Courtney Jackson Built a Career Behind the World’s Biggest Live Events

From a teenage internship in New Zealand to leading sponsor ticketing and hospitality operations across the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the FIFA World Cup, Jackson has built her career around making high-pressure events feel effortless to the people attending them.

When thousands of guests arrive for one of the world’s biggest sporting events, Courtney Jackson’s job is to make sure they never see the complexity behind the experience. Ticketing has to work, hospitality programs have to run on time, sponsors have to know where their guests are, and problems have to be solved before they become visible.

Jackson now leads teams of more than 30 people across global events, including the FIFA World Cup, the Olympics, and the Super Bowl, but her entry into the industry began far from that scale. She started as an intern at 16 in a small town in New Zealand, without formal qualifications and without any obvious path to international event leadership.

“I learned early that events reward people who can solve the problem in front of them,” Jackson said. “Nobody cares how impressive the plan looked if the guest is standing there and something has gone wrong.”

That emphasis on execution shaped her progression through the industry. Jackson moved from basic hospitality work into larger venues, conferences with more than 5,000 attendees, and VIP programs for music artists. She later built Superfan Live’s UK operation in London and opened and led its Australasia branch from Sydney. When she joined Superfan Live as its first employee alongside the founder, the company had two people. Over the following five years, she helped grow it to a staff of 35, eventually serving as COO before moving into the Chief of Staff role.

The work itself was rarely glamorous. Jackson describes live events as months of logistics, spreadsheets, schedules, and contingency planning compressed into a few hours in which everything has to work in public. There is no second take when doors open late, a sponsor guest cannot access a ticket, or an artist’s team needs an immediate answer. The audience may experience a concert or sporting event as a single night, but the operational team has often spent months preparing for every point of friction that could affect it.

“People see the show, the stadium, or the VIP package and think that is the job,” Jackson said. “Most of the job happened before anyone walked through the door.”

Her responsibilities expanded from music touring into major global sport. Through SUPER Sports, where she became CEO in 2026, Jackson leads ticketing and hospitality operations for sponsors whose programs can involve thousands of guests. Her recent work includes FIFA World Cup 2026, a tournament spanning 104 matches across 16 cities in three countries. During the same 18-month period, she also led operations connected to Super Bowl LX, FIFA Club World Cup 2025, and the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics 2026. Earlier projects included FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023, and the Paris 2024 Olympics.

The music side of her career has required a different rhythm but the same underlying discipline. Jackson has worked on VIP programs tied to artists and entertainment properties including Metallica, Katy Perry, Queen + Adam Lambert, Bon Jovi, Eminem, Michael Bublé, and WWE. She has also delivered events for President Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Across those projects, the operational challenge remains creating a premium experience around events where expectations are already unusually high.

“Executing a VIP service only works when the guest feels looked after without seeing how much effort it took,” Jackson said. “The experience can be complicated behind the scenes, but it should never feel complicated to the person who bought it.”

Jackson sees that approach becoming more important as premium experiences take on a larger role in live entertainment. She argues that VIP is often treated too narrowly, as though it amounts to a laminate, a merchandise package, or a meet-and-greet. In practice, she sees it as one of the closest relationships a fan can have with an artist, team, or event. When it is poorly planned, the disappointment reaches beyond a single package because the customer often associates the failure with the artist or brand.

Jackson’s career also demonstrates how operational expertise can transfer between categories that are usually treated as separate. Music touring and global sport have different commercial structures, stakeholders, and timelines, yet both depend on people who can manage pressure while protecting the guest experience. Jackson has operated across both on four continents, a breadth of experience she says is uncommon in a field where professionals often specialize in one event category or market.

Her approach to high-pressure work is less about appearing unflappable than about preparation. Jackson has repeatedly returned to the importance of personal standards, particularly in work where small mistakes can become public quickly. She has built her career by becoming deeply familiar with the details others may consider too minor, from operational logistics to how teams communicate when circumstances change.

“You do not get to choose when the difficult moment arrives,” she said. “You can choose how prepared you are when it does.”

The scale of Jackson’s work has changed dramatically since she entered the industry at 16, but the standard she applies to it has remained consistent. A World Cup sponsor program may involve thousands of guests across multiple cities, while a music VIP experience may involve a much smaller group of superfans trying to get closer to an artist they have followed for years. In both cases, the work succeeds when the people attending barely notice how much coordination was required.

For Jackson, that invisibility is part of the craft. The public remembers the event. Her responsibility is to make sure the machinery behind it never becomes the story.