1,600 Drones and 10,000 Names: The FBI Is Already Working the 2030 Super Bowl, and the World Cup Was the Rehearsal
The confetti from the World Cup has barely been swept up, and federal agents in Nashville are already working on a game that will not be played until 2030.
That is not an exaggeration of the timeline. Terence Reilly, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Nashville Field Office, says planning for Super Bowl LXIV is underway now — and that the tournament Nashville just hosted is being treated less as a finished event than as a full-scale dress rehearsal.
Reilly has said plainly that the World Cup will serve as the model. The coordination structure that federal, state and local agencies built for soccer is the structure they intend to reuse for football.
What the rehearsal actually looked like
Two numbers from the tournament explain why the FBI considers it useful practice rather than a warm-up.
The first is 10,000. That is roughly how many names the Nashville office alone ran through federal databases and collection points during the World Cup, screening for anyone entering the country with bad intent. Some of that work was on behalf of Nashville itself — fans from Spain and Japan used Tennessee as a home base for the tournament — and some of it fed the broader intelligence picture for the whole event, across every host city.
The second number is 1,600. That is roughly how many drones the FBI detected in restricted airspace over World Cup venues. More than 700 of them were seized.
Reilly called drone mitigation one of the biggest threat issues the bureau is dealing with right now, and pointed to what the technology has become overseas — a cheap, widely available platform used by nations and bad actors alike. Four years ago a drone over a stadium was a nuisance and a broadcast-rights problem. It is now a line item in a federal security plan.
The other priority is not about the stadium at all
The second focus Reilly named has nothing to do with airspace: human trafficking. Federal officials say they plan to run operations aimed at identifying victims and disrupting trafficking networks in the run-up to the game, not only during the week itself.
That advance work is the part most people never see. Large events draw enormous transient crowds, cash and hotel demand into a compressed geography, and the law-enforcement response to it now begins years out rather than days out.
Locally, the FBI is building the plan alongside the Metro Nashville Police Department. Metro, for its part, says it is working directly with the league and with the cities hosting Super Bowls between now and 2030, letting its own security plan evolve as it learns from each one — which is exactly how host-city playbooks get handed down.
Four years is not very long
Nashville was awarded the game on May 19, 2026, at the NFL's spring meeting in Orlando, after the league's major-events committee reviewed the bid and full ownership voted. It will be the city's first Super Bowl, played at the new Nissan Stadium.
Music City has run big before. The 2019 NFL Draft drew roughly 600,000 people downtown and was credited with about $224 million in economic impact — and that was a three-day event with no ticketed stadium game at its center. A Super Bowl is a different order of magnitude: hundreds of thousands of visitors, a week of surrounding events, and a security perimeter that will touch nearly every block between the river and Broadway.
Reilly's own framing is that the bureau is already thinking that far ahead, precisely because four years go faster than they sound.
For a city that spent a decade arguing about whether a new stadium was worth it, that sentence is its own kind of milestone. The building is going up, the game is booked, and the people responsible for keeping 100,000 visitors safe are no longer talking about 2030 as the future. They are treating it as a deadline.
Related: how the league first signaled a Super Bowl was coming.
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