The 2026 FIFA World Cup is here ⚽ and we have a unique opportunity to observe one of the world's most complex logistics operations in action. With matches spread across 3 countries in North America, 16 host cities, and millions of travelling fans, the tournament represents far more than a sporting event. It’s a live demonstration of how supply chains respond to extreme volatility and rapidly shifting demand.
The World Cup may be a once-in-four-years event, but the planning challenges it creates are becoming everyday realities for supply chains. Promotions go viral. Consumer preferences change overnight. Geopolitical events disrupt sourcing. Weather events alter demand patterns…
The opening weeks of this year’s tournament have already demonstrated how quickly demand shifts. In Boston, bars and restaurants were caught off guard by the arrival of thousands of Scottish fans, a.k.a. the "Tartan Army." One Boston taproom reportedly ran out of Samuel Adams Boston Lager after Scottish supporters consumed four times the volume typically sold during the Fourth of July. The brewery was forced to arrange an emergency delivery on Saturday morning to replenish supplies. Another venue reported sales volumes exceeding those of St. Patrick's Day and ultimately sold out of beer entirely.
This serves as a powerful reminder that resilience is not built through static plans, but through dynamic scenario planning, real-time visibility, and the ability to rapidly adapt when conditions change.
At major sporting events, a single result on the pitch can instantly alter demand patterns. A national team unexpectedly advances and jersey sales surge overnight. A host city experiences a sudden influx of visitors and food and beverage consumption spikes. Merchandise preferences shift by team, player, location, and even product size within hours.
Especially for retailers, manufacturers, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies, and logistics providers, these demand signals are both highly valuable and highly volatile. The challenge is forecasting demand while taking into consideration that it may never occur again.
A 39-day surge in sales during the World Cup is fundamentally different from normal business growth. Organizations need to maximize service levels during the event without allowing those extraordinary demand patterns to distort future forecasts.
The Three Phases of Event Planning in Supply Chain
Leading organizations typically approach major events like the World Cup through three distinct planning horizons:
1. Pre-Season: Stress Test Everything
Before the first match begins, organizations should be stress-testing their supply chains against a wide range of potential disruptions and demand outcomes.
Supply chain teams should consider, for instance, what will happen if demand doubles for specific product categories, what if a critical supplier experiences a disruption, or whether there is sufficient manufacturing flexibility to change product mix (e.g. quickly print more jerseys for one team and fewer for another).
The goal is to inject uncertainty into planning models and expose weak points before they become operational failures.
For example, uncertainty around labor availability, transportation congestion, or regional disruptions can quickly create single points of failure. Running what-if scenarios allows organizations to understand their exposure and build contingency plans before disruption occurs.
Stress testing helps organizations evaluate impacts on:
- Inventory levels
- Fill rates
- Service levels
- Profitability
- Transportation costs
- Supplier performance
2. In-Season: Sense, Respond, and Monitor Risk
Once the tournament begins, planning shifts from preparation to execution. Forecasts that were sufficient six months ago may become obsolete almost immediately.
Supply chains must continuously balance short-term demand sensing with long-term planning objectives. This is particularly important because event-driven demand behaves differently from traditional demand signals.
During the World Cup, businesses often need plans to update much more frequently within the event window while preventing excessive volatility from impacting longer-term planning horizons (post-event).
Success hinges on the ability to combine:
- Real-time demand sensing
- Automated replenishment
- Inventory optimization
- Risk monitoring
- Scenario-based response planning
Meanwhile, operational risks continue to evolve, and factors like transportation bottlenecks or supplier disruptions can affect product availability and customer service levels. Which is why real-time risk monitoring has become a critical component of supply chain planning.
3. Post-Mortem: Remove the Noise from History
One of the most overlooked aspects of event planning occurs after the event ends.
Events like the World Cup create demand spikes that are unlikely to repeat in future planning cycles. If those sales patterns remain embedded in historical demand data, they can significantly distort future forecasts.
Just as organizations isolate demand surges caused by hurricanes, promotions, or product launches, extraordinary demand must be tagged, classified, and removed from baseline forecasting models.
Supply chain planning tools like the Atlas Planning Platform handle this complexity through event and promotion management capabilities. By identifying and separating event-driven demand from underlying consumption patterns, teams can maintain forecast accuracy long after the event concludes.
Digital Twins: Turn Stress Testing into Competitive Advantage
The true value of stress testing lies in the ability to simulate disruptions before they occur. Digital supply chain twins deliver this by creating a virtual representation of the physical supply chain, allowing teams to model the impact of disruptions, demand surges, supplier failures, transportation constraints, and inventory policies before making real-world decisions.
This enables companies to experiment "in the lab" with a range of variables, targets, constraints, and more. Instead of asking what happened, planners can ask what is likely to happen, and what to do about it.
The Power of Context in AI-Driven Supply Chain Planning
As organizations explore AI-powered decision making, it is important to recognize the limitations of generic AI tools. A large language model (LLM) can generate insights, but it does not inherently understand a company's supply chain network, inventory positions, supplier relationships, operational constraints, or risk exposure.
Supply chain decisions require context. During an event like the World Cup, planners may want forecasting models to react aggressively to emerging demand signals within the tournament window while maintaining stability across longer-term planning horizons. Without supply chain context, AI systems can introduce unnecessary forecast volatility.
This is where purpose-built AI capabilities in supply chain planning platforms like Atlas provide a significant advantage.
The Atlas Planning Platform from John Galt Solutions helps organizations prepare for, respond to, and learn from highly disruptive events like the World Cup. With a dynamic digital supply chain twin, Atlas enables companies to model end-to-end supply chain behavior and evaluate the impact of potential disruptions before they occur.
Atlas' probabilistic planning capabilities allow teams to model variability across both demand and supply, helping them understand the most likely outcomes and evaluate trade-offs.
Atlas enables different forecasting approaches across different planning horizons, so you can leverage rapid demand sensing during a high-volatility event, while preserving long-term forecast stability afterwards. The intelligence of the AI-powered Atlas Planning Platform combined with broader ecosystem partners such as Resilinc, Everstream Analytics, and Treefera, equips teams with real-time visibility into disruptions across multi-tier supply networks for proactive risk management.
We’re here to help you leverage supply chain planning software to stress test your networks, model uncertainty and risk in real time, and adapt faster than competitors. Let’s have a chat.
