Go figure: The World Cup is a numbers game

Every four years, as football fans gear up for the World Cup, researchers engage in a game of their own: trying to determine just how costly the tournament is to employers and economies. Our own contribution to this genre suggests that the calculation is a bit more complex than is generally acknowledged.

To calculate the number of productive hours at risk in this year’s tournament, we assume local office hours are between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., and that 50% of each country’s workforce will be interested in watching the games. We estimate that a total of $14.5 billion in gross domestic product worldwide could be at risk in the first two weeks of the tournament.

From there, though, the story gets more complicated.

Perhaps counterintuitively, watching football could actually make for a moreproductive workday. As one recent paper demonstrates, watching soccer can affect a fan’s happiness an hour before kickoff and up to three hours after the players disappear down the tunnel. Other research has shown that boosting people’s happiness can make them about 10 % to 12% more productive at work — implying that a good day on the pitch will lead to a good day at the office. The catch is that the negative effect of seeing your team lose is twice as big as the boost to happiness of watching them win.

So what does this tell us about the World Cup?

Using these figures as a baseline, we calculated how much the expected outcome of each game -- based on odds from U.K. bookies -- would affect workers’ productivity. In all, we found that half of the 48 group-stage games could have economic consequences.

Take the France-Peru game. That match is scheduled for 2:00 p.m. (France time) on a Thursday, meaning that French workers will be on the job an hour before and after the game. Because France has a high probability of winning this game, we estimate that French workers will be 4.4% more productive that day, which implies a $354 million boost in GDP. That may sound like good news. Yet this boost doesn’t come close to compensating for the $2 billion lost during the two hours of the game itself -- to say nothing of the blow to productive work if France lost in an upset.

Brazil offers another cautionary tale. Its games against Serbia and Costa Rica both seem likely to be costly, since they interrupt workdays. Although Brazil is among the favourites to win the Cup, the increased productivity from these wins would not be significant or lasting enough to compensate for those lost working hours. An unexpected loss, meanwhile, could be a disaster: If Brazil were defeated by Costa Rica, productivity could decline by 14.4% in the hours after the match.

Since these games are likely to act as a net drag on productivity, what steps should be taken to prepare? Take a cue from the Dutch football legend Johan Cruyff, who once said: “The attack is the best defence.” In that spirit, why not turn on the office TV and invite employees to watch the games together? True, not much work will get done. But think of it as an opportunity to improve engagement, cultivate a stronger sense of community. The benefits of such an approach would be harder to quantify than lost working hours. But remember that the highest satisfactions of football are intangible -- the true costs and benefits of the World Cup almost certainly can’t be measured in dollars.