There’s a comforting lie at the centre of every big project: that it will be won by the talent out front, the visible stars doing the visible work. The World Cup is about to demonstrate, on the largest stage in sport, why that lie is dangerous.
The 2026 tournament is the biggest yet – forty-eight teams, a hundred and four matches, sixteen stadiums spread across the United States, Canada and Mexico. Four time zones. Mexico City sitting at over seven thousand feet of altitude while other venues bake in tropical heat. The official logistics partner expects to use more than five thousand trucks and around a million square feet of warehouse space. One South American squad has already lost preparation time because a flight couldn’t be cleared into the US.
And that’s the tell. Somewhere a brilliant striker is about to play the worst match of his career because his team spent the night before on a tarmac instead of a training pitch. The football will be magnificent. But the trophy, more than any tournament before it, will be shaped by the squad that managed the planes, survived the altitude and beat the time zones. The backroom decides this one.
I find this clarifying, because we romanticise the wrong people on projects too. We celebrate the charismatic lead, the technical genius, the person at the front of the room. Meanwhile the project actually turns on the work nobody applauds: the logistics, the scheduling, the dull unglamorous machinery of getting the right things to the right place at the right time. The backroom of a project is where delivery is genuinely decided, and it’s almost always under-resourced, under-thanked and the first thing cut when budgets tighten.
The World Cup makes a second point even sharper, and it’s the one I’d underline for anyone running a complex programme. FIFA is running an event whose success depends on the immigration policies of three sovereign nations – and it controls none of them. It cannot make a border officer wave a team through. It cannot move a city’s altitude. The tournament’s biggest risks live entirely outside its authority.
Every serious project has this problem in some form. You depend on a regulator, a council, a supplier, a partner organisation, a government department – somebody whose cooperation you need and whose decisions you cannot command. The amateur move is to assume they’ll come through because your project needs them to. The professional move is to assume friction, and build slack and redundancy around every dependency you don’t control. Plan for the flight that doesn’t get cleared. Hold time for the approval that arrives late. Treat the cooperation of others as a risk to be managed, not a fact to be relied upon.
Because here is what the tournament will quietly prove. The team with the best players doesn’t win a project like this. The team that planned for the world not cooperating does. Brilliance out front is necessary and never sufficient. The match is won in the warehouse, on the tarmac, in the hundred decisions the cameras never find.
The next time you build a project plan, give the backroom the respect the headline acts usually steal. Resource the logistics. Map the dependencies you can’t control. And ask yourself, honestly, where your tournament could be lost on a tarmac while everyone’s watching the pitch.
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