Large-scale, high-profile sporting and entertainment events pose uniquely pressing challenges for governments to overcome when protecting the safety of the event audience and participants. Safety is rightly prioritized above all else, but there are additional considerations to weigh when hosting and securing events of this scale.
There’s a built-in tension between the host country’s desire to provide event visitors with the best experience possible, weighed against the risk that cumbersome security measures will create bottlenecks that impede the proceedings and negatively affect the visitor experience.
Host countries derive major economic benefits from hosting major events, driven by tourism, advertising, service sectors, transportation and other factors. But there’s more than just money at stake where event security is concerned. Reputations and, even more importantly, lives are at stake.
The host country’s ability to smoothly and successfully stage these events enhances its global prestige and tourism allure. It projects its ambitions and strengths. Among other important benefits, these events help to showcase the uniqueness and richness of the regional culture. A bad visitor experience – marred by a security lapse or security overkill – can reflect badly on the host country and its people, with lasting reputational repercussions.
The Next Big Test
The FIFA 2026 World Cup will be the first to host games in three different countries and the first to include an expanded bracket of 48 country teams (expanded from 32). Canada, Mexico and the U.S. will collaborate to welcome over six million anticipated visitors from around the world. Projections estimate an economic impact ranging from $5 billion to $6 billion across the host nations.
The prestige and scale of the event make it a locus for crime, terror, hooliganism and riots. When it comes to implementing border protection for the 2026 World Cup, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM) and other agencies have their hands full ensuring safe, smooth passage for travelling game spectators, players and club staff while preventing the passage of threat actors as they approach (and depart) host country borders.
Much depends on whether they enter by air, land or sea.
Airports provide tightly controlled, confined environments for border entry, such that they’re considered by many to be the safest facilities in the world. Passengers funnel through fixed checkpoints with standardized passenger name record (PNR) and advance passenger information (API) screening, pre-vetted against no-fly lists.
Land borders and seaports are much more challenging to protect. They’re more spread out, more porous and logistically complex to monitor. The 2026 World Cup will likely see huge spikes in cross-border traffic flowing between Canada, Mexico and the U.S., with millions of people travelling fluidly between borders depending on their team – or scheme – of interest.
How Much Security Screening is Enough?
Ideally, coordinated security measures will prevent bad actors from departing their country of origin. Authorities often know in advance which visitors will be problematic to a major international event and can readily raise red flags and/or impede passage. This is one reliable way to limit checks and bottlenecks at border entries.
When bottlenecks do arise, random screening is often the culprit. Implemented at scale to screen thousands or even millions of event attendees, randomly selecting visitors and vehicles for inspection wastes valuable time relative to the value provided with occasional bad actor intercepts.
Random security checks are not the answer. 100% visitor screening would be even more cumbersome, creating untenable bottlenecks. Complicating matters, security checks performed only on intelligence tips are bound to be porous.
So, where and when should border security checks be applied?
Consistent intelligence monitoring is the most effective and ultimately the most efficient method of border protection, whereby only the threats surfaced from consistent monitoring are checked or screened. In these cases, there’s a much higher probability that security is checking the right people – the real threats – improving effectiveness while enabling border traffic to flow with fewer bottlenecks.
Data Without Borders
For large, high-profile events like the 2026 World Cup, effective security monitoring begins beyond the event boundaries, before visitors arrive at the border. Border checks for land and sea entries must be comprehensive, but swift. Decisions must be made quickly whether an individual or group should enter the country or not.
Before visitors arrive, government and border protection intelligence analysts need to look closely at data sources that are borderless.
Open-source data can be scrutinized from anywhere in the world to gain an understanding of who event visitors are and what they post prior to events. In these channels, it can be readily verified if visitors affiliate with groups prone to security risks, or if they share specific, relevant trend hashtags, for example. Maybe they’re in social messaging app channels known to deal in illicit drug trade. Much can be revealed from open data sources.
Satellite communication is likewise borderless, with heightened relevance for land and sea border crossings. The communication flowing on these channels provides threat assessors helpful visibility into potential threats as they approach borders individually or in groups, by private vehicles and/or public transportation, while navigating sensitive privacy and GDPR concerns.
News and sentiment monitoring is a natural component to borderless data analysis. If a specific country has exhibited a growing negative sentiment against Canada, Mexico and/or the U.S., security attention should be prioritized on World Cup visitors from this specific country. If there have been public protests against the World Cup host countries, it’s important to know where, when and why.
The cyber domain is also borderless, with unique challenges where data monitoring is concerned. People here use aliases, avatars and nicknames instead of real identifiers, making cyber domains and dark web forums a hotbed for crime and terror planning under the assumption these domains are anonymized.
Monitoring cyber threat intelligence is critical for surfacing criminal and terror intent in advance of a major event like the 2026 World Cup. It provides the ability to know visitor behavior well before they arrive at the border.
Additionally, the movement of crypto funds flowing from foreign blockchains and wallets to domestic blockchains and wallets and/or spikes in the amount of transferred funds are suspicious indicator that illicit activity might be planned.
Borderless data is also essential for streamlined international security coordination – collaboration not just between countries, but also international organizations like Interpol, Europol and the World Customs Organization (WCO). Continuous intelligence sharing should in large part preclude bad actors from travelling to the World Cup.
As visitors physically approach the country border, visual monitoring infrastructure as well as cellular and location data comes into play for SIGINT data sourcing. Suspicious behavior and movement adjacent to the border could warrant additional scrutiny and security measures.
AI for a Secure World Cup
There’s a deluge of data to be sifted with this strategy, and the majority of the data is unstructured – text, pictures, video, web and open-source content. Each of these data formats typically requires a devoted, siloed solution to process it, creating additional complexities when it comes to synthesizing the data. The big data challenge is immense, and this is where AI comes in.
AI-powered data fusion and investigative analysis can automatically ingest and organize the data and quickly score and prioritize the risks. The capabilities exist today to process diverse unstructured data efficiently into a unified view for centralized analysis, and likewise there’s an opportunity to implement seamless, end-to-end flows of investigative data from diverse data sources.
AI allows the ability to surface patterns from the data with unprecedented efficiency and use machine learning to assign risk and distill bad actors and security threats with precision from a pool of millions of World Cup visitors. This culminates in careful, continuous border protection that denies border entry to bad actors that wish to disrupt the event.
Consistent, AI-guided border protection improves security success outcomes while minimizing bottlenecks that cause negative visitor experiences at a time when visitors should be celebrating the host countries and World Cup excitement. Given the complexity of ensuring strong border protection, agencies should plan to ensure their actions comply with all relevant laws and regulations – including privacy, data protection, anti-discrimination and AI accountability standards. Since this preparation takes time, it’s best to start early.
