World Cup 2010 Google Calendar

It has become impossible for me to update the original calendar, Google keeps timing out when I try to save loosing any changes I have made.
Instead I have created an ICAL file which you can import in to Google yourself, copy this link https://blog.artesea.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/World-Cup.ics and paste it in to the “Add a friend’s calendar” box on the bottom left of Google Calendar.
I will be saving this calendar twice a day after each of the matches. Hopefully you should get the changes quickly on your new Google Calendar.
I also suggest you remove the old calendar as it seems to have some impact on the speed in which the other calendars load and sync.

(You can now ignore above, everything seems to be fine. Looks like Google crashed out when iOS4 came out and everyone re-synced their phones at the same time).

As there isn’t one is the preset list from Google for next years World Cup in South Africa, I’ve created this myself. If you wish to add it to your own Google Calendar click on the + icon at the bottom right.
I will be updating the knockout stages as soon as we know which teams will be in each fixture.

SORRY IF THE CALENDAR IS TAKING IT’S TIME TO LOAD, THIS SEEMS TO BE A PROBLEM WITH GOOGLE SHARING IT WITH SO MANY PEOPLE

Feedback in the comments suggest that if your Google Calendar is set to your timezone the fixtures will appear with the correct time for you. eg BST, PST, EST, CET, JST…



Alternate formats: XML | ICAL | HTML

To get the football icons (or others) next to your events on your own calendar, you need to enable Labs in Google Calendar, and there is an option to add “Event Flair”. When you next add or edit an event you should see a choice of icons on the right hand side.

If you wish to get the calendar on your mobile, you might consider using Goosync, you’ll need a premium account to sync calendars other than your primary one. They are available from £19.99.

GooSync

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232 thoughts on “World Cup 2010 Google Calendar

  1. many thanks
    have downloaded today. be aware, though, that some game times were changed by FIFA at the weekend, eg group D, to accommodate european tv audiences

    cheers
    Carlo

  2. Marvellous, thanks again.

    The Telegraph did one for the qualifiers but haven’t kept it updated for the finals.

    Apparently they are subject to copyright. Bizarre. Cheers, and congrats for being top return on a Google search.

  3. This is great idea, thanks!

    For some reason because I have a Google Apps AND a standard Google calendar accounts I can’t add this as Google doesn’t know which gcal to add it to.

    Would you be able to post the xml or ical address to share the calendar?

  4. I believe might be off by 1 with the timezones. The UK will, indeed, be at UTC+1 during the summer as per your previous comment. South Africa will remain at UTC+2, because they do not have a daylight savings time shift.

  5. @William, the calendar has been primarily designed for me with the match times in based on my timezone (London).
    I’ve yet to find a way for Google to allow you to shift the times on a shared calendar based on a timezone of your choice. One option you do have though is to download the ical file and do a find and replace on the times. As there are only 3 different kickoff times it shouldn’t be too hard to create the variations.

  6. Assuming you entered the data by hand from your current timezone (UTC), I think you subtracted 2 as you typed. Correct me if I am wrong. Keep in mind I’m seeing them as my local timezone, so am extrapolating your data-entry method.

    Kickoff of first game is 1600 UTC+2.

    I think you probably typed in 1400, because the current time difference is 2 hours. Google Calendar is not going to magically change this to 1500 at the moment the UK goes on daylight time.

    As a test, if you configure Google Calendar to show you the additional timezone of Johannesburg (in your default account settings), it will claim the game is going to start at 1500 UTC+2. It appears the app is smart and already knows the difference will be one hour on that date.

  7. Hmm, that’s odd, I entered all the times with kickoffs as 12:30, 15:00 and 19:30 and they all looked ok, but suddenly everything has shifted backwards an hour.
    Time to move all of them forward.

  8. Fixtures will need to be manually updated once we know who wins each group. I plan to do this as soon as I find out, and can even modify the fixtures on my mobile. But there could be the odd delay if I can’t get online.

  9. Thanks! I’m based in South Africa and when I added the calendar the times were updated to my time zone so they’re the local time (which at that time of the year is +1 hour)

  10. Thanks for the calendar! I don’t know why Google didn’t just create a single one for the whole World Cup like this. Who wants to add 32 calendars for one event? LOL

  11. This is fantastic… Exactly what I needed.
    One question – will you update the calendar after the group competition – so that Teams take place of 1A vs 2B?

  12. @Rafał, I will be updating the knockout stages as soon as I know who will be playing in each match. In some cases this will be seconds after a game has finished (I can edit the calendar on my mobile), others may be a few hours, especially if I’ve been drinking in the pub as it’s easy to forget to do the updating 😉

  13. Google has added team-specific FIFA World-Cup 2010 calendars complete with goals scored. Under “Other Calendars” click Add, then Browse Interesting Calendars, then select the Sports tab, scroll down to click on FIFA World Cup, then Subscribe to the teams you want.

  14. @UnnDunn: Google stuff is not good. There ma many teams I dont want so many calendars – just one will do, as this one. Ryan – thanks for the answer. Such updates are fine. Thanks a lot.

  15. You rock! The “by team calendars” that google has didn’t sit well with me. Awesome! May I suggest adding the scores as the games are completed?

  16. Brilliant calendar.

    I’ve a quick question that maybe someone will answer for me. I sync Google Calendars with my iPhone. Unfortunately only those calendars listed under “My Calendars” sync with the handset and not those listed under “Other Calendars” (which is where this one appears. Is there anyway of making those “Other Calendars” sync up?

  17. Brilliant – thanks for putting this together…don’t know why Google just don’t consolodate their separate calendars for subscription to save you the effort but it’s much appreciated!

  18. It won’t be possible for you to edit the calendar (without exporting to your computer and then reimporting). Because of the requests I’ll be placing the scores in to the event titles eg South Africa 1 – 1 Mexico once the games have ended.

  19. Just what I was looking for and top result when googling for it – nice work!

    Just one thing, perhaps adding the liitle football icon ‘flair’ would put the cherry on top – bit rude, I know :o)

  20. Ah for the good old days when you could search for things like this *within* Google Calendars. I still don’t understand why they took that function away.

    Thanks, though!

  21. Thank you so much this is great, I know this sounds greedy but is there a way to get all the Fifa international friendlies auto populated into google calendar instead of doing it manually?

  22. This is great!
    Would you be able to update it with the new flair google has (small soccer ball)? This will help my already crowded calendar.
    If you can’t, it’s cool. This is definitely tip top. thx

  23. Hi Ryan,

    As I use Google Apps, I cannot add the calendar with the plus sign… and I would really love to add this!

    Could you give me the xml address?
    You can find it in the settings of this calendar…

    Hope you respond because I really appreciate this effort you made in creating the calendar!

    Theo.

  24. Nice work: download the basic.ics and imported it into google apps account – times converted nicely to Eastern US.

    Thanks for the time you spent doing this.

  25. The event flair is a Google Labs feature, so you’ve got to enable it under Settings > Calendar Settings > Labs > Event flair. After that, you should be able to see a widget in your main calendar view.

  26. TNX !! That’s what I searched for !!

    How did you insert those cool football icons in the calendar ?

    I’ve never seen something like this before and found nothing in the google help center.

  27. Thanks a lot, Ryan!
    Pesky google option duplicates games as you have to subscribe to each nation individually. Hope you get time to update team names as the competition progresses. COME ON ENGLAND. Best wishes.

  28. Thanks a lot. Google’s own calendar is broken down into teams. And you have to add each team!! Not Cool!!
    Times adjusted to my timezone as well. Great thanks!

  29. @Gareth the score on my screen shows 1-1, however I’m finding that the calendar is taking an age to sync with my mobile (the New Zealand game is still showing no score). I just think that Google can’t cope with the large number of people subscribed to it.

  30. Its taking ages to load or not at all on the google calendar website. also it started off fine but now it’s not syncing properly on my android phone

  31. That’s a shame. I now can’t see this on google calendar – message reads “Calendar ‘World Cup 2010’ did not load” etc and has been that way for 2 days. Still have fixtures on android (which is handy) but the most recent result is also 2 days old – NZ v Slovakia 0-0, which was the half time score! Anyone else stuck at the same spot I wonder?

  32. My own phone is no longer displaying the games (I unsynced and resynced trying to get it to be up to date). My mates is perfectly fine and all scores correct.
    The calendar does appear for a short while on the Google Website, just try hitting Ctrl+F5 and it should appear (but expect it to go again), or when it has gone on the left hand side click on “World Cup 2010”.

  33. I am having the same problem as SJerz. Any help cuz I did what you suggested however it shows for a split second and then disappears again.

  34. Yeah, i’m having the same problem with the calendar not showing on my HTC Hero (UK)..i’ve unsubscribed and subscribed, re-syncs but no joy….shame as this feature was brilliant.

    Any update on this would be great…

  35. It looks like Google haven’t built their calendars to be shared with tens of thousands of people (if not millions).
    An alternative method would be to right click on this ICAL link, save the file to your computer. Then create a new google calendar for yourself and import that ICAL file.
    You won’t get any of the updates, so you will have to do that yourself but at least it won’t keep vanishing.

    At the moment it is taking me over 2 hours to get any updates saved to the calendar, so if you do manage to see the fixtures sorry if they are a bit out of date.

  36. I have the same issue. It looks like its an overload. Another way would be to use something like iCal’s feature to publish a local calendar hourly to a server and then we can link to that ICS file. Your calendar was such a great feature, now we can’t even see your efforts of adding scores anymore. How about re-publishing your file to the ICAL link you provided above? iCal on the Mac will be able to sync to that link instead of the Google one. Thanks for trying to make technology work for us…

  37. I’ve updated the top of this blog post with the following:

    It has become impossible for me to update the original calendar, Google keeps timing out when I try to save loosing any changes I have made.
    Instead I have created an ICAL file which you can import in to Google yourself, copy this link https://blog.artesea.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/World-Cup.ics and paste it in to the “Add a friend’s calendar” box on the bottom left of Google Calendar.
    I will be saving this calendar twice a day after each of the matches. Hopefully you should get the changes quickly on your new Google Calendar.
    I also suggest you remove the old calendar as it seems to have some impact on the speed in which the other calendars load and sync.

  38. Seems like Google have fixed the calendar from crashing. I believe the problem started when iOS4 came out and everyone re-synced their phones at the same time making Google Sync (including Calendars) unstable.
    Don’t worry if you have switched to the other format, both the Google Calendar and the iCal file will be continued to be updated for the last 4 matches.

  39. Thanks a lot for this calendar Ryan. I loved that you were updating it as the action happened and it synced up to my phone (even though we ran into some trouble because of iOS4, that’s OK :D)!! Are you gonna do something like this for Champions League? Please tell me yes!

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