As someone born and raised in Brazil, a country where soccer is the national temperamental family member everyone loves, many of my fondest early memories are inseparable from the World Cup. I remember my father jumping up and down to celebrate Roberto Baggio’s penalty miss in 1994, packed subway cars full of fans chanting against Zidane in 1998 (what a villain!), 6 a.m. watch parties with university friends during the 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan (who doesn’t enjoy tactical analysis with eggs?). The list goes on and on, and I was not even close to being the most intense fan around.

Time passed, and I eventually discovered my passion as I grew up. It (rarely) comes with face paint or penalty shootouts, but it did lead me here to Rotman: understanding how operations and supply chains tick, how food and everyday items find their way onto shelves, how better decisions keep complex systems moving, and the science of coordination, timing and optimization underlying all this. 

And with that, those fond World Cup memories now come with something else: logistical terror. Thank you, science.

You see, once you study operations, it becomes difficult to watch millions of fans pour into a city and think, “How exciting.” 

Despite the clear benefits for tourism, hosting a mega-event also creates a very specific civic anxiety: People are coming, lots of them. They will all need to move, eat, sleep, celebrate and, inevitably, use the bathroom. How will they get from the airport to the hotel? How will they reach the stadium? Who restocks the vendors? What happens when everyone leaves at the same time? Where are they staying? And, perhaps most importantly, how is this all being coordinated?

But answering these questions reveals something truly important: The long-term benefits can go well beyond increased revenue from tourism, retail and hospitality. The World Cup offers a rare opportunity to see a city’s logistics system under stress and to improve it in ways that may last long after fans leave. Airports, transit networks, hotels, restaurants, security teams, hospitals, waste collectors and food suppliers all have to absorb a sudden surge in demand. Some of that demand is predictable, such as the wave of fans arriving before kickoff. Some of it is not, such as an unexpected overtime or a rainstorm. The result is a real-world stress test of how well a city can coordinate people, information and decisions under pressure.

Start with transit networks. On a normal day, public transit already depends on careful coordination among routes to better serve passengers. During the World Cup — or any major event — that coordination becomes far more demanding. Thousands of visitors, many unfamiliar with the city, will need to move towards the same stadiums, fan zones and hotels within narrow windows of time. In practice, cities respond by treating match days less like ordinary commuting and more like a carefully managed surge: adding extra trains, buses, and late-night service; placing staff and volunteers at key stations; using clearer signage and multilingual directions; creating temporary shuttle routes from transit hubs; and guiding fans toward specific walking paths before and after games. 

Toronto’s plan, for example, emphasizes a multi-agency approach involving the city, the TTC, police, emergency services and many other partners. The TTC has also described plans for enhanced match-day service, additional staff and special-event ambassadors at key locations to help visitors navigate the system. In practice, this kind of coordination can leave a useful legacy: better communication between city agencies, clearer protocols for managing large crowds, improved signage and wayfinding at stations, and a stronger shared understanding of how the city moves under pressure. These are not glamorous improvements, but they are exactly the kinds of changes that determine whether a city feels welcoming or overwhelmed, and whether it is better prepared for future surges or unexpected events, such as the next time a superstar like Taylor Swift decides to come to Toronto and make everyone’s commute a little more complicated.

Emergency services offer another example. During the World Cup, paramedics, fire services and hospitals must plan for emergencies in unusually dense and dynamic environments. A medical call near a stadium, for instance, is very different when surrounding streets are closed and thousands of people are moving in the same direction. This requires advance planning around ambulance routes, temporary medical stations, and clear division of responsibilities across agencies. Here again, the same coordination can improve how a city responds to extreme medical events and disruptions.

And let us not forget food and retail. Yes, demand will go up, but something else happens too: It becomes concentrated and emotional, because eating seems to be one of humanity’s preferred responses to sorrow (as I can attest). This makes demand slightly hard to predict. Retailers will also want to leverage the opportunity in many ways. Toronto’s FIFA Fan Festival, for instance, is expected to include more than 30 food vendors, serving fans who may arrive in large waves around match broadcasts and celebrations. That requires vendors and stores to think carefully about how much food to prepare, when deliveries can enter crowded areas, how to keep perishable items safe, and how to restock without adding more congestion. To this end, the city is requiring food vendors to register with Toronto Public Health, submit self-audit reports and comply with rigorous and more dynamic inspection requirements. If captured and internalized properly within their processes, these practices can outlast the tournament by improving how food vendors manage storage, staffing, preparation volumes and documentation during future periods of unusually high demand.  Even waste becomes part of the supply chain, with Toronto creating a special mobility plan to best coordinate waste receptacles for trash and recycling. 

Security is another area where the World Cup can leave a lasting operational legacy. Large events require cities to prepare for many risks at once: crowd surges, protests, medical incidents, cyber disruptions and other unexpected situations. The key organizational principle is to make safety feel almost invisible. That requires stakeholders such as police and private security teams to share information quickly and act from a common playbook. The federal government has recently announced up to $145 million to support public safety and security for the 2026 World Cup in Toronto and Vancouver, emphasizing coordination across all orders of government. These investments offer a rare opportunity to improve general security protocols, strengthen inter-agency trust, and leave an important safety legacy that we can leverage for years to come.

Many other examples exist, all aimed at ensuring that the tears and anger of the World Cup come only from questionable refereeing decisions, not from citywide logistics chaos. More importantly, it reveals something truly unique and fascinating about the World Cup that goes far beyond the games themselves: The extraordinary coordination and partnerships required to make an international event of this scale work. We can look into history for many examples of this enabled growth, such as Paris 2024, which leveraged the Olympic games to permanently accelerate major metro expansions and create a sustainable cycling legacy. 

The opportunity, however, is not automatic. History has not been kind to cities that treat mega-events as one-time spectacles rather than opportunities for civic learning. Several stadiums from Brazil’s 2014 World Cup, for example, struggled with low post-event use, while Athens 2004 Olympics offers a reminder that event infrastructure can become an expensive legacy burden as opposed to a source of long-term public value. The take-home perspective is that the World Cup does not, by itself, make a city smarter. The lasting value comes only if cities intentionally capture what they learn: which coordination protocols worked, where congestion appeared, and how agencies shared information in ways that made the city more efficient and integrated.

This is worth appreciating even if one may not like soccer so much. But as someone who still remembers those watch parties and the shared thrill of a 6 a.m. breakfast while watching a game, I have to ask: why not take advantage of this opportunity to the fullest?