One Event, Three Lenses

Every four years I find myself going on a TV watching binge of football (soccer) which is natural given its FIFA World Cup season. This year is special because my home country’s team Jordan made it to the tournament.

As I was reflecting on their performance so far, comparing it to other teams, and the challenge of being in a very tough group, I found myself going back to thinking about Project Management. A question kept nagging at me. Is the 2026 FIFA World Cup a project, a program, or a portfolio?

Your instinct probably gave you an answer in about two seconds and most likely the person sitting next to you came up with a different answer. Here’s the thing though, no matter what your answer, you’re probably both right, depending on where you’re standing.

The PMI standards give us reasonably clean definitions. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined start, a defined end, and a specific outcome. A program is a group of related projects managed together to realize benefits that couldn’t be achieved by managing them individually. A portfolio is a collection of programs, projects, and operations aligned to strategic objectives.

At high altitude those distinctions feel logical and almost obvious. But here is what I have learned over years of working with organizations on complex initiatives: clean definitions don’t always survive contact with real work. The higher you fly, the cleaner things look. As you descend to around 8,000 feet the terrain starts to sharpen and you can see the boundaries more clearly. But get down to 500 feet, when you are actually in the work, and the ground gets complicated fast.

The lines blur and classification becomes less about finding the objectively correct answer and more about choosing the frame that best serves how you intend to govern, resource, and realize value from the work.

The 2026 World Cup is a perfect illustration of that.

From the perspective of the three host nations, this looks most naturally like a program, and a genuinely complex one.

Across 16 host cities, significant infrastructure work was underway. Stadiums were upgraded, transportation links expanded, and hospitality capacity built out. Each of those efforts delivers value independently of the tournament itself and in fact outlive the event altogether. The renovated MetLife Stadium in New Jersey doesn’t stop being useful after the final. The transit upgrades in Los Angeles serve commuters long after the last match is played. The essence of program logic is incremental benefit. Project by project benefit compounding into something larger than any single effort could achieve.

When we layer in the cross-border dimension things get even more interesting. Three sovereign nations, three governments, and three regulatory environments, coordinating under a unified framework toward a single cumulative outcome. The interdependencies aren’t just between work-streams, in the 2026 World Cup context, no single host nation delivers the event alone.

That’s program logic at its most vivid, and its most challenging.

From FIFA’s seat, the argument shifts, and perhaps this is where the conversation gets genuinely useful for practitioners.

FIFA’s benefit from the World Cup is essentially the tournament itself. You can’t partially deliver it and realize partial value. There’s no meaningful incremental benefit for FIFA if the group stages happen but the knockouts don’t. The value is whole, almost binary in nature.

That makes it behave like a project in terms of value structure, regardless of the scale or complexity involved.

That’s an important distinction because complexity alone does not determine classification. In fact, a project can be extraordinarily complex. What matters is whether the benefit is decomposable and incremental, or whether it exists only as a whole.

This is where the mega-project debate enters honestly. Some practitioners look at the number of interdependent work-streams FIFA manages such as venues, broadcast, logistics, security, hospitality, ticketing across three countries and say this has to be a program. Others apply the value test and land on project. Both are making a legitimate argument. The standards don’t fully resolve it. I’d argue that tension is worth sitting with rather than resolving too quickly.

Think about building an airport. Most practitioners would instinctively call it a program: terminals, runways, air traffic systems, ground transport. Each of these dimensions delivers standalone value, all combining toward an outcome none could achieve alone. Clear enough from altitude, but the national government funding it might see one capital project with a budget and a delivery date. The same initiative seen from different frames results in different governance implications.

FIFA and the airport share that ambiguity especially because complexity is real, but perhaps not the right litmus test.

This is where the program logic becomes almost intuitive.

Take the US men’s national team. They missed the 2018 World Cup entirely and Qatar 2022 was a rebuilding cycle. It included a young squad that exited early but after accumulating meaningful competitive experience. The 2026 campaign on home soil is the next cycle, shaped directly by what 2022 produced. Player development, tactical learning, squad depth, and coaching evolution. The benefits of each tournament cycle don’t disappear when the final whistle blows, they compound into the next.

Zoom out further from the men’s football program, and you see a portfolio. This would include the men’s program, women’s program, under-20s, and under-17s. Each of these programs has its own benefit stream, and its own development arc. When managed collectively under one national federation with a shared strategic objective, they fit within the context of a portfolio.

Pull back one level further to look at the national investment in football as one discipline within a broader sports strategy, and now you have a portfolio of portfolios. The standards support this construct. Real federations manage it, even when they don’t name it that way.

The 2026 World Cup doesn’t have one right answer. Neither does whatever complex initiative you’re currently trying to classify in your own organization.

The standards give you the vocabulary but experience gives you the judgment to apply it in context. I would argue that the most useful question isn’t “what does the standard say this is?” It’s a simpler one: where does the value live, and how does it flow? Can parts of it be realized independently and build toward something larger, or does the value only exist as a whole?

Those questions won’t always give you clean answers. Sometimes you’re genuinely at 500 feet and the ground is complicated. The practitioner’s job isn’t to pretend otherwise but to make a deliberate, informed choice about the frame and then govern accordingly.

I'll leave you with a couple of questions that started this whole train of thought for me: What are you currently calling a project that might actually be a program? Does the classification change how you're governing it?