For one fortnight this July, the four biggest events in world sport ran at once. Wimbledon in London. The Open at Royal Birkdale. The Tour de France across the Alps. The World Cup across a continent. Same broadcast window, same sponsors circling, same pressure. And four completely different answers to the most basic question an event can be asked. Where does it live?
Wimbledon is a fortress. One venue, owned outright by the All England Club, occupied 52 weeks a year and refined continuously since 1877. The organisation never packs up and never hands the keys to anyone. Every improvement compounds: the roofs, the drainage, the grass science, the crowd flow that has been iterated annually for over a century. When the tournament starts, the venue is not prepared for the event. The venue is the event, resting between fortnights.
The Open is a rotation. The R&A owns almost nothing you can stand on. It owns a system: a rota of links courses, a travelling kit of grandstands, media centres and tented villages, and a playbook for dropping all of it onto a members’ club and removing it three weeks later. I wrote during Birkdale week about what that looks like up close. The asset is portable capability. The venue is borrowed. The operation is the property.
The Tour is a circus in the honest, technical sense of the word. It builds its venue every morning and demolishes it every night, 21 times in three weeks. Start village, finish gantry, barriers, broadcast compound, hospitality, all erected and struck daily by a convoy that moves through France like a relocating city. Nothing persists except the capability to do it again tomorrow. The venue has a lifespan of hours.
The World Cup is a borrower. FIFA owned none of the 16 stadiums it just played in, controlled none of the three countries it played across, and employed almost none of the people who ran the buildings. It rented a continent’s existing capability for six weeks, built nothing, and left. The trade was control for scale. No fortress could hold 104 matches. No circus could move 48 teams.
Here’s why this matters beyond sport. Every project and every organisation runs one of these four models, usually without ever choosing it.
The fortress is the in-house team on owned infrastructure. Maximum control, compounding improvement, and the slowest to scale. Fortresses excel at the repeated event and struggle the moment the work moves somewhere new.
The rotation is the delivery firm with a methodology. The playbook travels, the client provides the ground, and the skill is fitting a standard kit to a non-standard site without breaking either. Rotations live or die on the quality of the playbook and the humility to adapt it.
The circus is the project team proper: assembled, mobile, temporary, rebuilding its working world around each new deadline. Circuses are fast and adaptable and they retain nothing unless someone deliberately harvests the lessons before the convoy disbands.
The borrower is the integrator. It owns brand, standards and coordination, and rents everything else. Borrowers scale further than anyone and carry the permanent anxiety of the final’s ticket queue: when a borrowed system fails, you don’t hold the levers.
None of these models is the right one. Wimbledon could not stage a World Cup. FIFA could not grow a lawn for 140 years. The failure mode is mismatch: fortress thinking on borrowed ground, circus speed applied to something that needed compounding care, a borrower’s scale ambitions with a fortress’s control instincts.
So name your model. Ask what your operation actually owns: the ground, the playbook, the convoy or the coordination. Then ask whether the way you’re running it matches the thing you own. This fortnight proved all four models can produce excellence. It also proved they are not interchangeable.
Which one are you running? And did anyone ever decide that on purpose?
Ben Webb is an Australian project manager and event delivery strategist. He was named AIPM Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for IPMA World Project Manager of the Year in 2023. He writes about project management, event delivery and leadership at benwebb.au.
Leave a Reply