The 2026 FIFA World Cup Is Coming: Thinking About Cross-Sector Impacts

Discussion exercise resources to help organizations prepare for the World Cup

Posted: April 1, 2026

 

The 2026 FIFA World Cup arrives in the United States this summer — and for organizations in and around host cities, it presents a planning challenge that most have not yet seriously engaged with. Unlike the mega-events that typically anchor the U.S. planning calendar, the World Cup doesn’t fit neatly into existing frameworks. Its scale, duration, international character, and geographic dispersal make it a genuinely different kind of operational environment. In late March, the California Resiliency Alliance (CRA) facilitated a discussion exercise at the BRMA workshop to help Bay Area organizations start thinking through those differences.

 

What You Need to Know About the 2026 World Cup

This year’s tournament is historic in scale. For the first time, the World Cup will be hosted jointly across three countries — the United States, Canada, and Mexico — with 48 teams competing across 104 total matches. The U.S. alone will host matches in eleven cities: the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York/New Jersey, Dallas, Seattle, Boston, Miami, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Atlanta, and Houston.

The tournament window runs from June 11 through July 19, 2026, with the final taking place at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. For the duration of the tournament, host cities will sustain elevated security operations, absorb significant increases in international and domestic visitors, and manage a regional operating environments different from normal conditions.

For California, the matches are distributed across two host regions:

For the complete schedule spanning all host cities, visit the FIFA match schedule.

 

Team Base Camps

In addition to the matches themselves, team base camps will be active across both California regions.

Two are located in the Bay Area:

Alameda County: Claremont Resort in Oakland training at Oakland Roots/Soul Training Facility in Alameda (Team Australia)

Santa Clara County: Signa by Hilton in San Jose training at the San Jose State Spartan Soccer Complex.

Five base camps are located in Southern California:

Santa Barbara County: Ritz-Carlton Bacara in Santa Barbara training at UC Santa Barbara (Team Austria) and Courtyard by Marriott Santa Barbara training at Westmont College in Montecito (Team Qatar)

Orange County: Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel training at UC – Irvine

San Diego County: Fairmont Grand Del Mar in San Diego training at San Diego Jewish Academy (SDJA) in San Diego (Team Switzerland) and Hyatt Regency La Jolla training at University of San Diego – Torero Stadium (Team New Zealand)

The base camps matter for planning purposes: their security footprints, transportation implications, and hospitality demands extend the event’s operational impact well beyond match days and stadium perimeters.
The potential scale of this event relative to anything most U.S. host cities have experienced before cannot be overstated — and that brings us to a point worth addressing directly.

 

This Is Not a Super Bowl Event

The Super Bowl is the natural reference point for major event preparedness in the United States. It is also the wrong one for the World Cup. The differences are not just matters of degree — they are differences in kind that have direct implications for how organizations should be planning.

Duration. The Super Bowl is a single game in a single venue over a single weekend, with some hospitality and fan events in the days prior. The World Cup is a six-week tournament with each host city receiving multiple matches spread across weeks. Even after the final match in a host city, team base camps may remain active for teams still in competition. The stress placed on infrastructure, supply chains, workforce, and public services is cumulative and sustained — not acute and brief.

Visitors. The Super Bowl draws a large and fairly predictable domestic audience — attendees who understand U.S. emergency protocols, navigate American systems without friction, and whose behavior during large events is reasonably well understood by planners. The World Cup adds a different variable: soccer fan culture. Fan cultures associated with different national teams vary enormously around the world in ways that U.S. planners may not be familiar with or have prior experience managing. Crowd dynamics, celebratory behavior, levels of alcohol consumption, and responses to security measures differ significantly across fan bases — and planning assumptions built on domestic sporting event experience may not hold.

Global visibility. While the Super Bowl has international reach, it is fundamentally a U.S. event. The World Cup will be watched by billions of viewers across the globe and will be under sustained international media scrutiny throughout the tournament. Operational decisions — how an infrastructure failure is handled, how an incident is responded to, how public communications are managed — will be made under a global spotlight in ways that routine domestic events simply do not generate.

Public Health Complexity. The Super Bowl introduces minimal novel disease risk. The World Cup concentrates visitors from countries with different endemic disease profiles, vaccination rates, and antimicrobial resistance patterns into mass gathering settings over multiple weeks — a documented amplifier of respiratory illness, gastrointestinal disease, and other conditions, with a post-event disease tail that extends beyond the tournament itself.

Supply Chain Stress. Super Bowl supply chain impacts are largely predictable and short-lived. The World Cup creates sustained, weeks-long demand distortions affecting inventory buffers, labor availability, last-mile logistics, and supplier prioritization — with a rebound disruption risk when demand drops sharply at tournament’s end.
Event Logistics and Coordination Complexity. The Super Bowl involves two teams, a single main venue, and a well-established host city playbook refined over decades. The World Cup involves an international organizing structure with which many local emergency managers have no prior working relationship, teams moving between matches at venues spanning three countries, and matches every couple of days for a sustain multi-week duration.

 

The BRMA Workshop: Where These Resources Came From

On March 26, 2025, the California Resiliency Alliance facilitated a discussion-based workshop at the BRMA meeting, bringing together emergency management and business continuity professionals from across the private and public sectors to examine how the World Cup will reshape the regional risk landscape.

The workshop — Preparing for the 2026 World Cup: Cross-Sector Impacts and Readiness — was structured around peer-driven small group discussions. No formal presenters; just practitioners sharing expertise across two core questions: how does the World Cup change the baseline operating environment, and how does it alter the hazard and threat landscape?

A few insights from the discussion stood out:

The convergence of multiple domestic stressors and the pressures of major international geopolitical event means that some long-held planning assumptions may no longer hold — and organizations should be actively pressure-testing them rather than carrying them forward by default.

Artificial intelligence surfaced repeatedly across discussion topics — both as a capability and as a complicating factor. Participants noted AI’s potential to support preparedness and response, but also how it has meaningfully lowered the barrier for threat actors and raised the sophistication of social engineering and disinformation. One particularly notable thread: AI-assisted clinical tools trained predominantly on domestic patient data may be poorly equipped to recognize diseases rarely seen in U.S. settings — a quiet but meaningful risk when a large international visitor population arrives.

Perhaps most strikingly: too many organizations have not yet seriously engaged with World Cup planning, and for many it hasn’t registered as a priority at all.

The one-pagers that supported that workshop are now available to any organization or group that wants to use them.

 

The One-Pagers: What They Cover and How to Use Them

The CRA developed eleven discussion-oriented one-pagers spanning two tracks: non-crisis baseline impacts and the changing threat and hazard landscape.

The Non-Crisis Impacts track covers the ways the World Cup reshapes normal operations — before any emergency occurs:

Communications — how network congestion, multilingual demands, foreign and non-standard devices, and interoperability gaps change the communications environment for everyone in the region

Movement of People — how large-scale population influx and heightened security measures reshape mobility patterns, access, and congestion — not just at core venues but across the broader region

Commodity Supply Chains — how demand surges, last-mile disruptions, supplier prioritization shifts, and labor market distortions affect the goods organizations depend on

Utilities — how atypical population density and activity patterns create demand conditions that may stress electricity, water, wastewater, and waste management infrastructure

Public Health — how population influx and global human mixing alter healthcare demand, disease exposure, and system capacity

 

The Changing Threat and Hazard Landscape track examines how the World Cup context transforms specific risk categories:

Cyber Threats — how the event expands the regional attack surface, shifts threat actor behavior, and creates new cascading risks

Targeted Attacks — how different attack types vary in likelihood and impact, how security hardening displaces risk to softer targets, and what locations may be underweighted in current planning

Supply Chain Disruption — how the event elevates the risk of deliberate or accidental supply chain disruption beyond the baseline logistics changes addressed in the first track

Natural Hazards — how endemic regional hazards — earthquakes, wildfire, heat, tsunami risk — become more consequential when overlaid on event-period conditions

Infrastructure Failures — how common failure scenarios become more complex and harder to resolve when access is constrained and the stakes are amplified by global visibility

Infectious Disease — what a globally mobile, mass gathering event means for disease introduction risk, surveillance gaps, and the post-event disease tail

 

Each one-pager includes an objective statement, key context and framing, discussion prompts, guidance on stress-testing common assumptions, a framework for identifying early warning signals, and a structure for group debriefs. As one-pagers, they are by design focused and selective — they are intended to surface some of the important questions and spark productive discussion, not to provide an exhaustive treatment of any single topic.

 

A Note on Geographic Applicability

These resources were developed with the San Francisco Bay Area as the primary context, and some specifics — venue references, regional infrastructure details — reflect that. However, the vast majority of the content applies to any World Cup host city. The questions about multilingual communications, supply chain stress, security displacement, and infrastructure strain are not Bay Area-specific challenges — they are host city challenges. Organizations in Los Angeles, Dallas, Seattle, Miami, and every other U.S. host city can find these materials equally relevant.

One note on the DHS content: several of the one-pagers reference federal planning support disruptions stemming from the funding situation at the time the one-pagers were developed. That specific situation may have evolved — but the downstream effects on interoperability planning, security grant distribution, and coordination infrastructure will continue to matter even after appropriations are resolved. The underlying questions remain valid.

 

Download the One-Pagers

All eleven one-pagers are available for free download below. No registration required.

If you use these resources in a workshop, a team discussion, or a planning process, we’d welcome hearing about it — share your experience with us using the form below.

To learn more about the California Resiliency Alliance or how to support our work, read our Operational Pause update.

 

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The California Resiliency Alliance is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit working at the nexus of California’s private, public, and nonprofit sectors to strengthen resilience statewide. Our mission is to equip private, public, and nonprofit professionals with actionable knowledge and bridge cross-sector divides to strengthen resilience statewide — turning complexity into clarity for planners and decision-makers across California.