving back. The reporting describes the idea as effectively letting people get out of work by volunteering while watching sports on TV at the same time.

To make the concept feel real. the reporting includes an example from the field: a Heineken-sponsored event in Brooklyn in early May. where volunteers bagged hundreds of meals for the local nonprofit Broadway Community while the UEFA Champions League semi-finals played in the background. A brass band even played at halftime—something the report says probably won’t happen at the other volunteer events.

Heineken’s vice president of marketing. Guilherme de Marchi Retz. said most workers aren’t aware of the volunteer time-off perk and should ask employers whether it’s available. “Heineken is shedding light on something and suggesting you to use that VTO to volunteer to make the world better while watching a game. ” Retz said.

Employers, for their part, are dealing with the practical reality that the World Cup is a workplace disturbance they have to manage, whether they like it or not. If employees call in sick suspiciously, the reporting says there’s not much companies can do to confirm that’s actually what’s happening.

An employment attorney, Marissa Mastroianni of Cole Schotz in New Jersey, said the “commute issue” is top of mind for many clients. Eleven American cities are hosting games, along with three in Mexico and two in Canada. In those areas, she said travel snags are inevitable on game days.

“To the extent you can allow people to work from home on those days, that would be great,” Mastroianni said. Otherwise, she said, people may show up late or leave early because of traffic. That means they’re more likely to be productive if they’re working from home. For companies that can’t offer work-from-home. Mastroianni suggested arranging on-site meals or even shuttles for employees who need to move between locations throughout the day. “The main focus is the travel situation,” she said.

There’s also the legal constraint. The reporting says many states have laws governing when employers can—and can’t—ask for doctors’ notes. In New Jersey. Mastroianni said. it’s got to be three or more consecutive days of being off before a note can be requested. In New York, she said it’s more than three days. “So employers really are going to probably be struggling a little bit with the calling out issue,” she said.

Still, not all of the workplace response has to be about damage control. Lindsay Bousman. vice president of culture and talent success at Dayforce. an HR software company. said employers may be able to use the World Cup as a team-building opportunity and “really embrace it.” She argued that the value of bringing people together for a match “outlasts what might be two hours out of their day.”.

On the logistics side, UKG’s Suresh Vittal said leaders can start planning earlier rather than later—asking employees about swapping shifts, nudging workers to make time-off requests early, and offering perks to employees who volunteer to work on days people are asking off.

The tournament itself is the driver behind all of this, and the reporting places the scale in hard terms. The World Cup represents the kind of mass cultural event sports are built to deliver at a global level. It features teams from 48 countries, and FIFA estimates some six billion people will engage with it or watch it.

For workplaces, that’s the pressure point: when attention is globally shared at that magnitude, there will be disarray—some of it planned, some of it improvised, and some of it, in the simplest sense, a worker trying to catch a match without officially admitting why they needed the day off.

World Cup workplace absenteeism UKG survey productivity losses employee schedule adjustments fan volunteers Heineken volunteer time-off employment law doctors notes commute disruptions