NEW YORK, July 23, 2026: The biggest opportunity to improve the live fan experience at the 2030 FIFA World Cup lies in creating more personalised, inclusive and connected experiences, beyond the stadiums, according to a new survey from Wipro’s experience innovation company, Designit.
Two in five poll respondents (40%) identified personalised fan experiences as the single biggest opportunity to improve the 2030 tournament, which will be the first in FIFA’s history to be hosted across three continents (Europe, South America and Africa). Accessibility and inclusion ranked second at 27%, followed by seamless digital journeys at 20%.
However, only 13% said immersive stadium experiences were the biggest opportunity.
The findings come as host nations and FIFA continue to invest heavily in stadium upgrades ahead of 2030. Yet the experience and design experts surveyed suggest the real opportunities lie before and after the 90 minutes rather than during them, and treat fan experiences as one connected journey, rather than a series of separate interactions.
With the next World Cup taking place across Spain, Portugal and Morocco, alongside matches in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay to mark the tournament’s centenary, delivering that connected experience will be particularly complex.
Nick Merritt, Executive Director, UK and Ireland at Designit, said: “Modern stadium infrastructure across major tournaments has reached a consistently high standard, so it is increasingly the baseline expectation rather than the differentiator.
“What varies is everything else: how fans get there, how included they feel, and how well the experience is personalised to who they are and why they’ve come. That starts long before they reach their seat and continues for hours, even days, after the final whistle.
“The bigger challenge for 2030 will be connecting everything around the match: ticketing, public transport, accessibility services, and hospitality. These services may be delivered by different organisations, but fans experience them as one journey.”
With studies showing that fans are investing more than ever, financially and emotionally, to attend the World Cup, getting the experience right before and after fans go through the turnstiles is what they will remember.
Merritt continued: “Instead, it’s the ‘grey space’ in between, the queues, the walk to the fan zone, and the journey home that get overlooked. That’s exactly where the opportunity sits, and personalisation is where it starts.
“Digital platforms should be part of that same experience. An app cannot compensate for a fragmented physical journey, and good transport infrastructure means little if the information fans receive is confusing or disconnected. The two need to be designed together.
“Two fans might look identical on paper – same age, same demographic – but their interests and personalities can differ massively. Design one generic experience built on generic assumptions for both, and it won’t work well for either.
“Understanding the individual fan, not predicting them based on broad assumptions, is what actually improves the experience. Organisations that get this right will earn the kind of lasting fan loyalty that no stadium, however impressive, ever could.”
The findings also carry a lesson for brands planning their involvement in future tournaments.
Merritt concluded: “For brands, this isn’t about putting another activation outside a stadium. Instead, they should be considering more broadly where they can add something useful to the fan journey.
“That opportunity may come weeks before the match, elsewhere in the host city or through a digital service that makes the experience easier to navigate. The brands that make a meaningful contribution will be those that understand where they have a credible role to play, rather than simply trying to be visible at the biggest moment.”
