If you’re a soccer hater

and not afraid to admit it, then you are sure to encounter suspicious events – such as hastily muttered excuses along the lines of “Erm ...important meeting with the ..erm.. shareholders’ committee…” If the meeting happens to be scheduled for an afternoon when your country’s team is in action, alarm bells should definitely ring. What’s more, you need to be particularly wary if you work for Emirates, Budweiser, Adidas or Continental. None of these official World Cup sponsors will schedule a meeting to clash with a match – unless the pow-wow is being held in a stadium in South Africa, of course.

Self-confessed soccer fans

– perhaps your boss – may decide to make every day of the World Cup a dress-down Friday. CEOs of publicly traded enterprises – whether Australian, German or Brazilian – won’t bat an eyelid when senior executives choose to ignore the fact that PhD students, secretaries and temps are turning up for work wearing the soccer strip of their national squad. But let’s be honest for a moment: when a team is sent packing despite a heroic performance because of a debatable penalty awarded in the 93rd minute, don’t we all identify with the losing country? True friends of soccer (I’m repeating myself, but I want to be absolutely clear on this) will not be all that concerned by the reduced hours colleagues and employees dedicate to their work over the next four and half weeks. But on the other hand, they’re pretty glad that synchronized swimming championships and orienteering contests also exist, i.e. sporting events that don’t create quite so much of a kafuffle as the World Cup does. Just remember, when it comes to capturing the spirit of a sport and transporting it to our desks and canteens, then it’s perfectly ok for bosses to introduce special time sheets in the next few weeks, to redefine goals, set up big screens in open-plan offices, and have a flutter on the department’s sweepstakes. So it only remains for me to say: have a ball this World Cup!

Part one of article