Real examples from 2018 and 2022.
Daniel Radwan is founder and lead consultant at Kenda Global Communications.
In the summer of 2018, I landed in Russia with a press pass, a contact list and the kind of confidence that comes from not yet knowing what you don’t know.
I was there for the FIFA World Cup, working on behalf of a major sports and entertainment broadcaster. On paper, my role was straightforward: engage media, build relationships, capture content. In practice, it was my first real look at what communications at a global scale actually demands. The sheer volume of international press, the speed at which narratives form and spread, the way a single poorly handled moment can define coverage for days. It was a masterclass I did not realize I was enrolled in.
Four years later, I found myself embedded inside an airport communications command room in Doha, managing real-time media and crisis response as millions of fans from every corner of the world arrived for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The scale was incomparable. The stakes were total. And everything I had absorbed in Russia came into focus.
With the 2026 World Cup arriving in the United States this summer, I keep thinking about what that experience taught me. Not just about sports communications, but about what it takes to manage reputation, narrative and pressure when literally the entire world is paying attention.
The tournament does not stop at the stadium gates
This is the thing most people get wrong about World Cup communications. They think it is about goals, press conferences and promotional highlights. It is not. Or rather, it is not only that.
When I was working with the airport during the 2022 tournament, we were not promoting soccer. We were managing the full visitor experience from the moment a fan’s flight landed. How long are the queues? Is the signage clear? What happens when a flight is delayed and 40,000 people have match tickets for that evening? What do you say, how fast do you say it and who speaks?
The communications strategy for a major event like this has to reach into every operational layer. Airport. Transport. Accommodation. Hospitality. Each touchpoint is a potential story, positive or negative. The organizations that understand this go into a tournament prepared with pre-approved statements, tiered response protocols and clear internal escalation paths. The ones that don’t spend the tournament reacting.
Ten days before the first match in Qatar kicked off, we opened a major new terminal expansion to international media. We invited journalists in specifically to tell the story of the airport’s readiness before the chaos arrived. That kind of proactive positioning is what shapes the narrative before the tournament defines it for you.
Speed is not your friend. Accuracy is.
In a high-pressure, high-visibility environment, the instinct is to respond fast. Social media is amplifying every incident in real time. Journalists are filing from the stands, the arrivals hall and the team hotels. The temptation to get something out immediately is enormous.
Resist it.
The most important discipline I developed during the World Cup was the distinction between what needed to be addressed immediately and what needed to be managed carefully. A logistical hiccup that affects a handful of travelers is not the same as an incident that could define how an entire country’s hospitality is remembered. Treating them the same way is a mistake.
We had prepared crisis response documents for dozens of scenarios before the tournament began. That preparation meant that when something happened, we were not writing from scratch in a panic. We were choosing from frameworks we had already thought through calmly. The difference in output quality is not subtle.
Cultural fluency is a communications skill
Before the 2022 World Cup, I spent time working with the official body responsible for delivering the tournament itself. Part of that work involved documenting the lived experience of Qatar’s diverse communities, the hundreds of thousands of people from South Asia, Africa, the Arab world and beyond who called the country home. I was telling the story of a place that many in the international media had already decided they understood.
What that work taught me is that communications in a multicultural, multilingual environment is not just a translation exercise. It is about understanding what resonates, what offends, what gets lost, and what lands differently depending on who is reading. A message that works perfectly in English for a European sports journalist may mean something entirely different to an Arabic-speaking audience in the Gulf, or to a South American fan experiencing the Middle East for the first time.
The 2026 World Cup will be hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico. That is three countries, dozens of host cities and a fan base drawn from every part of the globe. The communications teams supporting this tournament, and the brands and organizations activating around it, will need that kind of cultural intelligence built into their approach from day one.
The year before matters more than the month of
If there is one thing I would tell any communications professional preparing for a major event, it is this: the work that determines whether you succeed happens long before the opening ceremony.
The crisis documents. The spokesperson preparation. The media list building. The scenario planning. The internal alignment with operations, legal and executive leadership. All of it needs to be in place before the first journalist files their first story. Because once the tournament starts, you are in execution mode. There is no time to build strategy from scratch.
By the time I was in that command room in Doha, we had spent months in preparation. That preparation is what allowed us to handle record passenger volumes, manage the unexpected and still generate overwhelmingly positive international coverage. Not because we were lucky. Because we had done the work.
What this summer means
The 2026 World Cup is the largest sporting event ever staged, and it is happening in our backyard. For communications and PR professionals in the United States, this is not just an interesting backdrop. It is an opportunity and a test.
Airports, hotels, transit authorities, tourism boards, brands and local governments are all going to be communicating under a level of global scrutiny that most have never experienced. The organizations that treat this like any other busy season will struggle. The ones that approach it with the discipline, preparation and cultural awareness that a genuinely global audience demands will come out of it with something far more valuable than a few good media placements.
They will come out of it with a reputation that travels.
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