As North America hosted the largest FIFA World Cup in history, risk managers looked beyond the matches themselves.
With 48 teams, 104 matches and millions of fans expected across the US, Canada and Mexico, the tournament’s unprecedented scale is providing a blueprint for how organisations should approach risk planning for any large public event.
For Jeff Lang (pictured), senior vice president at Trucordia, the insurance challenge isn't simply protecting stadiums. It's also safeguarding an interconnected ecosystem where transportation networks, hotels, sponsors, broadcasters, technology providers and government agencies all depend on one another.
"This is much more than a sporting event," Lang said. "These are essentially temporary global cities. For 30 to 60 days, you've got millions of people, billions of dollars, dozens of venues, transportation networks, hotels, sponsors, broadcasters, and even government agencies all converging. The insurance challenge is protecting this interconnected ecosystem where one disruption can cascade through multiple stakeholders."
Think beyond the venue
That cascade is what makes a single incident so dangerous. Crowd safety and general liability top the list of common exposures: crushes, slips and falls, structural failures and transportation incidents moving fans between venues.
"When you have 70,000 or 80,000 people together in one stadium, the probability of small incidents becomes a certainty," he said. "Risk management is about preventing those incidents from becoming catastrophic events."
Security and terrorism exposures compound the problem. A single attack, he noted, can simultaneously trigger general liability claims, business interruption, reputational damage and event cancellation.
Plan years ahead, not months
Insurance is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to protecting mega-events.
Sophisticated organisers begin with risk identification years in advance, said Lang, asking what could stop the event, reduce attendance or disrupt broadcasts and sponsor commitments. “These discussions happen in the boardroom, not just at the risk management desk,” he said.
The second piece is contractual risk transfer, including vendor agreements, security contracts, venue contracts, transportation providers, and hospitality partners.
"Some of the most effective risk management happens long before game day, and it's written into contracts rather than insurance policies," Lang noted.
Expect weather disruption
Extreme heat, wildfires, flooding, severe storms and air quality are no longer just operational concerns.
The industry's response has evolved alongside it – most visibly through parametric insurance, which pays out against defined triggers such as temperature thresholds, wind speeds or rainfall amounts.
Once a niche product, parametric coverage now features in roughly three-quarters of his event conversations, Lang said, either as an endorsement to a property policy or as a standalone policy.
"It's no longer a question of choosing between parametric coverage and a traditional property policy," he said. "The two need to work together."
A standalone structure is often the better solution, he added, because the product is flexible enough to respond to location-specific uncertainties, whether a venue is enclosed or open-air.
Treat cyber as an operational risk
Modern events run on technology, and Lang ranks technology failure at the top of the cyber threat list, which also includes ticketing outages, credential failures, payment disruptions, broadcast interruptions and ransomware. AI has sharpened the danger, enabling phishing attacks, deepfake announcements, fake emergency notices, impersonation of officials and vendor fraud.
And the exposure bleeds into reputation, with a single viral video able to cause millions in damage that insurance can only partly absorb.
Plan for resilience, not perfection
The final lesson is that disruption should be assumed, not feared. "It's not a question of whether disruption will happen," Lang said. "The question is how quickly you can recover." That means backup communications, alternate transportation routes and power sources, redundant technology systems and rehearsed crisis management plans.
The mindset, he argued, applies far beyond sport.
"Most businesses don't need to prepare for a World Cup, but every business should think like World Cup organisers,” Lang concluded.
