The 2026 World Cup, hosted across North America, is set to attract over 6.5 million visiting fans. While it's all fun and games for spectators, infrastructure operators will surely let out a sigh of relief once the event concludes – especially mobile network operators.

In an unprecedented move, the number of teams participating in the World Cup increased by 50 percent, bringing in a wave of new teams from around the world. Instead of one host country, there are now three. It’s a whole new beast of a sporting event for MNOs to tackle, which means forecasting will become much more difficult for MNOs, as football fans travel across three countries, straining connectivity.

All of which is to say that MNOs will need to change up their game plan to ensure their preparations accurately forecast network traffic so infrastructure can withstand surge moments and avoid outages. With global attention focused on the host nations, even short-lived connectivity issues risk damaging the fan experience and triggering widespread public and social-media backlash.

Why are sporting events so challenging for mobile networks?

Sporting events in general are a challenge for MNOs as networks are usually built for average and predictable demands. With some stadiums generating the network traffic of a small city in just one day, networks cannot withstand extreme or even short-term surges. Network traffic also tends to synchronize around highlight moments, with constant uploading to social media. If everyone is using additional data at specific points, it is more likely that control panels get overloaded.

However, the circumstances of the 2026 World Cup make this much harder as the games will be hosted across three countries, with a lot of fans coming from new markets. Millions of fans will be traveling from their home country, relying on their national SIM (or increasingly, a travel eSIM), generating significant inbound and outbound roaming traffic. These roaming flows are harder to predict and place additional pressure on international interconnections, roaming platforms, and authentication systems. Finally, as more countries are involved, there is greater device and network profile diversity. Roaming partners must also ensure interoperability across 4G/5G networks and support seamless handovers.

Ultimately, MNOs will need to plan for worst-case scenarios to ensure their network is up and running, especially during the biggest game spikes.

Forecasting in a world of unpredictable roaming demand

While there are unique challenges to this year’s World Cup, we can look at lessons from connecting previous sporting events to predict how the MNO rulebook needs to change in the lead-up to the season.

All preparation periods begin with forecasting. In this year’s event, being able to anticipate traffic peaks and potential challenges will be even more important for a smooth game. For most events, there is one host country, and forecasting needs to account for one dominant host network, with peaks concentrated around certain cities. This no longer holds, since fans will move across cities and borders. Planning becomes more complicated due to repeated roaming attach/detach cycles, fluctuating inbound and outbound roaming profiles, uneven load distribution across cities and countries (depending on match scheduling). Forecasting will need to take into account dynamic network flows.

This will need to take into account how existing ‘peak’ moments, such as New Year's, holidays, etc., impact the network, identifying some common challenges during these moments. It is likely that under the massive load during the tournaments, these challenges will only be accentuated.

For example, at the 2022 World Cup, voice-related issues were identified as a major area of concern ahead of the World Cup. Targeted focus and dedicated remediation efforts led to a significant reduction both before and during the event, with further reductions planned going forward.

This type of foresight enables targeted network upgrades that are necessary for continuous connectivity.

Signaling overload - an MNO's worst nightmare

Most of the time, it is not data throughput alone that causes the most severe network incidents, but rather signaling overload. This is when control messages that are essential to keeping devices connected spike uncontrollably. It creates a situation equivalent to trying to start a car at 80 miles per hour.

Data from the 2022 World Cup final at Lusail Stadium illustrates the immense scale and intensity modern mobile networks must handle. During a single match, spectators generated 45.1TB of mobile data, alongside 8.4TB of WiFi traffic, while placing over 650,000 voice calls. Notably, 32,000 of the fans were roaming subscribers, adding extra strain on international signaling and authentication systems. To put this in perspective, this is the equivalent of streaming nine million songs.

The most critical moment is often recovery. If signaling retries are not carefully controlled, reconnection attempts can create a cascading “avalanche” effect, preventing systems from stabilizing. Dedicated avalanche control mechanisms are required to regulate retries and allow roaming platforms to recover safely.

A shared responsibility

With an event as large and globally visible as the 2026 World Cup, connectivity can’t be delivered in siloes. Host operators, operators from participating countries, and international roaming partners all have a critical role to play.

Host networks must ensure strong coverage and national network performance for the millions of local and visiting users throughout the tournament. ‘Participating’ operators need to be ready to ensure the roaming experience of their subscribers. International roaming partners, like the referees, need to be in the middle, managing things like interoperability and letting things flow.

All in all, success for MNOs at the 2026 World Cup will be decided by their ability to rethink traditional forecasting and proactively engineer for extreme and dynamic demand conditions. If they can anticipate signaling stress and synchronized usage spikes, operators will do just fine in moving from reactive firefighting to more resilient delivery. The first priority of connectivity is to make sure people are connected when it matters to people most. When it comes to performing on one of the world’s biggest stages, networks, just like the players, will need to prove they can step up and perform when it counts.