There is a phrase that gets used in project work until it means almost nothing: stakeholder management. It appears on every plan, gets its own column in every status report, and is usually treated as a kind of administrative hygiene — a list of names, a RACI chart, a fortnightly email. Treated that way, it is close to useless. And then you watch something the size of a World Cup, and you understand that stakeholder management is not a column on a plan. It is most of the job.
I have come to believe that the projects that fail rarely fail on the technical work. They fail in the space between people who needed to agree and didn’t. The World Cup is the most extreme version of that truth I can point to, which is exactly why it is worth studying.
The organiser commands almost no one
Start with the fact that reorganises everything. The body running a World Cup has direct authority over a remarkably small number of the people who actually deliver it.
Think about who has to move for the tournament to happen. National governments. City councils. Police and security services. Stadium owners. Broadcasters who have paid enormous sums and expect to be treated accordingly. Sponsors. Transport authorities. Local volunteers in their tens of thousands. Border and customs agencies in three different countries. The organiser cannot instruct any of them. Not one. They can persuade, align, negotiate and occasionally lean on a relationship, but the command-and-control model that project managers quietly assume they have simply does not exist here.
This is not a special feature of sport. It is the normal condition of any ambitious project, just usually less visible. You almost never have authority over the people you most need. You have influence, or you have nothing.
Stakeholders are not a list. They are a map of power.
The administrative version of stakeholder management produces a list: everyone with an interest, sorted alphabetically, each assigned a vaguely reassuring engagement level. The useful version produces something quite different — a map of who can actually stop the thing.
Because that is the question that matters. Not “who is interested” but “who can say no, and make it stick.” On a tournament, a single city’s refusal to grant a permit, a security service’s veto, a broadcaster’s contractual objection — any of these can halt a piece of the work in a way that no amount of enthusiasm elsewhere can compensate for. The people who can block you are a different and smaller set than the people who are interested in you, and they deserve the lion’s share of your attention.
I learned this the slow way, on projects far smaller than a World Cup. Early on I spread my energy evenly across everyone who turned up to meetings. It took me too long to notice that a handful of those people held the power to derail months of work, and that I had been treating them the same as everyone else. The shift that made me better at this was simple and slightly uncomfortable: work out who can hurt the project, and make sure they are never surprised.
Surprise is the enemy
If there is one principle that carries from a World Cup down to the smallest project, it is this. The fastest way to turn a manageable stakeholder into a hostile one is to surprise them.
People who hold power over your project can usually live with decisions they dislike, provided they saw them coming and felt consulted. What they cannot forgive is finding out late, in public, that something was decided without them. The injury is rarely the decision itself. It is the disrespect of being bypassed.
So the real work of stakeholder management, the part that never makes it onto the plan, is the unglamorous business of keeping the people who matter informed before they need to be. The quiet call ahead of the announcement. The early warning that something contentious is coming. The deliberate choice to let an important party shape a decision while it can still be shaped, rather than presenting it to them finished. On a tournament this happens constantly, across governments and sponsors and broadcasters, and when it is done well nobody notices, because nobody is ever ambushed.
Competing interests are the normal state, not a crisis
Here is something the tidy version of stakeholder management never admits: your stakeholders do not want the same things, and they never will. The broadcaster wants kickoff times that suit its home audience. The local authority wants them to suit crowd transport. The teams want them to suit player welfare. All three are right, and they cannot all win.
A weak approach treats each of these collisions as a problem to be smoothed over. A strong one accepts that managing stakeholders is mostly the management of permanent, irreconcilable tension. The job is not to make everyone happy — that is impossible and the attempt makes you dishonest. The job is to make the trade-offs visible, make them fairly, and make sure the parties who lose a given decision understand why, and trust that the process was straight. People will accept losing far more often than you would expect, provided they believe they were heard and the reasoning was honest.
That is the heart of it. Stakeholder management is not the manufacture of agreement. It is the maintenance of trust through a long series of decisions where someone always loses.
What to actually do
Stripped of the jargon, the practice that scales from a World Cup down to any project worth doing comes to a few habits:
Find the people who can stop you, not just the people who are interested. Spend your attention where the power to block actually sits.
Never let those people be surprised. Brief them early, especially when the news is bad or contentious. Being first to tell someone difficult news is one of the most underrated moves in the entire discipline.
Make trade-offs openly. You cannot satisfy everyone, so don’t pretend to. Decide fairly, explain plainly, and protect the trust even when you cannot protect the preference.
Treat the relationship as the asset. Projects end. The people remain, and they remember how you treated them when it was hard. On a long enough horizon, your reputation for straight dealing is the only stakeholder strategy that compounds.
None of this is on the standard plan, which is precisely why so many projects with excellent plans still come apart. The World Cup makes it impossible to ignore. Most projects merely make it easy to.
This piece sits alongside What the FIFA World Cup Teaches Us About Project Management and Why the FIFA World Cup Is Really a Program, Not a Project.
Ben Webb is a Sydney-based project leader and former Australian Project Manager of the Year, sharing practical lessons from major projects, events and complex stakeholder environments.
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