A bar owner in Greenpoint texted me on Friday. "World Cup starts Thursday. What do I do?"

He had been planning for months in his head and not at all on the surfaces that mattered. His Google Business Profile still showed last winter's hours. His website's contact page had a phone number he had ported away from. He had not posted on Instagram in nineteen days. And the closest thing he had to a multilingual plan was hoping the Brazilian fans would just walk in.

I told him what I'm about to tell you. Three days to kickoff is enough time, if you spend the next seven days on the right seven things.

The short version

MetLife Stadium hosts 8 World Cup matches between June 11 and July 19, including the final. NYC and the Tri-State will see one of the biggest concentrated visitor surges in recent memory. The businesses that capture it are not the ones with the best ads. They are the ones whose Google Business Profile, website, phone, and social are simply ready this week. This is the operational checklist. ---
## Why the next 7 days are the whole game
International visitors don't search the way locals do. They use Google Maps in their own language. They ask ChatGPT and Perplexity "where to eat near MetLife." They search "open now" at 11pm in a city they don't know. They use voice search because their thumbs are not native English speakers. In our last six months of NYC small-business audits, the pattern that came up over and over again is this: roughly four out of five businesses have Google Business Profile attributes, photos, or descriptions that have not been meaningfully updated in twelve months or longer. Those businesses are functionally invisible for any timely "open now / near MetLife / English-speaking staff" query. The bar in Greenpoint was one of them. You don't need a new website this week. You need the surfaces you already own to be honest, current, and findable. Here is how to do that in seven days. ---
## Day 1: The Google Business Profile sprint (45 minutes)
This is the highest-leverage hour of the entire week. Open your Google Business Profile and walk through it like a tourist would.
  • Hours. Set your World Cup hours for the next six weeks. Special hours for match days if you're extending. If you'll be busier than normal, say so. Stale hours are why a hungry fan walks past you to the open place next door.
  • Photos. Add 5-10 fresh photos from this month. A photo of your front, your interior, your food or product, your staff. Tourists trust photos that look recent.
  • Attributes. Confirm the small things that international visitors actually search for: outdoor seating, big-screen TVs, accepts credit cards, has parking, Wi-Fi, kid-friendly, kosher/halal if applicable, languages spoken if you have multilingual staff.
  • From the business description. Rewrite it. Mention you're near MetLife, near Times Square, near whatever the visiting fan is searching for. One short paragraph. No marketing fluff.
  • Post one update. A GBP post about World Cup week. Photo, two sentences, link if relevant. Posts decay after seven days, so this is a discipline you'll repeat.

If you do nothing else this week, do this day. A current GBP outranks an outdated competitor for "near me" searches without any other change.

---

Day 2: The "near MetLife" local search check (30 minutes)

Now sanity-check what people see when they search for what you sell, in your area.

  • Run three searches, in an incognito window: `[your service] near MetLife stadium`, `[your service] [your neighborhood]`, `[your service] open now [borough]`. Note where you appear. If you're not in the top three of the map pack, that's the gap.
  • NAP consistency. Open your website footer, your Yelp listing, and your Google Business Profile side by side. Name, address, phone. They must match exactly, character for character. Fans don't have time to figure out which phone number is current.
  • Schema markup. If your website has structured data for `LocalBusiness`, check that it lists current hours, current phone, and the right service area. If it doesn't have any schema yet, this is the week to add it. Our SEO + AEO + GEO service covers what to implement.

The "near MetLife" search is going to spike in the next ten days. Most NYC businesses haven't even thought about whether they show up for it. The ones that do, win.

---

Day 3: Multilingual triage (60-90 minutes)

You don't need to translate your entire site. You need the three pages tourists actually land on.

  • Home page. Add a short banner or one-line welcome in Spanish and Portuguese. "Welcome, World Cup fans" goes a long way.
  • Contact page. Address, hours, directions, transit. These three blocks translated into the languages your visitors actually speak. For MetLife matches you're most likely to see Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic depending on which teams are in town that week.
  • Menu, services, or pricing page. Whichever is the one tourists need to read before they decide. Translate the items, not the marketing prose. Visitors don't read your brand story; they want to know what you sell and what it costs.

Don't use a janky auto-translate widget. They feel scammy and they hurt trust. A human-checked translation of three pages beats a Google Translate plug-in on every page. If you don't have someone in-house, an hour with a translator on Upwork costs less than one dinner check.

---

Day 4: Phones and intake (60 minutes)

This is the day most businesses miss, because the phones don't feel like a marketing problem until you lose calls during a rush.

  • After-hours coverage. Match days run late. International visitors call at 11pm asking if you're open. If nobody picks up, they pick a competitor that did. Decide right now whether you're answering, sending to voicemail with a good message, or routing to an AI assistant.
  • Voicemail script. If you're using voicemail, the script should say current hours, mention you'll return calls within X hours, and give one alternative (book online, walk in, text).
  • AI receptionist if call volume is going to be heavy. This is the week to set one up if you've been thinking about it. We have a working demo at /demo/ai-callback that handles inbound questions, books appointments, and follows up by email. It's not the right call for every business, but for hotels, restaurants taking reservations, and any service business expecting a spike, missing calls is the single most expensive thing happening at your front desk.
  • Forms on your site. Submit a test inquiry to your own contact form. Confirm it actually arrives, that you get an email, that the auto-response is current. We audit roughly thirty client sites a month and somewhere between one in four and one in three has a contact form that is silently broken.

The cheapest customer is the one already trying to reach you. Make sure they can.

---

Day 5: The social calendar (45 minutes)

Pick four posts to schedule across the next ten days. You don't need a campaign. You need to look alive.

  • Post 1: Hours and match-day note. Plain, useful. "We're open for every match. Here's our schedule." Photo of your front, your screens, or your staff.
  • Post 2: One thing tourists should know. Closest subway, parking situation, your reservations policy, whether you take walk-ins. This is the post that earns shares.
  • Post 3: A match-day specific. A drink, a dish, a discount, a viewing party. A reason to choose you over the bar next door.
  • Post 4: A thank-you post on the morning after kickoff. Photo from the night, name-check who came in, tag a local hashtag. This is the post that builds repeat traffic.

Schedule them across Facebook, Instagram, and X. If you've got a social manager, they know what to do. If you don't and you want a system that handles it on a cadence, that's what our social media management is for.

---

Day 6: The reviews push (30 minutes)

Reviews are the single biggest signal on whether a tourist chooses you. Not your old reviews. Your recent reviews.

  • Pull a list of the last 20 happy customers. From your POS, your booking system, your inbox.
  • Send a one-line message. Email or text. "Hey, we're getting ready for a busy World Cup stretch. If you've got 30 seconds, a quick Google review would help us a lot. Link below." Personalize the name. Don't beg.
  • Reply to every existing review. Especially the ones in languages you don't speak. A two-sentence reply in their language (use a translator app for this one, it's fine for a reply) signals that you're paying attention.

A jump from 4.2 stars to 4.5 stars over two weeks is the difference between being chosen and being scrolled past. The reviews you collect this week will carry you through the next five.

---

Day 7: Day-of operations brief (30 minutes)

The last day is about the inside of the business, not the outside.

  • Staff brief. Walk your team through who is coming (which teams play that week, which language groups, what they'll likely ask). Print the match schedule and post it where staff can see it.
  • Payment readiness. International tap-to-pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay. If your card reader has been flaky, this is the week to fix it. International credit cards sometimes route differently and a clean terminal saves you twenty awkward minutes a day.
  • Signage. A printable schedule of match days on your front door. A note about hours. A note in a second language if you're targeting one. Even a printer paper sign hand-lettered. Tourists read everything.
  • One internal walk-through. Walk through your space the way a tourist will. Where do they enter? Where does the line form? Where's the bathroom? Where do they pay? If anything is unobvious, fix it or sign it. You don't get a second chance with a fan who's catching a 5pm train back to MetLife.

---

If you can do nothing else this week, do these three

If the seven-day plan feels like too much, here's the minimum.

1. Day 1. The GBP sprint. Forty-five minutes, maximum leverage. 2. Day 4. Make sure your phone or AI intake catches every after-hours call. 3. Day 6. Send the review request to twenty recent happy customers.

Those three alone will put you ahead of about 70% of NYC businesses going into kickoff. The rest of the list compounds from there.

---

What we're seeing in real time

We're watching client search volume already start to bend on terms like "near MetLife," "open late Brooklyn," and a handful of restaurant-and-bar queries that don't usually spike in June. The visitor wave hasn't arrived yet, but the search wave has. The businesses ranking for those queries on June 10 will not be the ones who start optimizing on June 11.

If you've made it this far in the post and you're realizing your business isn't ready, that's actually fine. Seven days is enough. Five is enough. Three is enough if you focus. The point of a checklist is that it makes the decisions for you so you can just do the work.

Kick off Thursday. Time to get to it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What if I don't have time for the full seven days before kickoff?

Do Day 1 (Google Business Profile), Day 4 (phone coverage), and Day 6 (reviews). That's roughly two hours of work and it captures most of the value. The rest of the list still matters, but those three are the ones that bend the math in the first week.

Do I really need translated pages if my customers are all locals? If your customer base is genuinely all locals and you're not targeting walk-in or search traffic from visitors, you can skip Day 3. Most NYC small businesses are not in that category, even if they think they are. Run one "near MetLife" search in Spanish or Portuguese and see who Google shows. If it isn't you, that's the answer.

Is "near MetLife stadium" really a big enough search to optimize for? Yes, and not just MetLife. The bigger pattern is that tourists search "[thing] near [landmark]" in a city they don't know. Times Square, Central Park, Brooklyn Bridge, JFK, MetLife. Optimizing for the landmark closest to you is a small content change with outsized return during any tourist surge.

Should I run paid ads during the World Cup? Maybe, but not until the seven-day operational checklist is done. Paid traffic to a website with broken forms or stale GBP information is wasted money. Get the surfaces ready first.

What about Knicks fans and other summer events? Same playbook, different landmark. The MSG-area version of this checklist is on the way as a separate post in the next two weeks.

Sources

---

Leonardo Moretti is a writer and digital strategist at EnovaCreations, based in NYC. He writes about the operational details of small-business growth — the stuff that's boring on a slide but actually moves revenue. If you want this kind of seven-day checklist for your own business before kickoff, the audit takes 15 minutes.