It seems they also don't realize that people are watching a LIVE event, which is completely different than watching a movie.

I've worked places where we would watch live streams of rocket launches (back when launches were less routine than they are now).

It is not unreasonable to ask people to move to an area where people aren't trying to work, even if the event is live. Many people do not care about <x>ball and would like to work, and typically an office is the place where you are supposed to do that. Having the game on in the common work area is incredibly distracting with people cheering.

Many people who are trying to work do not care if the event is live. Even as someone who also enjoys watching rocket launches, I wouldn't cheer loudly when it took off, and I'd probably go to some kind of common area to watch it to begin with.

This is the better approach. Make arrangements for people to watch while not disturbing the rest.

I don't think that's a fair assessment. Quite a few people in this thread do not share the same values that you do, even the more fundamental ones like patriotism.

It isn't a big event though. They kick a ball into a rectangular volume.

And us software devs push buttons on a keyboard. You can make anything sound useless if you make it your goal to do so...

It doesn't matter how big a deal it is. It's not work. Even if it's a natural disaster or a war, if it's not work you go watch it in a break room or you take PTO and stay home or you do whatever you need to ensure that it's not disruptive to others. The level of entitlement necessary to believe that your company and everyone in it should accommodate your personal non-work video watching boggles my mind.

But when the non World Cup watchers are in the minority then you have it exactly backwards. You're asking all the football fans (which at World Cup time is nearly everyone) to accommodate your idiosyncratic personal desire to carry on working.

The desire to carry on working isn't an idiosyncratic personal desire. It's why you're paid to be there, why the space exists. How is that not supernova-level obvious? Can someone's sense of entitlement be so huge that it blots out even that? I wouldn't have thought so until now.

It's completely obvious, you're right, but you are missing my point to some extent. It's nothing to do with personal entitlement. I'm guessing you've never been in a European office when the national team is playing an important World Cup match. Probably around 90% of people are not working at that point. Its like a public holiday. Consider the reaction if someone asked all the support staff to come into the office on a Sunday because they felt like getting some work done.

Did I say it is OK to disrupt others in the workplace? Of course it isn't, regardless of the event.

I was responding to a comment that compared watching a movie to following the World Cup live. The two are not comparable at all. I was also responding to other comments that were somehow dumbfounded by others wanting to watch the World Cup in general.