Timezone Tax

What the timezone tax costs

The fixture list is the same for everyone. The experience of it is not. A 19:00 kickoff in Mexico City is prime time for the fans in the stadium and a 4:00 AM alarm for the fans in Tokyo. The match does not change. The hour you watch it does, and for a tournament spread across the Americas, the kickoff windows that feel natural in one part of the world land in the dead of night in another.

We call that gap the timezone tax. It is the lost sleep, the half-days off work, and the 3:00 AM living rooms that never show up in a results table but get paid, match after match, by whichever fan base happens to live on the wrong side of the planet. This page scores all 48 nations on what their group stage actually asks of the people watching at home.

All 48 Nations Ranked

Score reflects average kickoff pain across all group-stage matches. Higher = worse schedule. Bar length = pain.

What the numbers show

Read the table top to bottom and the pattern falls out of it. The heaviest tax lands on the fan bases living furthest from the host time zones. Algeria, Tunisia, and Iraq carry the worst average pain scores, with several group matches pushed deep into the overnight hours at home. A fixture staged for a North American evening can land in the small hours far to the east, the part of our scale where no strategy works.

At the other end sit the host nations and the Americas sides. Uruguay, Panama, Mexico, and Haiti score lowest, close to the ideal end of the scale. When the tournament is played in your part of the world the tax is close to nothing: kickoffs arrive in the evening, prime time lands on schedule, and nobody sets a pre-dawn alarm. That asymmetry is the whole story. The same 104 matches are a gift to one half of the world and a month of broken sleep to the other.

How the score works

Every group-stage kickoff is converted from the venue's local time into each nation's home time, then scored from 0 to 8 on what it asks of a fan watching live:

• 0, prime time. Early evening at home, roughly 17:00 to 21:00. Ideal.
• 1, an annoyance. Work hours or a late finish, watchable around the day.
• 3 to 4, a late night. A 22:00 or 23:00 start that ends past midnight and costs you the morning.
• 5, an early alarm. A pre-dawn kickoff you get up for, coffee in hand.
• 6 to 8, the sleep zone. Midnight to 4:00 AM, where staying up and waking early are equally bad.

Each nation's score is the average across its group matches, scaled to 0 to 100. Higher is worse. This is our own analysis, not a peer-reviewed measure, and it ignores who wins. It only asks what the schedule costs the people watching.

The full fan tool lives at whatisthetime.now

Full country-by-country rankings for all 48 nations with per-country detail pages.

• All 48 countries ranked