Every World Cup, I do the same embarrassing thing.
About two weeks before the opening match I open a spreadsheet, name it "WC poule research v2", and convince myself I'm being rigorous. I look up the last time Brazil and Morocco played each other. I look up which group went furthest at the last Euros, in case that's somehow predictive. I check the altitude of every venue. I write down weather averages for Dallas in June, then I forget what I was going to do with that information. I open a tab to check whether Senegal's manager is the same one as in 2022. I close it without finding out. I open thirty more tabs. At some point I save the spreadsheet and never look at it again, then I fill in my poule from memory the night before the deadline, lose to a colleague who picked her teams by jersey colour, and tell myself next time I'll be more organized.
Getting organized
This year I tried to be more organized in a different way. Instead of doing the research, I built a site that has the research. wc.dcs.pm. Every team has its own page with past meetings, group context, fixtures and venues. Every venue has its own page with capacity, altitude, climate and a list of matches being played there. Every match has its own page with venue, kickoff, round and a countdown. It's not going to win you the poule, but it's all in one place, which is more than my spreadsheet ever managed.
The Time-zone Math
The other thing it does is timezones, which is the actual reason I started building. The 2026 tournament is split across the USA, Canada and Mexico. From Europe, kickoffs land 6 to 9 hours later than you'd expect. A 19:00 match in Los Angeles is 04:00 the next morning in Amsterdam. From Asia and Australia the gap is worse. And the whole thing runs June 11 to July 19, which is peak vacation season. So the kind of person who follows football closely enough to care about kickoff times is also the kind of person who'll be watching from a rental in Crete, a campsite in Portugal, a borrowed apartment in Lisbon, or a hotel in some country they've never been to.
I'd done this math wrong before. Two World Cups ago I missed the start of a Netherlands match because I'd worked out the conversion on a sticky note, trusted it, and turned out to be off by an hour. By the time I sat down, we were already losing. It happened again at the Euros. Different tournament, same story.
Check it out
So wc.dcs.pm just does the math for you. The site reads your browser's timezone and converts every match into your local time, in place, on the page. Open it from Amsterdam and see CEST. Open it from a beach in Croatia and see CEST Walk off a flight in Mexico City and see CST. No dropdowns, no settings, no sticky notes.
Bookmark
If you're traveling this summer, filling in a poule, or both, bookmark it now and thank me in July: wc.dcs.pm
