#65 | Moving the FIFA World Cup & the World's Biggest Tours | Rock-It
When you’re standing in the crowd at a show — the stage lit up, the production moving, the gear exactly where it needs to be — you’re not thinking about how it got there. For 47 years, The Rock-It Company has been the answer to that question. Every major tour. Every major stage. Odds are, Rock-It got it there.
This summer, they’re doing that. And something else: serving as the official logistics partner for the FIFA World Cup 2026 — the largest sporting event in world history. Three countries. 16 host cities. 104 matches. And a shipment load that never fully stops moving.
Giggs traveled to Los Angeles to spend a day inside Rock-It’s warehouse and offices and sit down with four of the people making both happen at the same time.
The Control Tower: Alex Becker
Alex Becker has been with The Rock-It Company for 13 years. He’s worked in compliance, music touring, and sports operations — which is exactly the kind of cross-functional background you need to run what he runs now: the Control Tower for the FIFA World Cup 2026.
The analogy he uses is air traffic control.
“We’re not physically flying the planes. We’re not physically driving the trucks. It’s many folks across our organization who are moving the freight. We sit as a layered approach on top of that to ensure that everyone knows where to go, where to land, who needs to receive them — and we can catch bottlenecks and critical issues that an individual might not see.”
At the center of the system is the tracker — months in the making, built to pull live data from multiple cargo management systems into a single source of truth. From there it filters down: each host city gets its own mobile view, ground ops teams see their assigned regions, and the Control Tower watches the full picture.
The moment it went live is the one Alex will remember.
“Months of abstract planning suddenly had a heartbeat. You could see sixteen cities all working from the same central data, each with their own clean view of it. And it just moved.”
When Nikki asks what keeps him up at night, his answer is honest: not what he can control, but what he can’t. Sponsors who haven’t activated. Suppliers whose products haven’t shipped. Border delays. Weather. On an operation this size, every unknown has the potential to ripple across sixteen cities.
“The goal was never ‘nothing goes wrong.’ On an operation this size, something always will. The goal is that when something does go wrong, we already know — and we already have a move.”
Alex is also getting married in the middle of all this. The timing is noted.
“Anyone Can Do It in Ideal Conditions”: Justin Carbone
Justin Carbone marks 20 years with The Rock-It Company this year. His first tour was Enrique Iglesias — a 747 that turned back halfway to Puerto Rico because of broken hydraulics. Three and a half days to complete a three-hour flight. He nearly missed the show. He still works with Enrique Iglesias 25 years later.
His framing of what Rock-It does cuts through everything else:
“We are a freight company moving boxes from A to B. However, everybody can do it in ideal conditions. What we do is we do it within the most adverse conditions.”
He traces Rock-It’s history through the music industry’s global expansion — writing the book on moving cargo to Brazil and Southeast Asia in the 1970s, taking the Rolling Stones to Cuba, doing the only concert ever staged in Antarctica (Metallica, southern tip of Argentina, a Rock-It agent handled it). The network they built across those decades — relationships in every country, trusted agents in every city — is the moat.
“Our network is definitely our secret sauce.”
Right now, Justin’s team is running some of the world’s biggest tours simultaneously with the World Cup — BTS, Harry Styles, AC/DC, Katy Perry (who opens the FIFA US match in Los Angeles), and Shakira (who closes the tournament). Both are long-standing Rock-It clients. That’s not a coincidence.
“One of the things we love is working with an emerging artist. Finding them, watching them find their footing and accelerating through the curve into larger venues. We grew with Katy Perry together. That was a joy in my career to be a part of.”
His favorite show of all time: Soundgarden at Lollapalooza in Buenos Aires in 2014. 80,000 people. First time they’d ever played there. One of his favorite bands of all time.
“That’s the goosebump show for me.”
The Backup Was Already Ready: Nancy Alvarado
Nancy Alvarado started at The Rock-It Company in 2008 as an entry-level operator — truck bills, airway bills, TSA documentation, the unglamorous infrastructure that makes everything else work. She built her way up to her own book of business, handling bands directly. Left in 2018 to work Fortune 500 corporate events logistics. Came back.
Her best story: a band had one flight to make their festival in Australia. The gear was on the plane. She was tracking it across the Pacific. It stopped mid-ocean.
“The plane made an emergency landing in Hawaii because of a medical issue with a passenger.”
While it was grounded, her team in Hawaii was already at the airport, ready to pull the cargo and find another flight. The medical situation cleared in time. The plane continued. The gear made soundcheck.
“We had the backup. Our guys were like, we’re at the airport, we’re ready to pull.”
The core characteristic of a Rock-It person, she says, is thinking about the worst case before it happens.
“I already think of the worst case scenario before something even happens. You have to be prepared.”
She’s now building the Next Gen program alongside Justin Carbone — a structured pathway for emerging artists to understand Rock-It’s capabilities, and for entry-level agents to develop a clear career trajectory inside the company.
From Reebok to AEG to Rock-It: Stew Heathcote
Stew Heathcote’s career is almost impossible to summarize. UCLA basketball. Professional basketball in Switzerland. Reebok. Adidas. The San Francisco 49ers. Twenty years at AEG Presents — where he helped build the commercial partnership infrastructure behind Coachella, launched Taylor Swift’s 1989 World Tour (Emmy-winning interactive experience), and helped define what brand partnerships in live music could look like.
One of his most formative stories happened early in his time at AEG. A major brand offered an enormous amount of money to sponsor Coachella in exchange for launching a new product. He brought it to Coachella founder Paul Tollett.
“He said, look, this may help us financially, but this product won’t be around in a year or two. I don’t want to align this festival and this brand with something that won’t be here in two years, because it will damage the brand.”
They passed on the check. It was one of the most important lessons of Stew’s career: the long-term relationship is always worth more than the short-term transaction.
He joined The Rock-It Company’s board during its acquisition process — recruited by an old friend doing private equity due diligence — and moved into the President of Live Events role two years ago under chairman and CEO Dan Rosenthal.
His job now is to build the commercial vision of a company that already dominates live music logistics, and extend that DNA into experiential, sports, film, and television. FIFA is the proof point and the springboard.
“FIFA is a moment in time. But what happens is you now have relationships with broadcasters. You have relationships with those brands, those agencies, those experiential folks. And that’s going to be critical as you go forward.”
He also puts it simply: “We move what moves you.” For the World Cup, that’s about as literal as it gets.
What They All Share
Four people. Four career paths. One operating philosophy.
Failure is not an option. The approach determines the landing. Have a plan A, have a plan B — and at the end of the day, the show has to go on.
In music touring, that means a 747 turning back halfway to Puerto Rico and getting there anyway. It means sitting in a Manila customs office praying for clearance — and watching the freight move an hour later. It means a plane making an emergency landing in Hawaii and having a team already at the airport before the call ends.
The FIFA World Cup is the same thing. A bigger stage. Three countries. 16 cities. A match schedule that doesn’t flex for anyone. Balls that get custom-printed with the logos of teams nobody knows until the match before — and have to be on an express flight within hours.
Rock-It has been practicing for this for 47 years. The tracker is live. The cities are loading. Katy Perry opens the tournament in Los Angeles. Shakira closes it.
Rock-It is ready.
