This World Cup is uniquely challenging: it’s not the heat, the altitude or travel – it’s the combination
This article introduces The Athletic’s World Cup performance series, in which Alan McCall draws on more than 20 years of experience across elite football to explain the science behind the challenges teams are facing this summer and the strategies they will use to deal with them.
He begins unpacking the unique challenges of preparing for a World Cup that spans three countries and a dizzying range of conditions.
The 2026 World Cup will expose teams to an unusually complex mix of environmental and logistical challenges across three countries, multiple climates, vast travel distances, and potentially differing altitudes and time zones — not because these challenges are new to World Cups, but because they may be more pronounced and variable across a single tournament than ever.
Environmental and logistical challenges are part of international tournament football. Teams have long been required to adapt to demanding and often unpredictable conditions, from altitude in Mexico in 1986 to the heat of the United States in 1994 to travel across countries in South Korea and Japan in 2002.
More recently, Russia in 2018 brought extensive travel distances but generally moderate and relatively consistent environmental conditions, while Qatar in 2022 presented a different type of challenge — a World Cup played during the middle of the club season for many of the world’s elite players, but with minimal travel between venues and climate-regulated stadiums.
These were significant demands, but they were often more stable, predictable, or centred on one primary factor, allowing teams to prepare more specifically.
The demands of 2026, however, cannot be so easily separated. The challenge at this summer’s World Cup lies in the cumulative effect of transitioning between environments across matches, and the variability this creates for preparation, recovery, and performance.
Fluminense players trying to cool off during the Club World Cup at the New York/New Jersey stadium last summer (Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
Across a World Cup, these performance influencing pressures accumulate. Match play naturally induces fatigue and can disrupt sleep. Travel compounds this, particularly when combined with changes in climate, altitude, and routine. Heat and humidity likely further impair recovery, while altitude adds an additional physiological strain. These factors do not act alone — they interact and influence physical recovery, mental freshness, and decision-making across the tournament.
Throughout this World Cup Performance series, I will draw on more than 20 years of experience across club and international elite football, alongside conversations with elite players, medical and performance staff, and leading researchers, to explore how teams are likely approaching these challenges and the science and practical realities shaping those strategies.
Better prepared than ever
While the 2026 World Cup may present a uniquely complex combination of challenges, the effects of these demands are now better understood. The science is stronger, monitoring technologies are more advanced, and many medical and performance staff possess greater exposure to elite competitions and major tournaments than at any previous World Cup. This gives teams a better opportunity to prepare with greater precision for the combined physiological, mental and logistical demands of heat, travel and altitude.
The most effective application of these approaches tends to come from experienced and integrated medical and performance teams — including doctors, physiotherapists, physical performance coaches, sport scientists, and nutritionists — who understand not only what to implement, but when and how to apply it within the realities of tournament football.
Over time, these staff groups develop an ability to recognise patterns, anticipate challenges, and distinguish what matters from what does not. When that learning compounds across multiple tournaments, it can become a significant competitive advantage.
Les Gelis, who worked across multiple World Cups with Australia’s men’s team, captures this well: “Having core staff across two, three or four tournaments creates a form of organisational maturity. The key is being able to cut through the noise and become more efficient.”
Countries such as Germany, Argentina and Croatia may not approach preparation in exactly the same way, but there is often an underlying organisational DNA shaped through repeated exposure to major tournaments and challenging environments. Croatia, finalists in 2018 and third-place finishers in 2022, have become one of international football’s most consistently competitive tournament teams.
Former Croatia national team doctor Zoran Bahtijarevic, who worked across four World Cups, described how that accumulated tournament experience can shape future preparation. “You use your own learning over time and tournaments as well as your own research and you improve each time,” he said.
No perfect plan, only probabilities – and trade-offs
There is no perfect plan for preparing for the 2026 World Cup. For many teams, preparation begins years in advance — often before qualification has even been secured — before becoming progressively more specific once opponents, host cities, and potential routes through the tournament are known.
Reflecting on preparations for the 2018 World Cup, former Australia physiotherapist Les Gelis recalls that “two years before the tournament, before we had even qualified, we had already visited Russia and scouted potential opposition”.
Qualification and then the draw allow teams to move from broad planning to more targeted decisions around base camps — where teams will essentially make their home during the tournament, living, training, and recovering between matches — alongside travel, recovery, and preparation for the specific environments they are likely to face.
Malo Gusto and Kylian Mbappe training at France’s World Cup preparation camp in Nantes (Franck Fife / AFP via Getty Images)
Germany’s former head of performance, Shad Forsythe, who was at their 2014 World Cup-winning tournament, described how, once the draw is known, key federation staff — including Forsythe himself, the head coach, technical director, and medical and performance teams — begin narrowing down options, scouting venues, and mapping possible tournament routes and trade-offs.
“You have an idea from the draw where you might be and when, so you can really start planning where you want to be, when you want to arrive, and what you want in place,” Forsythe explained. “You talk about all the possibilities and offer up potential solutions, but you know you need to keep your options open.”
The variety of pathways in 2026 means mapping multiple scenarios once again becomes essential. Teams could move from sea level to more than 2,200 metres altitude in Mexico City within days, while heat stress levels may also vary considerably across host cities depending on kick-off times and whether stadiums are open-air or climate-controlled.
Wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) — a measure combining temperature, humidity, wind and solar radiation to estimate heat stress on the body — is estimated during the World Cup to range between 19C and 23C (66F and 73F) and in cities such as Vancouver and Seattle to close to 29C in cities including Dallas, Houston and Miami during afternoon periods, although actual on-field conditions will vary depending on weather, kick-off times and stadium environments.
By comparison, estimated WBGT values derived from publicly available weather data across the 2024-25 Premier League season were generally much lower, averaging around 10C, with most match conditions falling between roughly 6C and 13C. Even the hottest estimated conditions across the season peaked at around 24C.
Alongside these environmental demands, teams may also face flights of four to six hours and time-zone shifts of up to three hours between matches.
The fixture schedule makes this tangible. Which route a team takes through the tournament shapes the specific combination of demands they will face.
England’s potential routes through the tournament illustrate how environmental and logistical demands may shift depending on results.
Winning the group could, counterintuitively, produce a more demanding pathway — both in distance travelled and environmental variability — potentially involving a round-of-16 match at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, around 2,240 metres above sea level, followed by a quarter-final in Miami, where mean WBGT values are 28.5C — among the highest of any venue in the tournament.
Finishing as runners-up, meanwhile, keeps England at lower altitude and in more thermally moderated environments — passing through Toronto, one of the coolest venues in the tournament, a climate-controlled stadium in Dallas, and a quarter-final in Los Angeles, where a noon kick-off at SoFi Stadium’s open-sided translucent-roof venue would represent the most exposed match environment on that pathway before the final, though still within more moderate thermal limits than southern venues such as Miami or Houston.
The runners-up route would nonetheless involve substantial travel and multiple time-zone transitions — a reminder that in 2026, a more thermally forgiving path does not necessarily mean a less demanding one.
For Scotland, a relatively stable group stage — two matches in Boston, a base camp in Charlotte, and a final group game against Brazil in the Miami heat — could be followed by sharply different demands depending on where they finish.
Win the group and the route heads to Houston, where external heat remains high despite matches likely being played in a retractable-roof stadium, before returning to New York, with heat remaining a potentially persistent thread throughout.
Finish second and the path swings south-west into Mexico, with a late-night match in Monterrey kicking off at 3am UK time — where mean WBGT values historically reach 28.4C, among the highest of any venue in the tournament, and where a two-hour time-zone shift from Charlotte adds a further layer of disruption — before looping back through Houston and Boston.
Depending on the pathway, Scotland’s route to the final could involve roughly 12,500 to 18,000 kilometres of travel across just a handful of matches, each presenting a different combination of heat, travel, recovery demands, and preparation challenges.
Co-hosts the United States offer another clear example of how sharply the demands of the 2026 tournament can diverge depending on group-stage results.
A west-coast group stage — with matches in Los Angeles and Seattle and a base camp in Irvine, California — could see them play much of the tournament in environments where mean WBGT values sit generally around 20-24C, well below the levels recorded at southern venues such as Miami, Houston, Dallas and Monterrey, particularly if they win the group and continue through Seattle, the Bay Area and Los Angeles before travelling east for the semi-final.
Yet the two pathways tell very different logistical stories. A winners route — staying largely on the west coast until the semi-final — would cover around 15,600 kilometres, modest by tournament standards.
A runners-up pathway is a different proposition entirely, with potential travel distances approaching 28,000 kilometres before the final — nearly twice as far — assuming the team returns to their base camp after each knockout match, with repeated long-haul round trips between Irvine and cities such as Atlanta and Kansas City spanning multiple time zones. In 2026, a more thermally forgiving route does not necessarily mean a less demanding one.
So what does this complexity actually mean for teams preparing for 2026?
Speaking anonymously to protect relationships, a performance director leading one of the top nations at the 2026 World Cup framed these trade-offs like this: “Everything is manageable with good planning, but that planning requires prioritisation; you can’t hit everything.
“You need to focus on the challenges teams are most likely to face, while maintaining flexibility for those that are less certain. It’s all about planning travel, heat strategies, cooling, and preparation beforehand to acclimatise. When you set good strategies and get the whole team on the same page, nothing is insurmountable.”
Simplicity as a strategy
Despite the complexity of the 2026 World Cup, international tournaments often reward simplicity rather than trying to control everything.
Reflecting on France’s 2018 World Cup-winning campaign after the disappointment of losing the Euro 2016 final on home soil, Didier Deschamps was quoted on FIFA.com as saying: “Before that final defeat to Portugal, I built the whole thing up and focused on the emotional side. Here, in Russia, I changed my focus and kept it simple.”
That same philosophy of simplicity is often echoed across the most successful national teams. For former Croatia national team doctor Bahtijarevic, the fundamentals still matter most. “Do the basics, the simple things well and minimise change,” he said. “Ask the player: ‘How do you feel? How did you sleep? How did you eat?’ No blood measure or technology has ever come close to these basics.” In his view, international football is “a place of minimum interventions for maximum impact”.
Making complex environments feel simple starts with the staff around the players. Across my conversations with players, one theme emerged repeatedly: the importance of clarity, familiarity, and trust in the people around them.
Former France defender Bacary Sagna, who competed at two World Cups, believes the fitness coaches “will play a big part” in 2026. “They will plan the training, prepare the players to go hard and fast for 20–25 minutes, recover, and then go again,” he said, reflecting on the likely impact of heat and cooling breaks.
Bacary Sagna (centre) stresses the importance of the relationship with fitness coaches (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
More broadly, managing these environments is rarely an individual task, but a collective one involving coaching, medical, performance, nutrition, and logistics staff working together behind the scenes to keep players physically and mentally ready throughout the tournament.
Per Mertesacker, who won the 2014 World Cup with Germany, praised head of performance Forsythe, who constantly reinforced the basics during the heat of Brazil: “Hydration, hydration, hydration, food, food, food.”
Speaking about the same tournament, England midfielder Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain reflected on how, as a younger player, he “didn’t realise straight away why the science staff were doing what they were doing”, before quickly understanding the importance of hydration, cooling, and recovery once exposed to the conditions.
England’s Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain training at the 2014 World Cup (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
With experience, he said, “players become increasingly aware of what works for them and what doesn’t”, learning how to adapt their routines and behaviours to the demands of tournament football.
The 2026 World Cup will bring a unique mix of environmental and logistical challenges — but that uncertainty and unpredictability are also part of what makes a World Cup so compelling.
For those watching, the effects are often subtle but visible. Games can slow as heat, travel, and fatigue build across the tournament, with small mistakes appearing later in matches, and extra time placing even greater strain on players physically and mentally.
In a tournament defined by complexity, the advantage may go to those who best manage uncertainty while keeping things simple. As Forsythe put it: “You’ve got to have a big toolbox of options” — and for 2026, that toolbox may need to be even bigger.
