Key Points

• Mega-event security is being redefined as public appetite for large scale gatherings grows alongside a rapidly evolving threat environment.
• New global standards work, including the Ligue’s role in ISO/TC 292 WG7, is shaping a more integrated, people-centred approach to event safety and resilience.
• Today’s security leaders emphasize coordinated governance, crowd understanding and intelligence-led operations to deliver safe, seamless, and positive event experiences.

The Football World Cup 2026 now underway is a powerful reminder that mega events are no longer judged solely by the spectacle on the field, but by the sophistication, coordination, and resilience required to keep millions of people safe while preserving the joy of shared public experience.

This year’s tournament is one of the largest ever staged, spanning multiple countries, dozens of venues, and millions of spectators across stadiums, fan zones, transit hubs and public viewing sites. Its scale reflects a broader global trend: the public’s appetite for large scale events has never been stronger. Whether it is football, concerts, festivals or national celebrations, people continue to seek out the energy and belonging that come from being part of something bigger than themselves. Attendance records at major sporting tournaments, rapid sell outs of global concert tours, and the resurgence of city-wide cultural festivals all point to a world eager to gather.

Yet this appetite for mass participation collides with a threat environment that is more complex and interconnected than at any point in recent memory. Traditional risks remain — terrorism, geopolitical tensions and criminal enterprises continue to target high visibility gatherings — but the tools available to disrupt major events are evolving rapidly.

One of the fastest emerging challenges is AI driven synthetic media – highly convincing but entirely fabricated audio, video, or text messages generated by artificial intelligence. A fake “emergency announcement” that appears to come from event officials, or a realistic but false video of an incident circulating on social media, can spread confusion, trigger unnecessary crowd movement, or overwhelm response teams. In a setting where trust, timing, and clear communication are essential, even a brief surge of misinformation can have real-world safety consequences.

These new risks sit alongside more familiar but still evolving threats, such as drone incursions, cyberattacks on event infrastructure, and coordinated attempts to exploit crowd density. Together, they create an operational landscape that is broader, faster moving and more unpredictable than ever before.

Meeting the public demand for large events in a threat environment that is more complex and interconnected than ever is extraordinarily difficult.

Meeting the public demand for large events under these conditions is extraordinarily difficult. Security leaders must design systems that are both robust and unobtrusive, capable of scaling across cities and regions while remaining flexible enough to adapt to rapidly shifting risks. The operational burden is immense: layered perimeter protection, intelligence-led threat monitoring, counter drone capabilities, cyber resilience, emergency response readiness and crowd science informed movement planning must all function as a single, integrated ecosystem.

Rising to the Challenge

The International Security Ligue contributes to ISO/TC 292 Working Group 7 (Guidelines for events), which is developing and refining international standards for the safety, security and resilience of major gatherings. Through this work — and the collaboration it enables with experts across continents — we have come to appreciate how today’s security leaders are redefining what success looks like for mega events. The shift is unmistakable: from control to understanding, from isolated functions to integrated systems, from static plans to adaptive, intelligence-led operations.

“Securing modern mega-events means keeping pace with a constantly evolving landscape of interconnected threats,” explains Stefan Huber, Executive Director of the International Security Ligue and the Ligue’s representative in Working Group 7. “Learning from one another, accelerating professional development, and sharing operational experience are essential. Standards have an important role to play, but unless they evolve faster, they risk being outpaced by the very challenges they are designed to address.”

Learning from one another, accelerating professional development, and sharing operational experience are essential.

From ISO TC 292 WG7 comes a clear message: resilience, preparedness and coordinated governance are the foundations of successful major events. Norwegian crisis-management expert Ivar Lunde, Convenor of WG7, reinforces this view, reminding us that leadership, readiness and inter-agency cooperation are what transform plans into performance when it matters most.

Drawing on the lessons of FIFA Qatar 2022, crowd management expert Salim Al-Bosta champions a powerful idea: crowd management is not crowd control. Safe events are created when security, transportation, technology, emergency services and fan experience operate as one integrated system. A key leader within the Qatar 2022 Host Country operations environment, he helped shape modern approaches to crowd management, spectator operations and mega-event delivery.

This philosophy is echoed by Adrian Zemp and the Crowd Management Unit of Municipality Police of Zürich. Their approach—applied to major international events, including UEFA Women's EURO competitions—focuses on safe movement, preventing critical crowd densities and creating positive visitor experiences. Their message is simple: safe events are created through understanding people, not controlling them.

Experts in crowd dynamics, like Dr. G. Keith Still, an advisor to the Olympics, and Paul Wertheimer, Founder of Crowd Management Strategies, stress the avoidable nature of crowd-related injuries and deaths, and Professor Dirk Helbing, explains that advanced data analysis has a growing role in planning for large crowds.

At the Centre for Sport and Human Rights, Mary Harvey, Guido Battaglia and Alison Biscoe add another critical dimension: security and human rights are not competing priorities—they are mutually reinforcing. Protecting people, workers and communities is fundamental to event success.

Helmuth Spahn, FIFA Director for Safety, Security and Access, advocates for intelligence-led operations, international cooperation and integrated risk management to protect fans, teams and host communities.

The private security sector shares the same vision. Allied Universal reminds us that success is when millions enjoy an event and nothing happens. Securitas promotes predictive security. Prosegur highlights the convergence of physical and digital security, while G4S emphasizes that people, procedures and planning remain as important as technology.

These leading voices reveal a new consensus: The future of mega-event security lies at the intersection of resilience, crowd science, human rights, technology, governance and international cooperation. The safest events are those where security is barely noticed—because it has already been designed into the experience.