How we verify TV rights and kickoff times, country by country

Football schedules look simple until you try to pin one down. Kickoff times shift. Broadcasters change at every border. A match that reads 20:00 on one site reads 21:00 on another, and only one of them is right. When Is Kickoff exists to settle that: one verified kickoff time in your local time zone and, for the World Cup, the right channel for your country. This page explains exactly how we get there, and where our limits are.

We’re a small team of football fans based in Norway, and we don’t just republish a feed and hope it’s correct. Every match on the site runs through the same routine: sourced, cross-checked, converted, and logged. Here’s that routine.

Where kickoff times come from

Every fixture starts from a primary source, not a scrape of another schedule site. For the World Cup, that is FIFA’s official communications. For club competitions, it is the football-data.org API. The Premier League and Champions League pages are rebuilt from that feed twice a day; the Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1 pages are rendered from a live match database that is refreshed against the same source every day.

We store every kickoff in UTC, one universal reference, then convert it to your local time using the IANA Time Zone Database, the same standard your phone’s clock trusts. That’s why a match reads correctly whether you open it in Oslo, São Paulo or Los Angeles, and why it stays right through the daylight-saving changes that catch other sites out.

How we verify TV rights, country by country

This is the part most schedule sites skip, and the part that takes real work. Broadcast rights are sold market by market. The same match is free-to-air in one country, behind a subscription in the next, and on a different channel again across the border. There is no single global list to copy, so for the 2026 World Cup we built ours one country at a time, across 60 markets.

Our primary sources are the official rights announcements: the FIFA Media Rights Licensees document for the World Cup, and broadcasters’ own press releases for each market. We treat Wikipedia’s broadcasting-rights pages as a drift-detection signal only, a way to notice when something may have changed, never as a source in its own right. When two sources disagree, the official rights holder wins, and we hold the listing until we can confirm it rather than publish a guess. It’s slower than copying a global grid, and it’s the whole reason a fan in Denmark and a fan in Mexico each see something true for them.

Our league pages list kickoff times only. We don’t publish broadcaster listings for club competitions today, and we would rather show nothing than a channel we haven’t verified.

How often we update

Fixtures are re-checked against source every day, automatically. When a verified correction comes in, a moved kickoff or a swapped channel, it goes out with the next refresh, the verification date is shown on the page, and the change is recorded in our version history. A change is a change on the record, not a silent edit.

When a match moves

Matches move: postponements, TV rescheduling, a frozen pitch in January. When our sources report a new time, the site shows it at the next refresh. A reminder you set here is tied to the match itself, not to a fixed clock time, so when the kickoff time changes, the pending reminder is re-timed automatically with the same lead time. If a match is postponed with no new date, we hold the reminder rather than fire it at the wrong moment. If it’s cancelled, we cancel it. Reminders are delivered by our partner service beep.me. The full mechanics, including the one case where you still need to act, are in our guide How reminders follow a rescheduled match.

What we don’t claim

We’re not affiliated with FIFA, any league, any broadcaster, or any rights holder, and we won’t pretend to be the final word. Rights deals change, and broadcasters sometimes announce late. For anything you can’t miss, a final, a decider, treat When Is Kickoff as your fast first answer, then confirm the channel with your broadcaster. We’d rather tell you that plainly than dress up a guess as a fact.

Sources and attribution

FIFA official communications and the FIFA Media Rights Licensees document: World Cup schedule and broadcast authority
football-data.org API: club and league fixtures
Official broadcaster press releases: per-country TV listings
IANA Time Zone Database: local-time conversion

Team-page descriptions paraphrase widely known facts and are shared under CC BY-SA 3.0 and 4.0. Full source-by-source attribution lives on our Credits page; our disclaimer covers the limits of the data.