Small decisions in a World Cup schedule
I built Mundial26 in a weekend. Most of what people liked about it came from choices nobody noticed.
Every four years, I used to cut the World Cup schedule out of the newspaper. I'd circle the matches I cared about, write the IST time next to each one with a pen, and stick it on the wall above my desk. If you're a football fan in India, you probably did the same thing.
This year I'm working, and I didn't have an evening to spend with a newspaper and a calculator converting ET to IST for 72 matches. So I looked online. Every schedule I found was in American or European time. They were built for their audience, not for someone watching from Kerala at 1:30am.
Work was hectic, but it was in my calendar, in Indian time, and it always reminded me.
Muzammil Ibrahim, BengaluruSo I spent a weekend and built Mundial26: every match of the 2026 World Cup, in your own time zone, with one click to add it to your calendar. No app, no login, no maths.
Making it feel like the World Cup
The first version just showed matches in IST. Then I kept going.
I pulled the official FIFA fonts from their Figma design system, used the tournament's real colour palette, and sourced the actual logos. Each group has its own official colour (Group A is coral, Group B is red, Group L is lime green) and the site uses them. I wanted it to feel like it belonged to the World Cup, not like another Google Sheet someone forwarded on WhatsApp.
The decisions nobody noticed
The details that mattered most were the ones people never saw.
The date that changes overnight. A match at 11pm ET on June 11 is the morning of June 12 in India. Plenty of schedule sites get this wrong and show you the wrong day. Getting the crossover right was the single most important thing on the site, because a schedule that's wrong once is a schedule you stop trusting.
Sharing always sends IST. The WhatsApp share button sends the match time in IST, no matter which time zone you've picked. If you're sharing a match, you're almost always sending it to a friend or a family group here, so the message should be in their time, not yours.
"Next up", not "Today". At 1am, "today" is the wrong question. You don't care about the date; you care about the next match. So the top of the page shows only what's coming up, never what's already finished. Nobody wants to scroll past games they've missed.
No landing page. You open the site and the schedule is right there. No hero, no sign-up, no "how it works". The product is the page.
What 48 hours taught me
251 people used it on the first day, and around 300 in the first 48 hours. Google indexed it in under a day. Most of the traffic didn't come from search, though. It came from people sharing it directly, mostly on WhatsApp, which made that IST share button feel even more right.
Not everything worked. I got banned from r/WorldCup for posting it, and I started thinking about distribution only after I'd built everything. Next time, I'd line up where it's going to be shared before I write the first line of code.
It's a small thing. But it's the thing I wanted every four years: the schedule I used to make with scissors and a newspaper, except it's always in my time, and it reminds me before kickoff.
Built at Switchcompany.