What suppliers and retailers need to be thinking about as they prepare to review their World Cup performance.
While the final is done and players and fans across Europe are turning their attention to the start of the football season, for retailers and suppliers, the short term is about reviewing how successful the World Cup has been in driving demand.
Completing our coverage of the tournament, we look at how shoppers actually behaved during the World Cup, versus what they said they planned to do, and the key takeaways for retailers and away from home operators.
Shoppers' engagement exceeded expectations…
Our ShopperVista research showed that 70% of shoppers surveyed said they followed the World Cup. This level of engagement surpassed 2026 and 2022 pre-tournament expectations. The increase in engagement may reflect England’s success in the tournament, which helped retain the 15% of shoppers who had planned to follow the World Cup depending on their team’s performance.
While there were concerns around the late kick-off times, convenient solutions, media coverage and strong activation helped encourage celebration. The benefit of the tournament being held in the summer made it more conducive to celebration, with warmer weather and longer evenings helping to drive participation. Certainly, the hot weather in the UK and across most of Europe will have helped enable at-home dining and celebration occasions. With the 2030 World Cup also taking place during the summer months, engagement levels are likely to remain high.
…But looked to save where possible
Shoppers looked for promotions and deals, which created space to spend on the event. 25% said they made more unplanned purchases, suggesting that the World Cup created additional eating and drinking occasions beyond shoppers' normal routines. Longer evenings, socialising around matches and spontaneous viewing occasions encouraged incremental spend.
Late kick-off times created new occasions…
When shoppers were asked about their viewing plans, they may not have fully considered the impact of late kick-off times. Ultimately, the practical challenge of celebrating matches late at night proved difficult, meaning many prioritised certain fixtures. Later match timings reduced spontaneous socialising and hosting occasions, with 73% saying they were less likely to watch with friends and family.
Despite creating challenges, late timings accelerated convenience-led viewing occasions in the home. Quick commerce operators responded by extending delivery hours and expanding coverage to meet demand. Looking ahead, quick commerce operators have an opportunity to drive long-term growth by using shopper mission data to deliver more targeted promotions, strengthen loyalty and support wider missions.
…With retailers and suppliers turning it into an “at-home occasion”
Unlike previous tournaments, given match timings, retailers focused heavily on helping shoppers watch games at home. Savoury snacks, soft drinks and alcohol were the core categories, but this was supported through the addition of meal deals, pizzas and prepared foods, with many driving excitement by developing products specifically for the tournament or match nights. The key lesson is that major sporting events can be used to compete directly with takeaways, pubs and other away from home spending by creating convenient, mission-based solutions.
Retailers and suppliers maximised the activation opportunity…
Seasonal events have been a key driver of footfall and additional spending in 2026, and the World Cup was an opportunity retailers and suppliers were not going to miss. While activations remained similar to other recent events, their number, visibility, and the tournament’s longevity meant they were likely to make an impact on shoppers.
Official partnerships, prizes and limited editions drove the strongest visibility, with brands with official FIFA partnerships dominating store space, online activations and promotional displays. The most effective campaigns combined and maximised the prominence of the Official World Cup branding, and created urgency through the addition of limited-edition products and tangible prizes, like free products, merchandise, vouchers, and tickets, to encourage purchases.
…With further opportunities for 2030
While snacks, soft drinks and beer dominated, the biggest opportunity for 2030 is broader event activation beyond the traditional categories. For retailers and suppliers, it will be key to take the learnings from 2026 and look to understand how and where they can extend their products to support wider missions and occasions. For retailers, this means looking at further opportunities with general merchandise ranges, themed seasonal zones, cross-category adjacencies, and how loyalty programmes can be used to extend the event into new categories and for gamification to drive spending.
Away from home operators market the experience, rather than the products
With retailers and suppliers focusing on bringing the late meal, drink, and celebration occasions home, for away from home operators, the opportunity lay in not just simply promoting themselves as a place to watch football, but as somewhere consumers can experience the match.
The operators who were able to promote their venues as offering consumers the chance to create memorable shared experiences, build flexibility into their activations as the tournament developed, and help groups share, so everyone could save, are likely to have won. Those that have invested in fan viewing areas with clear venue-wide sightlines and speaker systems to create stadium-like atmospheres were favoured by consumers. These solutions are allowing operators to target younger and more affluent consumers, who are the core growth audience, with experiences and through social media engagement. Social media can help build excitement before, during and after matches through content, countdowns, ticket giveaways, influencer partnerships and fan-generated content. This enables them to target a range of occasions, not just the matches themselves.
Many operators used ticketing, table packages, pre-booked experiences and subscriber incentives to secure attendance ahead of matchdays. Advance booking created demand, and encouraged consumers to sign up to secure their place, while for operators it helped reduce demand uncertainty, support staffing plans and bring revenue forward.
Ultimately, the biggest World Cup winners won't be venues showing football—they'll be operators creating experiences before, during and after the final whistle.
How can you get the most from your World Cup review?
The most effective commercial teams will move quickly, separating the celebration of short-term sales from the core lessons that can improve future ventures.
1. Reconfirm what success looked like
Do: review performance against your original commercial, category, customer and brand objectives.
Make it more compelling: separate results into incremental growth (which sales were driven by weather, which by the World Cup, which by my promotion, etc.). Review post-World Cup sales figures for displaced sales.
2. Create one trusted performance view
Do: bring together sales, margin, distribution, promotional, media, shopper and operational data.
Make it more compelling: build a shared review across sales, category, revenue growth management and trade marketing as one source of truth. Celebrate the successes and learn from the review together.
3. Identify what really drove performance
Do: compare performance by customer, channel, format, occasion, activation mechanic and shopper group where possible. This can be done qualitatively as well as quantitatively.
Make it more compelling: look beyond the strongest sales numbers. Consider execution quality, availability, visibility, timing and competitor activity to understand why something worked, did not work or could’ve done more.
4. Capture the eight trend implications
Do: use the trends highlighted in this article to assess which shifts are temporary and which are likely to influence future sporting events and summer trading.
Make it more compelling: translate each relevant trend into a clear implication for your portfolio, pricing, promotion, activation or customer planning. When creating plans, use performance now to estimate future performance; do not dress for yesterday’s weather!
5. Turn learning into action
Do: agree what to repeat, improve, stop and test next time, with clear owners and deadlines. Embed the best behaviours.
Make it more compelling: take your strongest lessons into annual planning, customer strategies and future event playbooks, rather than leaving them in a post-event presentation. Use your successes as reasons to believe and your lessons as opportunities for growth.
A focused review should help teams protect what worked, address what did not and create a stronger team and plan for the next major occasion. At IGD, we can lead the full review process, support internal teams with analysis and facilitation, or advise on the methodology, scorecards and outputs required. Get in touch with the IGD Consultancy team to find out more!