In Kansas City, they have a countdown. On everyone’s screen, it ticks down, day by day. When GOAL spoke with Pam Kramer, CEO of Kansas City’s World Cup committee, the first thing she mentioned is that the World Cup was then 384 days away. It is on everyone’s mind.
Elsewhere, there are checklists, notebooks, calendar invites, Zoom calls, meetings, community events, and everything in between. This is the life of a World Cup host committee in North America, with the 2026 event on the horizon. The biggest iteration of the tournament in the history of the game - 48 teams playing in 16 cities across three countries - is fast approaching. There is no escaping it.
Talk to the people involved, though, and it’s generally a sense of the calm before the storm. Boxes are being checked, tasks worked through, logistics implemented, and initial planning well underway. Infrastructure projects have begun, while broader questions are being asked and then addressed. But for all of the planning best practices, the challenges are real. And the sheer number of unknowns, in most cases out of their control, make preparing for an event of this scale immensely difficult - and also, at times, a little bit insane.
“It’s kind of gone from feeling like we’re drinking out of a fire hose to now being in a place where we’re really able to think critically about the planning,” Alex Lasry, CEO of the New York/New Jersey host committee, told GOAL. “As we get through the summer and into the fall, we’re going to start to go into full execution.”