Contributing editor, Peter Backman, is a long-term foodservice sector guru and founder of theDelivery.World, a platform that connects the delivery sector and makes sense of the myriad changes and challenges that affect the sector across the globe.
Does delivery benefit from watching sport? Only when the sport is the right kind of occasion and the 2026 World Cup will not be that occasion everywhere.
American readers will know that the Super Bowl is the country’s single biggest at-home delivery event, so the lesson worth drawing out is why. It is not really the sport; it is the gathering a planned, social, at-home evening, ordered for in shareable form. Two caveats travel from it. First, the surge comes before kickoff, not during: operators are frantic in the build-up and dead once the whistle blows. Second, even at its peak delivery takes only a slice – an Adweek survey found only around 23 percent of Super Bowl viewers planned to order through an app, with most still cooking or buying from the store.
Soccer sharpens the point. Ninety near-continuous minutes with a single break offer little in-game ordering rhythm, so the opportunity concentrates even more tightly into the pre-match window. Delivery benefits, then, only where a match is a planned, at-home event at a sociable hour. That condition is what makes the World Cup so uneven and the unevenness has two sources: how far ahead the timing can be known, and where in the world the clock falls.
The first is structural. In the group stage, the 48 teams play three matches each on fixed, published dates and times, so a country knows months ahead exactly when its team plays. In the knockout rounds single elimination, where a loss means going home the slots are fixed but the teams filling them are not known until results come in, so a nation can only infer when its team, and its delivery orders, will be called on.
The second is the clock, and it splits the world. In the United States the conditions align almost perfectly: home prime time, the most developed delivery infrastructure on earth, and an entrenched order-in-to-watch habit. Expect Super Bowl-style spikes on the marquee games the US team, the latter stages, the final and little on the rest, the ceiling being cultural rather than logistical, since soccer still trails the NFL in American devotion.
Europe and Africa broadly share the same two-hour band, so they watch at much the same hours — and both are vast soccer-watching regions, if with very different economies and delivery patterns. Northern Europe, with its mature platforms, looks most like the United States. But the occasion is split: the afternoon and early-evening kickoffs are prime, while the later ones drift past midnight. And in Britain the pub remains the cultural default, taking the sociable slots and leaving delivery and the supermarket the late and post-pub games – to a shrinking audience and on thin late-night capacity.
The Middle East is the surprise. Most matches fall between midnight and dawn, yet the Gulf’s late-night, indoor, summer social culture and fast-growing delivery sector could make the late-evening slots quietly favorable.
The Far East is the great mismatch. East Asia has the world’s most sophisticated delivery networks and huge audiences, but matches arrive over breakfast and through the working day, when no one orders in to watch live. The region best equipped to serve a delivery World Cup is the one the schedule shuts out.
The thread is that delivery’s World Cup is neither global nor uniform it follows the clock, favoring the Americas first, Europe partially, the Gulf late at night, and the Far East scarcely at all.
