Add Every World Cup 2026 Game to Your Calendar in One Command

FIFA World Cup 2026 runs from June 11 to July 19. Forty-eight teams. One hundred and four matches. Games spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

That is a lot of calendar events to add manually. With CalendarMCP and Claude, you can do it in one prompt.

What You Need

First, get CalendarMCP connected to Claude:

# Connect CalendarMCP to Claude Code
claude mcp add calendar https://calendarmcp.ai/api/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer cal_your_api_key"

If you do not have an API key, go to calendarmcp.ai, connect your Google Calendar, and grab the key from the dashboard.

The Group Stage Approach

The World Cup has three phases: group stage (June 12 - July 2), knockout rounds (July 4 - July 19), and the final (July 19). For the group stage, all match times are fixed in advance. For knockout rounds, you will need to add games as they are scheduled.

Here is the prompt pattern to use with Claude for adding a batch of matches:

Add the following FIFA World Cup 2026 group stage matches to my
calendar. For each match, create an event with:
- Title: "WC 2026: [Team A] vs [Team B]"
- Start and end time (matches are 2 hours)
- Location: [stadium and city]
- Description: "Group [letter] - FIFA World Cup 2026"
- Mark as transparent (free) so they don't block my schedule

Matches to add:
- June 12, 8pm ET: Opening match at SoFi Stadium, Los Angeles
- June 13, 3pm ET: Group A match at MetLife Stadium, New York
[... continue with your match list ...]

Claude will call create_event for each match. With the transparency: "transparent" field, the events show on your calendar but do not block time in free/busy lookups.

Using batch_update_events for Bulk Edits

Say you added all the matches but forgot to set the right color or mark them as free. Instead of editing each one individually, use batch_update_events.

First, list the events to get their IDs:

List all events on my calendar between June 12 and July 19, 2026
that have "WC 2026" in the title. Give me their event IDs.

Then update them all at once:

Update all of these World Cup events at once. For each one:
- Set colorId to "5" (banana yellow)
- Set transparency to "transparent"
- Set reminders to none (useDefault: false, overrides: [])

Event IDs: [paste the IDs Claude just gave you]

CalendarMCP will call batch_update_events and update up to 50 events concurrently in a single API call. A full group stage with 48 matches will be done in under a second.

A More Complete Prompt

Here is a more complete example showing how to structure the data you give Claude. You can paste the full group stage schedule and let Claude parse it:

I'm going to give you the World Cup 2026 group stage schedule.
Add each match to my Google Calendar with these rules:

1. Event title format: "WC26: [Team A] vs [Team B]"
2. Duration: 2 hours from kickoff time
3. Convert all times to America/New_York timezone
4. Location: full stadium name and city
5. Description: "Group [X] | FIFA World Cup 2026 | [stadium]"
6. transparency: "transparent" (shows on calendar, doesn't block)
7. colorId: "6" (tangerine - easy to spot)
8. reminders: none (useDefault: false, overrides: [])

Here is the schedule:
[paste schedule from fifa.com or a sports site here]

Add them in batches. Tell me after each batch how many succeeded.

Claude will work through the list systematically, calling create_event for each match. For 48 group stage games, this takes a couple of minutes.

Keeping Up with the Knockout Rounds

Once group play ends, knockout match times get announced a day or two before each game. You can keep up by prompting Claude after results come in:

The Round of 32 results are in. Add the Round of 16 matches
to my calendar with the same format as the group stage events:
- July 4, 3pm ET: [Team A] vs [Team B], MetLife Stadium
- July 4, 9pm ET: [Team C] vs [Team D], SoFi Stadium
[... etc ...]

Checking Your Calendar During the Tournament

During the tournament, you can ask Claude things like:

• "What World Cup games are on this weekend?"
• "Is there a match on Friday evening that conflicts with my dinner?"
• "Find me a free 3-hour window on July 9 to watch the semifinal"
• "Delete all the group stage events for teams that were eliminated"

That last one is where batch_update_events and delete_event really shine. You can clean up the calendar after each round without touching a single event manually.

The Bigger Point

World Cup scheduling is a fun demo case, but the same pattern applies to any bulk calendar operation. Conference schedules, sports seasons, recurring travel itineraries, team meeting cadences. If you have a structured list of events, you can add all of them to your calendar in one prompt and let CalendarMCP handle the API calls.

That is the point of having an AI agent with calendar access. Not just asking "what's on my calendar?" but actually managing it at scale.