Municipalities and hospitality sector faced significant workforce planning demands for the FIFA World Cup 2026 — but was it enough?
Two of Canada's largest cities spent years preparing for one of sport's biggest stages. Now, midway through the FIFA World Cup 2026, the workforce planning strategies built by the municipal governments and hospitality industries of Toronto and Vancouver are being measured against reality — and the planning has largely held for municipal governments but the picture is more uneven for the private hospitality sector.
The City of Toronto began its workforce planning process as early as 2022, according to Tobie Mathew, the city’s interim Chief People Officer. The municipality established a dedicated FIFA Secretariat — an internal body responsible for coordinating event delivery across the city's approximately 58 divisions and 42,000 employees, she says.
"We began thinking about the staffing model back in late 2022, about how we were going to establish the planning process," says Mathew. "One of the first things we did was start a really comprehensive recruitment process for the executive director of the FIFA Secretariat, and it was really through her experience and expertise that we built out the rest of it."
Staffing models built to keep city services running
The City of Vancouver took a structurally similar approach, standing up a temporary Host Committee department with a phased hiring plan designed to match the precise timing of event needs. Karen Levitt, Deputy City Manager at the City of Vancouver, says getting the timing right was a deliberate priority. "Hiring people too soon meant higher than necessary costs, and waiting too late meant critical work wouldn’t get done on the required timelines," says Levitt.
Vancouver’s Host Committee drew on a mix of seconded city staff, temporary contracted employees, and external consultants, says Levitt. In some cases, business units were able to reassign employees into different work areas; in others, management deprioritized lower-priority projects to ensure sufficient capacity during the event window.
“All other city business areas had to understand their role vis-à-vis the event,” says Levitt. “For some business areas, this simply meant delivering their business-as-usual services alongside the almost six-week long event, while for others it meant substantially higher-than-normal workloads and/or changes to the nature/scope of their work in order to support planning and delivering the event.”
Projections meeting reality for city planners
Both cities report that their staffing models have largely held up under the pressure of the tournament.
“We have planned quite accurately,” says Mathew. “There haven't been any shortages or anything like that from the city's end at this point in time — if we've made adjustments, it's been very slight and more adjusting to issues we haven't planned for completely or some emerging things, but it hasn't required a huge resource shift or reallocation at all.”
Metrolinx, the regional transit authority for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, also approached the tournament with extensive scenario planning. Ramneet Aujla, Chief Human Resources Officer at Metrolinx, says the organization ran significant tabletop exercises ahead of the tournament to stress-test its workforce model against as many contingencies as possible. "We tested our hypotheses a number of times, really trying to make sure we were responding to as many of the what-ifs that we could as part of our planning,” says Aujla.
Aujla also notes that Metrolinx's daily operational rhythm — which regularly involves managing unexpected service incidents — proved to be useful preparation. A culture of volunteerism within the organization has also played a role, with a number of employees volunteering for World Cup duties beyond their regular responsibilities, she says.
Levitt also says that Vancouver's staffing plans have similarly tracked expectations. "We’ve built contingency plans into staffing plans, but we’ve found that to date, anticipated staffing needs are generally working well, with small adjustments being made where appropriate,” she says.
Hospitality sector: an uneven picture
While municipal government operations have kept pace with projections, the hospitality sector has faced a more complicated reality.
Hotel occupancy in Toronto during the second week of June 2026 — when Canada played its first match — came in at 82 per cent, down slightly from 83 per cent in the same period last year, according to Sara Anghel, president of the Greater Toronto Hotel Association, in an interview with the Canadian Press. The decline was sharper in the third week of June 2026, when the rate dropped to 72 per cent, compared with 86 per cent a year earlier, while Destination Vancouver reported before the World Cup began that room bookings in that city were down approximately 20 per cent in June compared with the same month in 2025, according to the Canadian Press.
Anghel confirmed that the Toronto hotel industry wasn’t planning for a significant jump in staffing needs: “I don’t see FIFA as a special situation/demand within the hotels,” she told HRD Canada. She also told the Canadian Press that hotels in Toronto weren’t planning for a “massive boom” in guests due to the fact that the tournament was spread out among 16 host cities across three countries.
Val Upfold, a Chartered Human Resources Leader (CHRL) and hospitality industry expert based in Toronto, says that hotels aren’t as busy as they expected and occupancy is down even more in Vancouver than in Toronto. She also says there’s a divergence between how hotels and restaurants were able to prepare for the tournament. Hotels — many of which are unionized — had limited flexibility to add temporary staff, while restaurants near stadiums and in the downtown core that proactively hired, trained, and expanded capacity ahead of the tournament are performing well. Those further from the action that are still seeing increases in activity due to community interest, are seeing burnout as demand concentrates in certain pockets.
"The ones that prepared months ago are the ones that are benefitting," says Upfold. "They hired more staff, they did more training, and they recognize the fact you have a bunch of international visitors and people are going to have higher expectations.”
Addressing burnout risk
With the tournament running well beyond Toronto's and Vancouver's own match windows, managing workforce fatigue has become a priority across sectors.
Mathew says the City of Toronto has implemented structured overtime and lieu-time policies and has planned deliberate rest-and-recovery windows for staff after the event concludes. "Burnout is a real thing, and it's one of those things I've been thinking about — just how do we ensure that we're keeping our workers safe, healthy, and happy during the delivery of the games, but also thinking about what that letdown is after," she says. "We also thought about vacation planning so that when the games are done, people are taking that time off and getting that rest and recovery."
Workplace culture is a decisive factor separating businesses who are managing the pressure from those who are struggling, says Upfold. Employers who already had strong communication habits and a culture of checking in with staff regularly — what Upfold describes as basic employee relations — are seeing their teams remain engaged even through Ontario's extended last-call hours, while those without that foundation are struggling.
"The ones that have had to deal with burnout don't have that culture of making sure they're checking in with their staff," Upfold says. "The restaurants and hotels that practice what they preach, that have a strong employee culture — there's less burnout there, even though they may be working extra hours. There's a sort of 'all hands in, this is a busy time, let's get it done' team-building thing."
Advance workforce planning wins out
Mathew believes that the discipline of scenario planning — testing systems, refining escalation protocols, and running the organization through tabletop exercises before the first whistle — was the most valuable investment the city made. Drawing on the experience of the 2015 Pan Am Games helped, though the scale and complexity of the World Cup required a new level of cross-divisional coordination, she says. Levitt agrees, noting that the City of Vancouver's Emergency Operations Centre has been activated daily throughout the event, staffed by a combination of permanent emergency management personnel and trained employees drawn from across the organization.
As the tournament heads into its knockout rounds, workforce management and staffing strategies will likely continue to be tested for both the host cities and the hospitality businesses operating there.
“HR is a very important partner and we are integral to delivering an event like this,” says Mathew. “But we can't do it alone, and it’s really important to highlight the work of the entire city and all the leaders and staff right across the organization who pull together and collaborate on an event like this.”
