The tournament is over, the trophy is lifted, and the post-mortems have started: the format, the refereeing, the heat. Strip out the football, though, and what remains is a pattern we recognise. An organisation that expanded its output by more than 60%, redefined its workers' conditions partway through, described a commercial decision as a welfare measure, and treated the people raising concerns as a communications problem rather than a safety one.
So we did what we do, and assessed it.
What follows is the 2026 World Cup marked against the framework Australian organisations are actually held to: the psychosocial hazards named in the model Code of Practice, Managing psychosocial hazards at work, followed by the duties a person conducting a business or undertaking owes under the WHS Act. Hazards first, then the systemic failures beneath them, in the order a regulator would set out their findings.
(Yes, FIFA is not a PCBU, and Zurich sits well outside SafeWork NSW's jurisdiction. That is rather the point, because the version of this playing out inside your organisation sits squarely within it.)
Part 1: hazard identification
High job demands
Fail.
The tournament grew from 32 teams and 64 matches to 48 teams and 104 matches. Player unions, FIFPRO globally and the PFA in England, warned that players were being asked to perform through successive summers with no adequate off-season, and named the risks plainly: injury, burnout, reduced performance, mental fatigue. A year earlier, France's players' union had described the expanded Club World Cup calendar as a "massacre" of player welfare. The demand curve went up regardless.
Finding: Sustained high workload with an identified fatigue risk, escalated through representative channels, with no corresponding control. The hazard was documented by the people exposed to it before the tournament began. That matters later.
Poor environmental conditions
Fail.
FIFPRO's analysis found that close to one in five matches were played in heat that exceeded its safety threshold and should have triggered a delay. FIFA's own trigger for mandatory action sat at a wet bulb globe temperature of 32°C, four degrees above the union's science-based line. Dozens of players signed an open letter calling for stronger heat protocols. The same conditions had already surfaced at the 2025 Club World Cup a year earlier in the same country, where players reported dizziness in what one described as "very dangerous" temperatures.
Finding: A known physical hazard with a documented near-miss history, managed reactively rather than through predetermined controls. When your workers' representatives and your own risk trigger disagree by four degrees, that gap is not a technicality. It is the risk.
Poor organisational change management
Fail.
The 48-team format was the largest structural change in the tournament's history. The mandatory hydration break rule was announced in December, six months out, and applied uniformly across all 104 matches, including those in air-conditioned stadiums where players, coaches and captains openly questioned the point. Consultation on the rule, according to FIFA, involved coaches and broadcasters.
Finding: A major change implemented with the affected workforce informed rather than consulted, and controls standardised past the point of usefulness. A control applied where the hazard does not exist erodes trust in the control where it does.
Poor organisational justice
Marginal.
Egypt filed an official complaint after their round-of-16 exit, citing a disallowed goal and a denied penalty. FIFA's refereeing chief reviewed the decisions and defended them as correct. The process was followed; the outcome was accepted by nobody who lodged it.
Finding: A grievance mechanism existed and was used, which earns the pass. But procedural fairness is not only about having a process; it is about whether the people using it believe it can ever find against the house. On the evidence available, marginal is generous.
Poor support
Pass, with an asterisk.
Credit where it is due: cooling breaks were provided at every match, substitution allowances were generous, and the medical response was well resourced. Players were not left without controls.
The asterisk is in how the flagship measure was framed. The three-minute hydration break was sold to broadcasters as advertising inventory at the same time, reportedly generating hundreds of millions in revenue. A control that protects the worker and monetises the stoppage is still a control. But when the welfare framing arrives in the same announcement as the commercial one, workers notice, and performative controls do not only fail on their own terms; they teach people to distrust the next one.
Part 2: the duty breach
Everything above is hazard identification. This next part is different in kind, and it is the part most organisations get wrong.
Under the WHS Act, consultation with workers is not a hazard to be managed. It is a duty, set out in sections 47 to 49. A person conducting a business or undertaking must consult workers who are, or are likely to be, directly affected by a health and safety matter, and where those workers are represented, that consultation must involve their representatives.
Read the tournament again through that lens:
The workforce's representative body published a science-based heat threshold. The decision-maker's action trigger sat four degrees above it, and matches went ahead in conditions the representatives had flagged as unsafe.
Players resorted to an open letter, coordinated through an outside institute, to be heard on heat protocols. When workers have to go public to raise a hazard, the consultation mechanism has already failed.
Workload concerns were raised formally, through unions, across several years and two tournaments. The calendar expanded regardless.
The change that most affected match conditions was designed in consultation with the parties who profit from the stoppage, rather than the people standing in it.
Individually, each of these is a hazard finding. Together, they describe a system in which the people exposed to the risk had no effective voice in how it was controlled. That is not one more line item on an audit; it is the mechanism that produced every failure above it. The hazards are the symptoms; broken consultation is the disease.
The same assessment, inside your organisation
Your organisation did not host a World Cup this year. But if it grew output without growing recovery, rolled out a uniform "wellbeing" measure built around business convenience, ran a grievance process nobody trusts, or learned about a hazard from an all-staff email rather than a conversation, then it ran its own version of the tournament. It simply did not have FIFPRO publishing the numbers.
In Australia, those numbers surface elsewhere. Psychological injury claims already cost around four times more than physical injury claims and take around five times longer to resolve, and mental health claims have risen 161% over the past decade (Safe Work Australia). A single psychosocial prosecution in Victoria drew a fine of approximately $380,000. The pattern that produces those figures is rarely exotic; it is the same one set out above, playing out where nobody is filming.
The Code gives you the hazard list and the Act gives you the duty. The difference between the organisations that pass this assessment and the ones that become the case study is rarely the hazards themselves. It is whether the people exposed to them were genuinely in the room when the controls were designed.
That is the assessment FIFA failed, and it is the one every Australian organisation can actually run: not once, after something has gone wrong, but continuously, with the people affected in the room while the decisions are still being made.
ReFresh is the psychosocial operating system for Australian organisations. It helps you identify, assess and manage psychosocial hazards continuously, with the people affected in the room. No ad breaks.
Disclaimer: This article provides general information on psychosocial compliance in Australian workplaces. It does not constitute legal advice. Organisations should consult qualified professionals for advice specific to their circumstances. Data cited is sourced from Safe Work Australia and relevant state regulators as of the date of publication.
