Two World Cups happened this summer, and both of them borrowed the same idea, spread the tournament across more than one country. FIFA did it with three: the United States, Canada and Mexico, forty-eight teams, sixteen host cities, a final at MetLife Stadium that Spain won 1-0 over Argentina after extra time. FIH did it with two: Belgium and the Netherlands, just two stadiums, both genders playing at once. On paper, FIFA’s version sounds like the bigger achievement. Watch how each one was actually run, and the smaller neighbourpair comes out looking like the better-organised event. That is not a small thing to say about a tournament involving three of the world’s largest economies. But scale and coordination are different skills, and August in Amstelveen and Wavre proved it.
Two Neighbours, one shared Plan
Belgium and the Netherlands shared exactly two venues — Wagener Stadium and Belfius Hockey Arena for men’s and women’s matches running on the same days, often the same evenings. One production crew covered both tournaments. Sponsors got thirty-two teams and two finals under a single partnership rather than negotiating Three countries and sixteen cities cannot sit in the same room quite so easily. FIFA’s tournament was a genuine spectacle; Spain’s win over Argentina was one of the great finals of recent memory but coordinating logistics, broadcast windows and fan travel across a continent is a fundamentally harder engineering problem than coordinating two neighbouring stadiums forty minutes apart by road.
A governance story, Not Just a sporting one
As an Independent Director, what strikes me most about the FIH model is how deliberately it was built. Belgium and the Netherlands won hosting rights back in November 2022 on documented, comparable criteria like venue readiness, broadcast infrastructure, financial guarantees not on which federation lobbied hardest. FIH President Tayyab Ikram’s office ran that selection the way a well-governed board runs is supposed to do.
The lesson for a country chasing 2036
a succession process: criteria first, decision second, and a paper trail that would survive an audit. Running the men’s and women’s World Cups together, at equal billing, is the same instinct applied to a different problem. It is only the third time in history it has been done after Utrecht in 1998 and The Hague in 2014 and it quietly ends the old hierarchy where women’s sport got the smaller stadium and the worse broadcast slot. Good governance is rarely invisible. It shows up exactly like this: in a scheduling decision nobody was forced to make. The FIH tournament also incorporated the FIH Para Hockey World Cup, making it the federation’s most inclusive edition to date.
What The results actually say
Germany won the men’s title, beating Spain 1-0 in Wavre for a fourth crown that now equals Pakistan’s own record. Argentina’s women beat the Dutch hosts on a shootout after a tense 1-1 draw, their third World Cup and a genuine changing of the guard in the women’s game. India’s men, after that famous 5-3 win over Pakistan earlier in the tournament, eventually finished eighth, losing the classification match to Belgium on a shootout of their own. None of that changes the format argument. If anything, it strengthens it — a tournament design that let a mid-table India, an emerging Spain, and a resurgent Argentina all get genuine, highstakes matches deep into the competition is doing exactly what a world championship I spent a career planning operations where the number of moving parts decided whether a plan survived contact with reality. Add allies, add territory, add supply lines across more borders, and the plan gets fragile faster than most people expect — not because anyone involved is incompetent, but because coordination cost grows faster than the number of partners. Two committed neighbours, sharing a tight plan and a short supply line, will usually out-execute a wider coalition trying to cover more ground with the same discipline. India, chasing the 2036 Olympics, keeps hearing that hosting means going big — more cities, more venues, a message built around scale. FIH just showed a quieter model that worked better on execution: fewer moving parts, shared infrastructure, and a governance process that could survive scrutiny. As India’s own bid moves through the IOC’s Strategic Dialogue over the next three years, that is worth more attention than another announcement about how many stadiums are planned. Bigger is not the same thing as better run, and this August, in two small Dutch and Belgian towns, the difference was there for anyone paying attention to see.
*Colonel M V Shashidhar, Retd is a Defence & Strategic Affairs Expert, Certified Independent Director (IICA), ESG Advocate and Governance Thought Leader.