What to Do During 16 Days Without Club Soccer? How to Adjust to the National Team Window

From September 21 through October 6, there will be no club soccer. This year, for the first time, FIFA has combined the September and October windows into one, resulting in 16 consecutive days during which each national team will play up to four matches. At the same time:

• the schedule within the window remains packed: there are four rounds of the UEFA Nations League, the first rounds of qualifying for the Africa Cup of Nations, and the group stage of the CONCACAF Nations League;
• on September 29, the MLB playoffs and the NHL regular season both kick off on the same day;
• the geographic scope will expand, with Africa, Mexico and Central America, and the U.S. joining the usual European fixtures.

On October 10-11, the domestic leagues will resume, and the second round of the Champions League will take place on October 13-14.

Why is the break so long?

Previously, national teams gathered twice: briefly in September and again in October. Starting in 2026, FIFA has combined these gatherings so that players have to fly across the ocean less often. Clubs are facing a break of nearly three weeks: the last round of league play takes place on September 19-20, and the next one is not until October 10-11.

Where to run traffic

UEFA Nations League: four consecutive matchdays

Matchdays take place September 24-26, September 27-29, October 1-3, and October 4-6. There are 54 national teams in the competition: 16 teams each in Leagues A, B, and C, and six in League D.

This means that European evening prime time will be filled with matches almost every day. You can leave your bids and budget as is during this period, but do not forget to update your ad copy and replace the club names with the national team names.

We also recommend taking a look at the lower divisions. Matches in Leagues C and D drive traffic in the Balkans, the Baltic states, and the Caucasus, where the CPC is significantly lower than in Germany or France, and interest in the national team is higher there than in club soccer.

Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers

The first qualifying rounds are scheduled for the same dates, September 21 to October 6. Forty-eight teams compete in twelve groups, and the 2027 tournament will be hosted by Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

You know that African GEOs are inexpensive, but before launching a campaign, you still need to check three things:

• whether the offer accepts local payment methods; otherwise, you will get registrations but no deposits;
• the file size of your creatives and landing pages, as a significant portion of traffic comes from budget Android devices and mobile internet;
• language. Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya read English; Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon read French; Egypt and Morocco read Arabic.

We covered the rest of the groundwork for these markets in how to scale gambling offers safely in Tier 2 GEOs.

CONCACAF Nations League

Starting September 23, the group stage runs concurrently; League A features sixteen national teams divided into two groups. GEO: Mexico, the U.S., Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, Jamaica, and Guatemala.

Keep in mind that matches start at night in European time. If your campaign is set to the server time zone, you could end up wasting half your budget, so dayparting is essential here.

September 29: all eyes on the U.S.

On this Tuesday, the MLB playoffs and the NHL regular season kick off. The hockey season opens with Carolina vs. Florida and Toronto vs. Montreal. The World Series begins on October 23, so interest in baseball will continue throughout October.

U.S. traffic will definitely get more expensive that evening: two events compete in the same auction. We recommend splitting them into different campaigns; otherwise, it will be unclear which combination is paying off. Oh, and set aside a separate budget for Canada: the start of the NHL season there means more than any European match.

What else to run besides soccer

Two lines deserve special attention. The NFL is taking games to Rio and London, and both times the games air during local prime time. Brazilian and British audiences tune in to American sports on these days, a rare occurrence.

We ran the same breakdown by date and GEO for September: the sports calendar for iGaming campaigns.

Impression schedule around national team matches

The phases are the same as for club matches: a preview a day in advance, a build-up three to four hours before kickoff, a brief spike in activity during halftime, and a window after the final whistle.

The difference is that matchdays are scheduled back-to-back every other day. The evening window after the final whistle transitions almost immediately into the build-up for the next match, so it is easier to keep the campaign running from 6:00 PM to midnight local time than to restart it four times.

To avoid wasting time manually starting and stopping campaigns, the campaign settings include a “Live Targeting” section: clicking the “Add Events” button opens a list of sports, and ads are shown only during the selected matches. Almost the entire calendar fits into this window: “Soccer” covers the Nations League and the Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers, “Baseball” covers the MLB playoffs, “Hockey” covers the start of the NHL season, and “American Football (NFL)” covers games in Rio and London.

16-day checklist

1. Organize your campaigns by tournament, not under a single “soccer” category. Otherwise, you will not be able to track the statistics later.
2. Check the current CPC for new GEOs in the “Available Traffic” section before setting your bid.
3. Create three to four creatives per bundle, and include the national team names in the headline.
4. Set up dayparting based on each country’s local time, especially for CONCACAF.
5. Run African GEOs as a separate campaign with a separate budget limit.
6. Enable auto-rules to pause creatives with zero conversions: you might not have time to do this manually during the short window.
7. Check the postback before launching.

What to launch right now

Open “Available Traffic,” check the CPC for Nigeria, Mexico, and the U.S., and set up three separate campaigns for the three tournaments. You can check bids and GEOs with your manager in your account dashboard: asking will be cheaper than figuring it out with your own deposit.

What to do after October 6

The window closes on Tuesday, and the domestic leagues resume on the weekend of October 10-11. There are two empty days in between, when you should lower your bid to the minimum.

The schedule gets busy from there: the second round of the Champions League is October 13-14, and the third is October 20-21. The budget you save during the break will come in handy then.