Basel, Switzerland's most wide-awake city: the World Cup nights on the electricity meter

The biggest swing of Switzerland's entire World Cup is not found in Zurich, nor in the Argentina night. It is found in Basel, on the Wednesday evening of the decisive group game against Canada: +22.7 percentabove a normal Wednesday. For comparison: Zurich reached +16 that same evening, Winterthur +12, the canton of Lucerne +10 percent. Basel didn't just watch: Basel watched collectively.

On the quarter-final night, Basel's household electricity ran on average 14.8 percentabove a normal summer Sunday. The highest overnight value of all grids studied, an unbroken plateau from midnight to the final whistle at half past five. Summed up: around 48,500 kilowatt-hours of extra consumption, about half a kilowatt-hour per household. At 4am, roughly one Basel household in four was awake (estimate band 18–41%).

In Zurich, the curve at the 3am kickoff at least rose by 1.6 percentage points, a few latecomers with alarms. In Basel: +0.1 points. Nothing.The city was already at +15 percent from midnight and simply stayed there. Basel didn't wait for the game. Basel extended Saturday night seamlessly into the quarter-final. Fittingly: in the night's cantonal search ranking, Basel-Stadt is the only German-speaking canton in the top 7 (rank 5, between Neuchâtel and Valais).

The all-night vigil cost a Basel household around 16 centimes of electricity(ELCOM median tariff). The night's real currency was sleep: RAND puts the follow-on costs of chronic insomnia for Switzerland at up to 10.1 billion francs a year and the Monday after the quarter-final started especially early for Switzerland's most wide-awake city. That, too, belongs on the balance sheet: while Basel slept in, employees in thousands of the city's households cleaned, cooked and cared: work that appears in no statistic.

The full analysis, six games, six grids, 26 cantons, methodology and raw data, is in the main study: «Switzerland Never Went to Bed».