Temporary Tourism: What FIFA Toronto Taught Us About Service Design

FIFA is a world-renowned event. When Toronto and its citizens heard they were going to be one of the host cities, the reaction was almost unanimously positive. The brand that FIFA carries, the scale, the spectacle, and the global significance of the tournament made the announcement genuinely exciting for Torontonians and GTA locals alike. It felt like the world was coming to them.

And in that moment, that feeling made complete sense. FIFA’s brand is one of the most recognizable in the world, and the emotional response to an announcement like that is naturally shaped by everything the brand represents before a single logistical detail has been shared. Most people weren’t thinking about road closures or transit capacity or what the fan festival would cost to attend. They were thinking about what it would feel like to have the world’s most watched sporting event happen in their city. That is what a strong brand does: it shapes expectations and emotions well before the service behind it becomes visible.

What isn’t often thought about during the early stages of a major event being announced is usually the “boring stuff”, the things the public doesn’t need to worry about yet: how the event is actually going to be orchestrated. Unfortunately, just because the public often has little interest in the minutiae of event planning doesn’t mean they’re insulated from its consequences. When the planning is good, residents barely notice it. When it isn’t, they feel every gap.

From Excitement to Skepticism

As details of the FIFA planning started coming out, including transit plans, fan festival ticket fees, and road closure notices, a shift began in how Torontonians felt about the event. This is the natural progression that happens when the brand promise of an announcement collides with the reality of execution. The excitement that came with the initial news was real, but it was formed in the absence of information. As that information emerged, people started doing what they couldn’t do at the announcement stage: they began imagining their own lives inside the system.

What the Numbers Say

A recent survey by the Angus Reid Institute found that 70% of GTA respondents believe the public costs of hosting are not worth the trade-offs, 80% believe FIFA, its sponsors, and large businesses will benefit most rather than local residents and their communities, and about one-third doubt their municipal government will be fully transparent about the final hosting costs.

These numbers reflect something more nuanced than simple negativity or opposition to the event itself. They reflect the gap between what the brand promised and what the planning process revealed, and that gap is worth understanding not just as a political or communications problem, but as a service design problem. This is where service design comes into play, and where the rose-coloured glasses tend to come off.

About Service Design

Service is one of the four pillars of Experience Thinking, a framework developed by Akendi that connects Brand, Content, Product, and Service experiences into one intentional whole. Brand shapes how people feel about an organization, Content governs how information reaches them, Product defines the tools and interfaces they interact with, and Service design is the connective tissue that holds all of it together.

Brand and service design are not independent of one another, even though they are often treated that way in practice. Brand shapes expectations. It is the set of promises, associations, and feelings that people carry into an experience before it begins. Service design is what either fulfils those promises or falls short of them. When the two are aligned, people feel that an organization has delivered on what it said it would. When they diverge, the gap between what was promised and what was experienced is precisely where trust erodes.

How It’s Affecting Toronto

In the case of FIFA Toronto, most residents derived their opinions about the event with expectations shaped by FIFA’s global brand and by the city’s own framing of the tournament as something that would benefit and celebrate the city. It isn’t just FIFA’s brand that shapes public perception here either. It is the interplay between FIFA’s brand and Toronto’s own identity as a city. When Toronto accepted the hosting bid, it implicitly made a promise to its residents that the event would serve the city, not just occupy it. If the service design of FIFA fails to honour that [huge] promise, the erosion of trust doesn’t just affect the event, it affects how people feel about the city’s institutions more broadly.

Think of a city hosting a major event as a layered system of interactions. There is the fan buying a ticket online, the resident commuting to work on a match day, the parent picking up their child from a school near BMO Field, and the local business owner wondering whether customers can still reach their front door. Each of these represents a distinct experience within a system, with distinct needs, and distinct points where the experience can either work smoothly or end up breaking down.

Every Journey Matters

Service design asks whether all of these experiences have been mapped, what the connection between all of them is and the possible effect they may have on one another. It asks whether the points where they conflict have been identified, and whether deliberate decisions have been made about how to handle those conflicts before they happen rather than in response to them. A useful way to visualize this is what Akendi describes as the red thread. Every interaction a person has with an organization or a system is a knot, and the service is the thread that connects them. Good service design doesn’t just define the knots. It deliberately designs the space between them, so that moving from one touchpoint to the next feels coherent rather than disjointed.

Most people naturally think about something like the World Cup the way they think about any other sporting event, as something with a defined start time and an end time, contained to a venue and an evening. When you really think about it however, for an event like FIFA, that thread runs not just from stadium gate to stadium seat, but from the moment a Toronto resident first hears about road closures in May, to the moment the last temporary fence comes down in their neighbourhood a month after FIFA has left the city. During that entire period, the small business owner in Fort York isn’t just having one difficult afternoon because of a road closure on match day, they are navigating months of reduced foot traffic, altered access routes, and uncertainty about when things will return to normal. The parent near BMO Field isn’t dealing with a single school pickup delay, but an adjustment of their family’s routines across an entire summer. The resident whose street access is restricted isn’t inconvenienced once, but every single day on their commute to and from work. A road closure in Fort York changes driving patterns in Parkdale. A reduction in foot traffic near Exhibition Place changes the revenue picture for businesses several blocks away. A communication gap about transit changes leaves thousands of people making uninformed decisions about how to get to work.

The Thread Is Longer Than You Think

When the service design thread is well designed, people move through the entire experience without unnecessary friction. When it isn’t, every gap becomes visible, and when you consider that Toronto is home to roughly three million people, you have an enormously complex web of interconnected experiences, each one a knot on the thread, each one affecting the others in ways that aren’t always obvious at first.

The system is far larger and more interconnected than any single planning decision accounts for, and that is precisely the point. Service design, when applied seriously to something like FIFA, requires that the full complexity of that system be understood and mapped before decisions are made, not discovered through the lived experience of the people inside it.

The Ripple Effect: Decisions Don’t Stop at Their Intended Boundary

Many genuine improvements were made in preparation for the World Cup. New red transit lanes were introduced to improve TTC reliability along key corridors. Fort York and Liberty Village neighbourhoods were restructured to limit vehicular through-traffic to local access only, encouraging residents and visitors to use transit, cycling, and walking as their primary modes of getting around. These are thoughtful, transit-forward decisions that were made with the intention of protecting the communities closest to the event.

Service design, and systems design more broadly, asks a harder follow-on question: what happens next, and to whom?

When neighbourhoods in Toronto like Liberty Village and Fort York restrict through-traffic, those vehicles don’t simply disappear, they reroute. They move into neighbouring communities like Parkdale, West Queen West, and CityPlace, areas that had no pre-existing disruption, no particular preparation, and no direct involvement in the decision-making process that produced these changes. These communities weren’t the problem being solved, they were a secondary audience, and as a result became an unintended consequence of the solution.

Solving One Problem, Creating Another

This is commonly known as the domino effect, where a deliberate intervention in one part of a system produces a cascade of effects in others. A change to a road network is not a contained, local event. It is a system-level event, and its effects distribute outward in ways that are entirely predictable when you look for them with the right lens. Good service design and systems design treat those downstream effects with the same level of attention as the original problem. The design question isn’t only whether a given decision solves the issue it was aimed at. It’s what that decision creates for everyone else in the system who wasn’t the primary focus.

The planning failure here wasn’t a matter of bad intentions. It was a failure of scope. The frame around the problem was drawn too narrowly. Fort York and Liberty Village were treated as the system to be optimized, when in reality they were one node within a much larger and more interconnected one. And this is where the brand promise and the service reality come back together. Every one of those unintended consequences, the rerouted traffic in Parkdale, the disrupted business in CityPlace, the family in West Queen West with no warning that their street had become an overflow route, is a moment where someone’s experience of Toronto during FIFA fell short of what the city said this event would be. Multiply that across millions of people and several months, and the cumulative gap between promise and reality becomes the story of the event for a very large number of the people who will evidently live through it.

What to Take Away from This

The FIFA World Cup is just beginning, and it would be premature to render a final verdict on how Toronto managed it. There are genuine successes here worth acknowledging, from the transit infrastructure investments, to the public art programming at The Bentway (a public art installation space under the Gardiner Expressway), and many of the people involved in planning this event worked hard and in good faith. The intention was never to exclude residents or disregard their needs.

What this moment offers, for anyone working in service design, experience design, urban planning, or civic decision-making, is a live and observable case study in what happens when the scope of a service is defined too narrowly and the full range of people living inside it isn’t mapped from the beginning. The complexity was always there. Three million people, four months, dozens of interconnected neighbourhoods, and an enormous web of daily routines that don’t pause for a global sporting event. The question isn’t whether that complexity existed. It’s whether the planning process was designed to see it.

For practitioners, the most useful thing to take from this isn’t a list of things FIFA Toronto did wrong. It’s a set of questions worth asking at the beginning of any large service design engagement. Who are all the people this service will touch, including the ones who never asked to be part of it? How long does their experience of this service actually last? Where do their journeys conflict with each other, and what happens downstream when you solve for one of them? And perhaps most importantly, what has been promised, by whom, to whom, and is the service being designed actually capable of delivering on it?

Answering those questions doesn’t guarantee a perfect outcome, but they make visible the full shape of the system you are designing within, and that visibility is where good service design begins.