Our Summer of Sport series connects what's happening on the pitch with what's happening in your organization: how teams perform under pressure, how technology earns trust, and how to move fast without falling apart.
The World Is Watching. Is Your Infrastructure Ready?
Game On
Every four years, the FIFA World Cup commandeers the globe's attention. Billions of people pick favorite teams and players, learn flag emojis, and suddenly develop strong opinions about penalty shootouts. And this summer, the tournament comes to North America, spread across 11 U.S. host cities, three countries, and six weeks of the most watched sporting event on earth. The cities hosting it have spent years preparing to welcome millions of fans.
Between 5 and 7 million international visitors are descending on American cities simultaneously, many from places where high-speed rail is routine and urban transit is a given. Getting them to matches, safely and on time, has required host cities to think creatively, move fast, and find solutions at a scale that would test any transportation system.
How Cities Are Making It Work
Take the logistics around MetLife Stadium, which hosts the World Cup final. With private cars banned from the venue entirely and up to 82,500 fans descending on match days, organizers needed a different approach. Their answer involves fleets of up to 300 school buses running continuous shuttles from Manhattan, trains departing every five minutes from Penn Station, and two 600-person ferries chartered as backup if rail delays hit. Practical, creative, and for many international visitors, a genuinely memorable slice of Americana.
Across host cities, transit agencies have responded with similar ingenuity, backed by $100.3 million in Federal Transit Administration funding for expanded capacity, additional vehicles, and improved coordination. The result is a patchwork of creative, city-specific solutions that reflect the resourcefulness of American infrastructure planning when the stakes are high enough to demand it. What the World Cup is proving is that American cities can move quickly and creatively when a moment demands it. The more interesting question is what that same energy looks like when it's applied ahead of the deadline rather than because of it.
The Score Before Kickoff
The World Cup is arriving at a moment when transit investment is already top of mind across American cities. The American Society of Civil Engineers' 2025 Infrastructure Report Card gave U.S. public transit a D, citing a $152 billion funding gap over the next decade. More than half of Americans lack adequate access to bus, subway, or commuter rail. These aren't new findings, but the World Cup is giving them a new urgency and, in many cases, a new budget line.
Large global events have a long track record of accelerating investment that cities knew they needed but hadn't yet prioritized. The 1996 Olympics drove lasting improvements to Atlanta's transit corridors and pedestrian infrastructure, and the 2012 London Games spurred major upgrades across the Underground and rail network. Los Angeles shows what becomes possible when cities commit to long-term infrastructure investment, and the World Cup is giving other host cities exactly that kind of momentum.
From the World Cup to the Boardroom
What's happening in host cities this summer (gaps that existed long before the spotlight, made visible by a moment too big to manage around) is something that shows up in organizations of every kind. Because regardless of your processes, tools, or systems, infrastructure gaps don't stay invisible forever. It probably looks different in your context: systems built for a different era of demand, processes held together by workarounds, or technology that works fine until something tests it seriously.
Infrastructure gaps don't stay invisible forever. Cities that had invested proactively walked into this tournament with options, absorbing the surge, adapting their systems, and delivering an experience worth talking about. Those still building toward that level of investment found the moment an opportunity to accelerate. The difference, often, came down to timing rather than resources or luck.
The best teams in the world don't wait for the final whistle to figure out what went wrong. They review the tape, identify the gaps, and train for the moments that haven't arrived yet. The teams that come out of high-stakes moments strongest operate the same way, looking honestly at the gap between where they are and what they might be asked to handle, and making the investments while there is still time to do it right.
The World Cup is less a warning than an invitation. The only real question is whether you surface the gaps on your terms, or someone else's.
This is the second piece in North Highland's Summer of Sport series, exploring what the 2026 FIFA World Cup reveals about the challenges every organization faces with people, technology, and change.
North Highland has spent years helping transportation and public sector organizations navigate exactly these questions, from modernizing aging systems to planning for future demand. North Highland works with organizations to find the gaps before they find you. Whether that's infrastructure assessment, long-term investment planning, or getting operations ready for what's next. Let's talk.
