Hosting a global sporting event is about much more than filling stadiums and delivering a great experience. For a host city, it is also an opportunity to shape reputation, strengthen community pride and create something that lasts long after the crowds go home.

In this episode, Aaron Blank, president and CEO of Fearey, and Peter Tomozawa, CEO of Seattle FIFA World Cup 26, take us behind the scenes of Seattle’s approach to the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Peter explains why successful host-city bids must focus less on touting a city’s assets and more on understanding what the organization making the decision actually needs—and how Seattle reframed its strengths accordingly.

Aaron and Peter also discuss the importance of building local credibility before pursuing global visibility, bringing businesses and communities into the experience, and thinking beyond the matches themselves. For Seattle, the goal was not simply to host the World Cup successfully, but to use the moment to strengthen the city, expand access to soccer and create memories and infrastructure that would endure for decades.

Key Takeaways

• Major events can function as reputation campaigns, giving cities an unusual opportunity to shape how residents, visitors and global audiences perceive them.
• Winning a host-city bid requires understanding what the decision-maker needs, not simply promoting everything that makes your city impressive.
• Local credibility should come before global visibility. Community support, business participation and grassroots engagement create the foundation for a successful international moment.
• The most meaningful impact often happens beyond the event itself, through investments in infrastructure, access, community programming and shared experiences.
• Legacy should be part of the strategy from the beginning. The real measure of success is not only what happens during the event, but what people remember—and what remains—years later.

About the Guests

Peter Tomozawa is a global executive with more than 40 years of leadership experience across finance, professional sports, civic service, and education. A former Partner and Global Head of Foreign Exchange Sales at Goldman Sachs, he later served as Vice President and Executive Director of Partnerships and Board Relations for Los Angeles’ successful bid to host the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Peter is an owner of Seattle Sounders FC, where he previously served as President of Business Operations, and a minority owner of the Vegas Golden Knights. He also helped lead Seattle’s successful FIFA World Cup host-city bid and serves as CEO of the Seattle FIFA World Cup 2026 Local Organizing Committee. Peter has also served in public and nonprofit roles, including as Executive Director of Business Development in the Honolulu Mayor’s Office, where he advanced projects including a $5 billion light rail system, Waikiki public WiFi, and innovative public-private park partnerships. He also served as Commissioner of Charter Schools in Hawaii, helping stabilize and grow a statewide education system. A lifelong ice hockey, skiing, soccer, and racquet sports enthusiast, Peter brings an authentic passion for sport alongside extensive leadership experience in finance, global events, and civic development.

Aaron Blank is CEO, president and owner of Fearey, one of the West Coast’s leading public relations and strategic communications firms. A trusted advisor to sports organizations, athletes, venues and major brands, Aaron has helped shape high-profile moments across the sports landscape, including the launch of the NHL’s Seattle Kraken and major initiatives tied to soccer, golf, baseball, football, hockey and entertainment. Aaron played a key communications role in helping Seattle announce its new arena and launch the Kraken brand and NHL franchise, supporting the team’s public relations efforts for five years. His sports experience also includes work connected to the FIFA World Cup, LPGA Tour, Minor League Baseball, Topgolf and TOCA Football, as well as athlete and celebrity partnerships involving Basketball Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkens and former Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Jermaine Kearse. Since joining Fearey in 2005, Aaron has helped grow the firm into a creative communications leader serving clients across sports, healthcare, civic, corporate and community sectors. He became CEO and president in 2011 and owner in 2014, leading the agency through years of double-digit annual growth. Aaron was named to the Puget Sound Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” list in 2015 and recognized by PRWeek in 2020. He has also served as president of the Public Relations Global Network and sits on several civic and nonprofit boards and advisory groups. A lifelong sports fan and believer in the “never eat alone” philosophy, Aaron is known for building lasting relationships across industries, locker rooms, boardrooms and communities.

About the Hosts

Abbie Fink is president of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona and a founding member of PRGN. Her marketing communications background includes skills in media relations, digital communications, social media strategies, special event management, crisis communications, community relations, issues management, and marketing promotions for both the private and public sectors, including such industries as healthcare, financial services, professional services, government affairs and tribal affairs, as well as not-for-profit organizations.

Dr. Adrian McIntyre is a cultural anthropologist, media personality, speaker, and strategic communications consultant for PR agencies and marketing firms. He's lived in over 30 countries and spent more than a decade in the Middle East and Africa as a researcher, journalist, communications adviser, media spokesperson, and storytelling consultant. He earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Fulbright scholar and National Science Foundation fellow. Adrian helps agency leaders strengthen their positioning, sharpen their messaging, boost their visibility, and win new clients by replacing impersonal, intrusive and ineffective marketing tactics with authentic human conversations.

PRGN Presents is brought to you by Public Relations Global Network, the world’s local public relations agency. Our executive producer is Adrian McIntyre. The show is produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, AZ.

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From the Public Relations Global Network, this is PRGN Presents. I’m Adrian McIntyre.

And I’m Abbie Fink, President of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona and a founding member of PRGN. With public relations leaders embedded into the fabric of the communities we serve, clients hire our agencies for the local knowledge, expertise and connections in markets spanning six continents across the world.

Our guests on this biweekly podcast series are all members of the Public Relations Global Network. They will discuss such topics as workplace culture, creative compensation and succession planning, the importance of sustainability and environmental, social and governance programs, crisis communications, and outside of the box thinking for growing your business.

For more information about PRGN and our members, please visit prgn.com. And now let’s meet our guest for this episode.

Hey, I’m Aaron Blank, President and CEO of Fearey, a Seattle based public relations firm with a huge bent on sports. I’m a huge sports fan and decided when I started taking over my company back in 2011 from Pat Fearey, one of the founding members of PRGN, to break into sports and go do that. And so I’m here today to tell you a little bit about that. Thanks for having me.

Well, Adrian and I were talking about who should we have on the podcast next? And I’m like, well, I have to get Aaron back on here. It’s been several seasons since we’ve had you, so I’m excited to have you and probably equally as exciting to have you on here because this resonates a little bit with my career trajectory as well. And I started my career working in and for a sports organization, the Fiesta bowl, now the Fiesta Sports foundation, who all these years later are still a client of mine. Admittedly knew very little about college football at the time that I got my job there, but learned pretty quickly the significance of what I was embarking on and really the sense of community pride it is to bring an event like that to life and what it means for not only the individuals that are, you know, dedicating what could be years of their time to something like this, the volunteers that spend their time and then just showcasing our city on a national and international stage. And so I’ve been following your, your work in, in this environment and I thought this would make a really interesting conversation for us. So before we introduce our guest to share some thoughts with us as well, just give a little insight into, you know, the, the city of Seattle, its reputation as being a host city for some of these types of events and then we will let that segue into the specifics about the work that you did and in partnering with your host committee to bring the World Cup to life in Seattle.

Yeah, Seattle is at the forefront of a lot of the major companies that people around the world have no idea about, like Amazon.com, and Microsoft and Expedia.com and go on and on in a company called Starbucks and Boeing Airplanes. Right. And so it’s tucked in a corner of the United States and far from a lot of major locations throughout the world, but it is a pretty. Pretty cool spot. Beauty is unbelievable.

We joke that it rains here all the time. We just tell the world that because we don’t want a lot of people from California and around the world coming up here to spend their time here. But Seattle is just a dream location for people to live, work, and play. And sports. The fans that are in the Northwest are rabid. You talk about something like the Seattle Seahawks, which is our American football. It’s our team that just won the Super Bowl. You talk about the Seattle Sounders, an incredible soccer program that my guest is partially very connected to. We’ll talk about that in a second. All these other things, we’re.

We are just rabid fans and known as the 12th. They call it the twelves, the 12th man in what we do. And so to get a major event like the World Cup for Seattle is a huge deal. And I think the city really shined through what my guest will tell you a little bit more about. But it really shined. You know, a global event like the World Cup or any event that comes to a major city is a reputation campaign that is conducted in real time, right. For the world to see. And that’s what this was all about. And so this World Cup that Seattle was one of the major cities in hosting, really featured our city and showed it off in ways that only Peter imagined, as I talked to him a couple years ago and really tried to get in there and learn from him and be on the inside of this. Peter really imagined this years ago, and the city shine through, and we have proof to show that.

Well, let’s bring Peter on to have that conversation. But one of the things that you said, and that’s kind of where I want to start, was a couple years ago. And you know, what we see as viewers of these things and the magic of television, we’re right there in the stadium. It’s amazing, all of this excitement. And most people do not understand really what’s happening behind the scenes and for how long and for how many, many months and many, many people it takes to bring something like that together. So please introduce our guest and let’s dive in a little bit about what all that was to bring Seattle to the forefront in the way that you did.

Yeah, yeah. So our special guest today is Peter Tomozawa, Chief Executive Officer of the Seattle FIFA World Cup local organizing committee. And Peter has been in sports for a long time. He was planning for, as Abbie, we’ll get into this in a second, plan bunch of international events that’s not new to him. So in 26, 20 16, he was selected by the LA 20 24 and LA 20 28 exploratory committee for obviously the Olympics and all the other stuff. He was also worked on the Seattle World Cup host city bid committee. We’ll get into that in a second.

Alongside his work, he was with the Seattle Sounders as one of the original inside operations people running the organization for a number of years. He’s a minority owner of a National Hockey League team called the Las Vegas Knights, which is also pretty cool, as I was on the inside of the Seattle Kraken a bit here in Seattle and being on the inside of the NHL is pretty cool. And before that he was at Goldman Sachs and did stuff in Hawaii. I mean, Peter’s well-traveled and all that, but needless to say, World Cup is why we’re here. Peter, welcome.

Thanks, Aaron, appreciate that. Those are very kind and comments and nice introduction. So thank you. Feel like maybe you ought to be our mayor of Seattle, given how enthusiastic you are. Yeah, I mean, like my career in Sports started in 20 16. I was on the bid committee for the Los Angeles Olympics. We ended up getting 20 28 Olympic Games. Third time in history. LA gets some. Third time in history. First time in history we will be hosting the Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. And that’s only two years away now.

And I learned the business of sports by working on the Olympics. My youngest son of five children, we were living in Hawaii at the time. My youngest son of five children made the Seattle Sounders Youth Academy team. And to support him and my wife and I were facing premature empty nesting. We moved from Hawaii to Seattle not knowing a soul. I got a job down in la, commuted for two and a half years to pay my penance and learn the business of sports. Moved back here after we won the Olympic Games and then quickly joined the ownership group of the Seattle Sounders.

Next thing I know, I’m asked to be the president of the Seattle Sounders. And I ran the team for four seasons. In that time, I joined the Seattle City host bid committee for the World Cup. We won that. And you know, as Abbie mentioned earlier, you know, it was years in the making. So I joined the bid committee in 20 19. We were awarded the World Cup hosting race in 20 22. And I started full time this project, being the CEO in 20 23.

And what’s, you know, again, most people don’t understand what it really takes to pull off, not just physically the event itself, but the amount of energy that must go into preparing that presentation and convincing a panel that you are the right team and the right location and that you have the infrastructure or will have the infrastructure X number of years from now to pull this off against a wide variety of other cities and communities around the world that believe they are the best location for it as well.

It is a business model, it is a economic driver, and it is an opportunity to really demonstrate leadership and capitalize on your city’s reputation on a larger scale. So thinking about your role in that and putting all of that together, and then I’d like to kind of bring Aaron back into that discussion about how do you use those inherent assets of your city. But those things that you’re building upon to really demonstrate your capabilities, I mean, they got it. They’re, they’re, they’re agreeing that you can do this based on what you have presented to them and what they hope you can fulfill based on what you promise in your presentation.

If I may, if, if I told you the secret of how to win these things, and I think I do know there is, wait, win, then I do our city a disservice. But having said that, it’s not that big a secret. Let me start with all the things you just mentioned. And those are the ways to lose. If you’re, all you’re doing is talking about yourself and all the great things and the assets that you have, you will assuredly lose.

Because like in any transaction or any business, as you mentioned, it’s a business thing you gotta lean into. What does the organization you’re trying to convince to pick you, how do they benefit from having selected you? That’s critical. And that’s the biggest mistake most host cities make is they’re like, hey, come pick me. We’re so great. We have all these assets. And the reality is that’s not how you win a host city bid.

Not even close. Because every city thinks they’re great. I don’t know a single city that doesn’t think they’re beautiful, that doesn’t have a stadium, that doesn’t have the assets that doesn’t have all the things that you just mentioned, right? To lean in on what makes your city attractive to them, but in a way, or whoever you’re telling it to, so they want to buy it. It’s kind of like business one on one, you got to sell into need. So that’s where I would go with that. And we definitely shape-shifted our bid to acknowledge things that we had, but reframed it in a way that it was very difficult for FIFA to say no.

Aaron, thinking about it from your perspective and knowing what your business goals were for Fearey and looking at this opportunity at that point outside looking in, what were some of the things that you noticed from a marketing perspective, a public relations perspective that was unfolding during those early conversations and ultimately at the point where Seattle was selected to be a host city.

Peter and Beth Knox, who’s the Seattle Sports Commission leader, who is our chair of our board of the local organizing committee, really thought about how to build local credibility on the streets before we started focusing on global visibility. And I think it’s really important to recognize how do you do that with all these companies that are out there. So it’s really about the local credibility piece that Peter really started focusing on as the focal point of it. And early on, when I met him two, three years ago, he was telling me about this vision of like really taking all the flags and putting them all downtown and having art and, and, and something of substance that we’re going to sell into different companies and, and sort of that different.

That vision is really what landed us on building the local credibility and getting sponsors of the groups and getting the businesses to show up so that we could do things like we, we did. We had a big Seattle soccer house with a three story TV inside a underdeveloped mall in downtown that brought the place back to life. We had something on the waterfront with a barge that came in and a giant screen that brought people together. And if you look across the United States at that World Cup and compare our city to all the other cities and what they did, Peter really went out and above and beyond to build that local credibility early.

That really made a dent when we had the global stage together because everybody was on the streets of Seattle during the six to eight weeks that we had here. It was like no other time period that I’ve seen in my 20 plus years. And I think that local credibility is what the team really focused on early on to build that groundswell of support to say, hey, we are going to have this opportunity to showcase our world or our city to the world like we’ve never had before. And how do we do that? And I think that’s what really I saw play out across the country in ways that Seattle shined.

What were some of the opportunities that existed for. I mean, you mentioned some of the larger brands in the Seattle area that we all know and recognize, but there are hundreds of small businesses, local, regional businesses as well. What were the opportunities for others to engage and participate and capitalize on this incredible experience that was coming into their city?

I can tell you that what I saw was the vendors, and Peter’s going to add to this, but I know that I have other clients that wanted to go hire vendors to do certain things. And everyone was saying, talk to me after the World Cup. We are so busy right now dealing with whatever it was for two months. Everything from designers to, you know, activations to. I mean, you couldn’t even get like fencing and stuff for different types of everything was sort of booked up for the couple months that we had the World Cup. But Peter, go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, I would agree wholeheartedly, agreeing with Aaron’s comments. You know, one company he didn’t mention that’s pretty substantial is Costco. You know, people always wonder where the Kirkland brand came from. Well, it’s Kirkland, Washington. It’s actually a city. And Abbie, you’re spot on in your observation, but when we set off to do the World Cup, we wanted to do things very differently than any other host city. And we did do things very differently than every other host city.

Our mission statement, which we created right after they named me CEO, was to leave a lasting legacy based upon the principles of soccer, innovation and inclusion. And so we wanted to think about how can we lift the community vis a vis the World Cup versus executing a tournament that was always first to us. We were the only city to really. So we did the reverse of most cities. In fact, all cities, every other city was focused on delivering the matches.

My view on that was the matches would take care of themselves. FIFA are going to deliver an incredible match experience. What we needed to do was lift the community so that people would remember this event. Just the same way the 19 62 World’s Fair left an indelible impression on the world and our own region. You know, with the World’s Fair. So that’s. That’s what we were going for, was a 19 62 World’s Fair-like, moment.

We had super high expectations for the World Cup. And I have to say with great pleasure, and also a lot of feeling of pride and validation, we exceeded every category that one can measure in terms of exposure numbers, in terms of actual, in terms of transportation, which we built a whole transportation plan. We. We have changed Seattle forever. And that’s what we were going for.

I want to explore that a little bit more because leaving a legacy is a pretty powerful statement. And a legacy is one of those things that I think only gets realized into the future when we look back on our time and we can say things that were that happened. This is our legacy. This is what we left. So thinking about today and what is in place now, and we’re, you know, we’re several weeks from the experience itself. What do you want the legacy to be? What will be five years from now, ten years from now? When someone reflects as you just did on the 19 62 World’s Fair, what do you want them to say about Seattle in the 20 26 World Cup? What. What is the legacy you’re hoping to build?

Abbie, great question. The legacy that we were going for was what people would remember 20 years from now. So we did things based upon that idea. Things like partner with the Seattle Sounders, Seattle Rain soccer teams to build fields for kids. You know, our original goal was to build 26 fields by 20 26. Well, because of the World Cup, because of the largesse of our community and the community coming together, 52 fields were completed.

So double that goal. We were the only host city to send 1,400 underserved youth to a World Cup match. And we recognize that one of the criticisms of World Cup events, and mostly all large sporting events, is that how unaffordable they are. So we got corporations to come together. And because, you know, FIFA’s not giving us these tickets for free and send 1,400 children. And I have a really wonderful story to tell about one of those children. And this leads goes to your, "What will people remember?"

After the first match, which was Egypt versus Belgium, I got a chance to meet some of the families of the children that we sent to a World Cup match. And in talking to one of the 14-year-old boys who was dressed up in, you know, Liverpool gear. So he clearly was a Mo Salah fan, right? I asked him, what did you think? You know what he said? I fully expected him to talk about the amazing soccer, he saw that he saw his childhood, you know, hero Mo Salah playing live and what an amazing thing that was. You know what he said?

He said, "I have never seen Seattle, and so many people, so happy." He’s going to remember that for the rest of his life. If that’s the memory of a 14-year-old child. And when he’s going to talk about the World Cup 20 years from now and he reflects back to say this is what a unified world would look like, then I feel like we’ve done our job. And I will tell you, this is the summer that America rediscovered or discovered soccer.

This is the summer that the world fell in love with Seattle with those great images and the great help of people like Aaron at Fearey Group and all the comms that we did. But this is also the summer where Washingtonians rediscovered pride and belief in where we are and who we are. That’s the lasting legacy that will last far beyond now. One thing I didn’t understand or realize was I had underestimated how badly people wanted to feel good about themselves.

And Seattle, as Aaron mentioned, has got a lot of beautiful things, but there was a lot of negative things going into. We had a very divisive mayoral race. We had a millionaires tax, we had Starbucks, even though Aaron mentioned them, they’re leaving town, right? They’re moving their headquarters, or at least headquarters to Tennessee. So there was a lot of disgruntlement, if you will, with what was going on.

And what the World Cup did was we showed what the world looks like when it’s unified, when it’s happy. And man, we hit it out of the ballpark. We really scratched an itch for people that want to feel good about themselves. And I’ve had people come up to me almost on a daily basis thanking us for delivering an amazing experience. But more, it showed people like what Seattle, what the state, by the way, because we, we executed across the state. We had nine fan zones across the state, the only whole city to do that.

But we showed people what it feels like, and it feels great. You know, we had. There’s a... Here’s a factoid that your audience will never have heard probably because I don’t know why it doesn’t get out there more, but this was the first time in 56 years that there was not one homicide in the whole month of June in Seattle. There wasn’t a single homicide recorded in the month of June. And that has never happened since 19 70.

It was that safe. People were walking around. Aaron can attest to this. People were walking around our city at 10:30 at night feeling completely safe. Turns out crime hates crowds. And you know, we demonstrated that we can have a very safe and happy city, a magical period of time, but also was very illustrative as you talk about when you, you know, the very beginning of what we need to be doing in the future of what a city can look like.

Thanks for listening to this episode of PRGN Presents, brought to you by the Public Relations Global Network.

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