Zurich stayed up: the city's World Cup nights, read off the electricity meter

On a normal summer Sunday, Zurich's household electricity falls steeply after midnight into its weekend trough — towards 4am the city consumes less than at any other time. In the small hours of 12 July the trough never came: from kickoff at 3am to the bitter end at half past five, the city ran a constant 13 to 15 percent above normal. Summed up: around 131,000 kilowatt-hours of extra consumption in one night — as if the city had gained an extra neighbourhood that never went to sleep.

Had Zurich set its alarms for just before 3, the curve would have to jump at kickoff — hundreds of thousands of devices switching on at once. The jump amounts to all of 1.6 percentage points: extra consumption already sits at +12 percent from midnight. The city simply stayed up; a few latecomers joined during the first half (up to +15 percent at 4am).

The Argentina night was no one-off, but the peak of a series. The round-of-16 drama against Colombia (penalties until quarter to one, on a Tuesday) held the city above 11 percent past 2am; the 5am game against Algeria lifted the morning exactly from kickoff to final whistle; the Canada game turned an ordinary Wednesday evening into +16 percent. Only the Saturday-evening game against Qatar is invisible — on Saturday evenings, Zurich is awake anyway.

It is the comparison with the surrounding region that makes Zurich's night truly visible: in the EKZ grid area — the canton of Zurich without the city — the deviation on the Argentina night was only about half the city's value; in Winterthur, +8.4 percent. The more urban, the more awake. And the bill? The all-night vigil cost a Zurich household around 16 centimes of electricity. The sleep that went missing was dearer: RAND puts the follow-on costs of chronic insomnia for Switzerland at up to 10.1 billion francs a year.

And while the city slept off its hangover on Sunday, employees in thousands of Zurich households cleaned, cooked and cared — the people who keep households running and appear 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».