How We Created Live World Cup Coverage for Every Game

Here at Arena, we’re big fans of football / soccer, so we used some of our out-of-the-box features to create live feed coverage of all the games in the World Cup. If you’re in media, publishing, or just a huge fan, we’ll show you how to do this on your site as well. This is a fun way to cover the event, even if you don’t have people on-site, but can also help you boost digital property metrics like average session time, registration rate or even CTR for direct or programmatic sponsorships.

Step 1: Create a free account

To build a custom version of this, you’ll need an arena account, or you can just DM us in the chat on any of the pages and we can send you the snippet you can add to any webpage or app. Still, creating an account is easy and free: just click here.

Step 2: Create an event for a match

We bet this is simpler than you picture. When you create a sports event in the Arena Dashboard, you can already pick “soccer”, the exact tournament you’ll cover – World Cup, in this case – and the list of matches will come right up!

This is when you can enable automatic sports features that make your life much easier:

• Countdown the match
• Live score update
• Automatic play-by-play

These are features that will work automatically and set you free from updating everything that happens in a game, like goals, yellow cards and substitutions.

Step 3: Embed the Live Blog in your web page

Next thing is to add the embed code in your page. It’s usually just a copy-and-paste process, but it can vary depending on the platform you use (WordPress, Webflow, etc). If you have any difficulties, check Arena’s Help site.

Step 4: Add some social accounts for automated publishing

To create a live experience that also filters for more brand-safe content, we set two high level filters:

1. We pulled in any twitter post with the hashtags #WorldCupQatar2022, #Qatar2022, #WorldCup, etc but set a filter for only accounts with over 1,000,000 followers. This gives us global reach that can pull from any publisher, influencer or player post, but also ensures random garbage doesn’t clutter the feed.
2. We selected several official accounts, like FIFA World Cup, FourFourTwo, ESPN, etc to pull in any of their posts related to World Cup.

Next we add the countdown clock, then set live score counter to auto update. Now, anyone who comes to the page early will know when the experience will go fully live, but, for our team, it was basically “set it and forget it”.

Step 5: Enable the Live Chat

For engagement, we added a Live Chat to the right side which allows the community to engage with each other when the match starts. Since we’re NOT a publisher, and our website traffic is much lower than, say, pretty much any online media company, we opted to create a single chat that spans over every game, but, we could just as easily have created dedicated chats for specific game audiences. For high traffic sites, setting different chats for different segments of your audience can be a good idea.

Step 6: Add Conversion Cards for CTAs

After that, we added direct calls to action with Conversion Cards. For our purposes, we added two:

1. For our fun Chrome extension
2. For our new publishing solutions page

For these, we’re basically just promoting some cool content we made, but these could just as easily have been sponsored ads from partners, or even programmatic ads from a DSP.

Finally, we just toggled which match we wanted & copied and pasted this on to different pages and within about an hour, we had set up live coverage experiences for every game in the World Cup. For a list of all the pages, please see below!

World Cup calendar and live coverage links

Group Stage‍

Nov-20 Qatar vs Ecuador

Nov-21 England vs Iran

Nov-21 Senegal vs Netherlands

Nov-21 United States vs Wales

Nov-22 Argentina vs Saudi Arabia

Nov-22 Denmark vs Tunisia

Nov-22 Mexico vs Poland

Nov-22 France vs Australia

Nov-23 Morocco vs Croatia

Nov-23 Germany vs Japan

Nov-23 Spain vs Costa Rica

Nov-23 Belgium vs Canada

Nov-24 Switzerland vs Cameroon

Nov-24 Uruguay vs South Korea

Nov-24 Portugal vs Ghana

Nov-24 Brazil vs Serbia

Nov-25 Wales vs Iran

Nov-25 Qatar vs Senegal

Nov-25 Netherlands vs Ecuador

Nov-25 England vs United States

Nov-26 Tunisia vs Australia

Nov-26 Poland vs Saudi Arabia

Nov-26 France vs Denmark

Nov-26 Argentina vs Mexico

Nov-27 Japan vs Costa Rica

Nov-27 Belgium vs Morocco

Nov-27 Croatia vs Canada

Nov-27 Spain vs Germany

Nov-28 Cameroon vs Serbia

Nov-28 South Korea vs Ghana

Nov-28 Brazil vs Switzerland

Nov-28 Portugal vs Uruguay

Nov-29 Netherlands vs Qatar

Nov-29 Ecuador vs Senegal

Nov-29 Iran vs United States

Nov-29 Wales vs England

Nov-30 Tunisia vs France

Nov-30 Australia vs Denmark

Nov-30 Poland vs Argentina

Nov-30 Saudi Arabia vs Mexico

Dec-1 Croatia vs Belgium

Dec-1 Canada vs Morocco

Dec-1 Japan vs Spain

Dec-1 Costa Rica vs Germany

Dec-2 South Korea vs Portugal

Dec-2 Ghana vs Uruguay

Dec-2 Cameroon vs Brazil

Dec-2 Serbia vs Switzerland

Round of 16

Dec-3 Netherlands vs United States

Dec-3 Argentina vs Australia

Dec-4 England vs Senegal

Dec-4 France vs Poland

Dec-5 Japan vs Croatia

Dec-5 Brazil vs South Korea

Dec-6 Morocco vs Spain

Dec-6 Portugal vs Switzerland

Quarter-Finals

Dec-9 Netherlands vs Argentina

Dec-9 Croatia vs Brazil

Dec-10 Morocco vs Portugal

Dec-10 England vs France

Semi-Finals

Dec-13 Argentina vs Croatia

Dec-14 France vs Morocco

Play-off For Third Place

Dec-17 Croatia vs Morocco

Final

Dec-18 Argentina vs France

Check Out Arena Live Blog Live Updates With World Cup Content From Social Media