On September 22, 2026, the NGA Health Team convened state and territory health advisors to discuss best practices and future planning around emergency preparedness protocol for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The call “Match Ready, Mission Ready: Public Health Emergency Preparedness Lessons from the 2026 FIFA World Cup” coincided with National Preparedness Month and highlighted state-level approaches to public health emergency preparedness.
Kerin Milesky, Director of the Massachusetts Office of Preparedness and Emergency Management, presented Massachusetts’ approach in coordinating across agencies, strengthening cross-agency communication, and ultimately developing the Match Ready Massachusetts Hub to protect the health and safety of residents and visitors. State and territory advisors had the opportunity to learn best practices, discuss their public health emergency preparedness priorities, and identify knowledge and resources to inform their governors’ public health emergency preparedness priorities moving forward.
Key Takeaways
Massachusetts provided recommendations for Health Policy Advisors on scaling up and centralizing existing monitoring systems, coordinating hospital systems communications, and situational awareness and action triggers. Key takeaways include:
- Coordinated across Massachusetts regions, Rhode Island partners, EMS, and hospitals because Boston’s stadium location is near the Rhode Island border, impacting multiple healthcare regions.
- Stressed the need for pre-positioning resources to understand receiving hospital capacity and improve real-time EMS data to support rapid decisions.
- Found success in using syndromic surveillance and cluster detection to identify unusual patterns, including potential high-consequence infectious diseases.
- The state plans to use event data to strengthen targeted prevention messaging and inform future major event planning.
The state and territory discussion reinforced focuses on strengthening communication with hospitals in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, sharing lessons from summer tourism, large scale concerts, seasonal cruises and World Cup watch parties to keep international visitors informed.
State & Territory 2026 FIFA World Cup Strategies
Health Policy Advisors Call Spotlight
Massachusetts: MatchReady
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey’s administration brought together various state agencies under one digital footprint to launch their MatchReady website. In working with partners in the public health and safety, transportation, and federal and local government, they created a dashboard that quickly provided information about transportation, public and cyber security, and public health communications and information through enhanced disease surveillance and monitoring, extreme heat preparation, and food safety monitoring.
State Governors Office Spotlights
Georgia: Preparations in Atlanta
The Democratic Republic of the Congo played major matches in Atlanta, a city with one of the busiest airports in the country. The Democratic Republic of Congo was experiencing an Ebola Outbreak at the time, in addition to general 2026 FIFA World Cup Emergency Preparedness preparations, Georgia focused on detection of rare and travel related pathogens. The public health officials increased water surveillance, airport screening protocols for Ebola, and screening for vaccine preventable disease like Measles both in the states and abroad.
Missouri: Executive Order 26-11
Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe issued Executive Order 26-11 in preparation for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The executive order activated plans for 24/7 epidemiologist hotlines, mass casualty and hospital bed capacity tracking, as well as overdose planning. There were heavy focuses on triaging mass casualty events, illicit drug/overdose response tools, and severe heat illness. The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services also published Post Event Findings and Public Health Response Advisory Bulletin in May of 2026 with more information about the event, how Missouri’s Department of Health is handling things, and links to states and federal emergency preparedness and response resources related to the World Cup events.
New Jersey: Health Hub
New Jersey tackled FIFA World Cup preparation and execution during a gubernatorial transition. Former First Lady Tammy Murphy was named Chair of the Host Committee Board of Directors, bringing valuable knowledge and perspective for the planning process that had begun years in advance under former New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. New Jersey launched a data dashboard, that not only focused on health resources and coordination but also provided insight into how New Jersey continued to exercise lessons learned from the 2020 Pandemic, what local and regional partnerships to leverage, and identify resources that were everyday necessities versus critical. Know Before You Go information on health safety, air quality, food safety, sun safety, tick and mosquito safety, drug safety, and steps to take if you are feeling symptoms of an illness were provided through the hub.
