Every four years, the FIFA World Cup turns into a ritual in India. The ‘seasonal’ viewer picks a side, dusts off an old Brazil jersey, WhatsApp groups light up with predictions, and football fever spreads through hostels, pubs, cafés, and living rooms. The 2026 edition is likely to unsettle that rhythm. Hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico from June 12 to July 20, this World Cup arrives in India at unusually difficult hours, making it much harder for the tournament to function as the easy, shared event it has been in the past.
The scale of the problem is straightforward. According to Al Jazeera, only 14 of the 104 fixtures will begin before midnight for viewers in India. With FIFA expanding the 2026 tournament from 32 to 48 teams, this will be the longest and most crowded World Cup yet. Indian audiences will have to play catch-up, dealing not just with a handful of inconvenient kick-offs but with a month-long chase in which most games begin after midnight or early in the morning.
Across India, these issues play out in familiar ways. Cities like Bengaluru and Kolkata have an established football audience, with active fan clubs, sports bars, and nightlife that would typically soak up a tournament like this. But with many fixtures falling outside the times when screenings are practical, those same places are effectively split on how it watches the ‘beautiful game’. A handful of matches can still be watched as events, while the rest are pushed into more private viewing.
The World Cup in India has never belonged only to the hardcore fan. A lot of its energy comes from people who barely watch the game otherwise but show up every four years, pick a team, put on a jersey, and follow the drama with their friends. “The World Cup is the only time you can suddenly start talking football and no one calls you out for being a non-watcher,” says Purab Karanth, a self-proclaimed “part-time” football fan.
This year’s schedule pushes most of the World Cup into three different time bands. A small cluster of games in the 9.30 pm–10.30 pm IST window can still be treated as an evening game, working for screenings in pubs, hostels, and paying guest facilities without wrecking the next day. But even within the teams that are considered favourites by pundits and bookmakers, like Spain, France, England, Argentina, Brazil and Portugal, only five group-stage matches fall into this relatively friendly slot; almost all the ‘massive’ games arrive either just past midnight or too early in the morning. The 12.30 am slot may draw crowds for a marquee fixture on the weekends, yet it is hard to sustain on regular weekdays. The 3.30 am–7.30 am block is the toughest of them all, when the odds of anyone but the most committed of fans tuning in are slim.
In the places that would normally turn up in volume for the big matches, venues are already struggling to cope with the awkward schedule. Pubs and sports bars say that they can accommodate the occasional late evening match or 12.30 am weekend game, but there is almost no way to show a Brazil‑vs‑Morocco‑type fixture listed at 3.30 am on a Monday. Most cities have capped serving hours at around midnight or 1 am, long before many of these matches can even kick off.
Call around, and the pattern repeats: some venues are only planning to screen the earlier matches, others are not screening at all because of the restrictions, and a few admit they were not even aware the tournament was around the corner.
For supporter groups and fan clubs, the underlying concern feels especially stark. “What I feel will be different this year is the timing,” explains Manoj Lad, the president of Manchester United Supporters’ Club (MUSC) Bengaluru. “Most of the games are early morning. Everything will be shut, and every pub has to close by 1 am, so that affects us a lot.” He remembers the 2022 Qatar World Cup as a rare exception, when the time difference was small enough for people to gather and watch several matches.
For the individual fan, that shift is likely to feel more fragmented. People who might once have gone out to watch a match or two are now far more likely to follow it alone, on a laptop balanced against a pillow, half an eye on a live watchalong, and muffled cheers kept just low enough not to wake anyone else.
For a while, the main question for Indian viewers was not when the World Cup would be on, but where they would be able to watch it. It was only in June that FIFA finally announced its agreement with ZEE Entertainment, after months of uncertainty and a deadlock over pricing between the organisation and potential broadcasters, even as it wrapped up contracts in dozens of other markets.
Reuters reported that FIFA initially sought around 100 million USD for the combined 2026 and 2030 World Cup rights in India, before lowering its expectations to about 60 million USD, while JioStar, the Reliance–Disney joint venture that held the rights in 2022, is believed to have offered closer to 20 million USD, which FIFA is reported to have turned down. That gap left the Indian rights unsold just weeks before kick-off, but the late rescue by ZEE ensured escape from the prospect of a rare World Cup blackout in one of FIFA’s largest markets.
The deal that emerged could be seen as a long-term one as FIFA has granted ZEE the Indian rights to 39 of its tournaments between 2026 and 2034, including the men’s World Cups in 2026 and 2030, the women’s World Cup in 2027, and a series of youth and futsal competitions.
For this edition, ZEE plans to showcase the matches on its new Unite8 Sports television channels, with live-streaming done on ZEE5. This means most fans will be able to watch either through their existing cable or DTH provider, or by adding a single streaming app, but they will still need to pay for access. On ZEE5, the tournament sits behind its premium sports offering. At present, the platform has two relevant options: a three-month plan at Rs 799 for three months, or an annual plan at Rs 1,699.
The network has launched four sports channels – Unite8 Sports 1, Unite8 Sports 1 HD, Unite8 Sports 2, and Unite8 Sports 2 HD – with Hindi commentary on the first two and English on the last two. Looking ahead, the same network is meant to anchor ZEE’s wider push into sports, with Unite8 Sports carrying football, cricket, kabaddi, and other properties as it tries to establish itself as a more diversified player in the sports ecosystem.
For ZEE, this deal is a statement of intent. It pushes the network deeper into football in a landscape where cricket dominates, and rival broadcasters have usually controlled the biggest properties.
And for anyone who keeps up with club football, the picture is even messier. European leagues and other competitions remain scattered across rival broadcasters and apps, so ZEE’s World Cup package ends up as one more separate subscription to manage rather than a single home for all their football.
For fans, though, the impact is more of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the deal ensures clarity on who carries the World Cup and how easy it is to access, but on the other, deeper problems start to surface in India’s own football system.
The All India Football Federation (AIFF) hailed the deal on its social media pages, eliciting fan reactions arguing that the federation was quicker to celebrate a World Cup broadcast deal, than to show real progress at home. “Hypocrisy of AIFF,” one fan wrote on X. Another user put it more bluntly: “Countries are celebrating World Cup qualification, meanwhile India is celebrating a broadcaster.”
Just last year, clubs from the Indian Super League (ISL) warned they faced the real possibility of shutting down amid an ongoing crisis in the domestic league, a threat they have repeated this year in joint statements pushing for a more sustainable future.
For supporters, that crisis goes beyond balance sheets: poor infrastructure, underfunded training facilities and patchy access to the game keep India lagging behind its ambitions on the global stage.
None of this means that India will be switching the World Cup off. Alarms will be set for 3.30 am, with post‑match discussions going on for hours after the final whistle, memes circulating on social media, and a small, stubborn group of people willing to trade sleep to watch football. For them, the matches will be part of their daily ritual, carrying a certain thrill of belonging to an exclusive circle that keeps the footballing tradition alive.
What fades, instead, is the idea that the tournament is inescapable. In previous editions, it was much easier to stumble across a World Cup game without intending to, be it commentary in the background of a local tea shop, or your friends arguing about last night's match in the corridors, or sitting through half a match with your parents. Back then, fewer apps and cheaper cable also meant that football could slip into your day almost by accident.
This time, in a more fragmented, paywalled, and tightly scheduled era, you have to opt in.
You have to decide whether to sacrifice a night of sleep to watch your favourite team play, who will even be willing to stay up with you to watch, or whether one more subscription is even worth the hassle. By the end of it all, this shift pulls the spectacle away from the edge of ordinary life.
The new broadcast deal guarantees that, when someone does make the effort to seek out the games, they will find them. But everything around it feels more fragile. Local calendars have to bend around North American kick‑offs and venues cannot afford to stay open all night. The tournament still reaches India; it just no longer does so in quite the same way.
By the time a champion is crowned, India will be full of overlapping realities. For a pocket of fans, the tournament will have shaped their sleep cycles, social lives, and shared stories, while for many others it will blur into a few highlights and half‑remembered scorelines. On the other side of the world, everything would carry on at its own pace, indifferent to how hard it was to keep up from here. By the time it is over, what lingers may not be one defining moment, but the way the country chose to watch one of the world’s biggest sporting events.
This article was written by a student interning with TNM.
