Stadium Safety: What You Need to Know About CISA’s 2025 Stadium and Arena Guides

March 2, 2026

Introduction

In 2025, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published two companion guides aimed at helping stadium and arena operators strengthen their physical security posture and prepare for disruptions to critical infrastructure. The Venue Guide for Security Enhancements (January 2025) and the Venue Guide for Mitigating Dependency Disruptions (December 2025) together represent the most comprehensive federal guidance on stadium safety since CISA began its public-gatherings initiative.

Both guides are voluntary. CISA makes that clear on their face. But for attorneys who litigate premises liability, negligent security, or mass-casualty cases, the word “voluntary” is beside the point. These documents establish a publicly available, federally endorsed baseline for what reasonable security looks like at a large public venue. When a venue falls short of that baseline and someone gets hurt, these guides will be exhibit A in the discovery file.

Guide 1: Venue Guide for Security Enhancements

Published in January 2025, this guide was developed by CISA in collaboration with industry security professionals and serves as a catalog of security measures organized around seven core areas:

• Coordination and Administration. Governance structures, security planning, inter-agency coordination, and stakeholder roles.
• Perimeter Security. Physical barriers, surveillance technology, vehicle mitigation, and standoff distances.
• Access Control. Credentialing systems, entry points, ticketing integration, and restricted-area management.
• Screening. Walk-through metal detectors (including multi-zone WTMDs), X-ray systems, handheld detectors, bag checks, and secondary screening protocols.
• Crowd Management. Capacity monitoring, ingress and egress planning, density thresholds, signage, and staff-to-patron ratios.
• Traffic Management. Vehicle flow, parking security, rideshare staging, and emergency vehicle access.
• Emergency Management. Evacuation planning, shelter-in-place protocols, medical response staging, and communication systems.

For each area, the guide evaluates measures by complexity, cost, and the specific threats they mitigate. It explicitly notes that operators should tailor these measures to their own risk profiles, but it provides a common vocabulary and a structured framework for doing so.

The full guide is available as a PDF on CISA’s website.

Guide 2: Venue Guide for Mitigating Dependency Disruptions

The second guide, released on December 17, 2025, addresses a different and often overlooked category of risk: what happens when the systems a venue depends on fail. CISA identifies four critical “lifeline sectors” that venues rely on:

• Energy. Power failures can disable access control systems, surveillance cameras, lighting, and communication networks simultaneously.
• Water and Wastewater. Loss of water service affects fire suppression, sanitation, and medical response capabilities.
• Communications. Breakdowns in cellular, radio, or internet connectivity can prevent coordinated emergency response.
• Transportation. Disruptions to transit, roadways, or rideshare systems can prevent safe crowd ingress and egress and delay first responders.

The guide walks operators through understanding these dependencies, assessing what would happen if one or more lifeline sectors were disrupted during a major event, and building contingency plans. It emphasizes relationship-building with local utility providers, first responders, and CISA’s own regional Security Advisors as a core part of the preparedness model.

Alignment with Executive Orders

Both guides were developed in the context of three presidential executive orders that signal the federal government’s heightened focus on venue security:

• Executive Order 14234: Establishing the White House Task Force on the World Cup 2026.
• Executive Order 14239: Achieving Efficiency through State and Local Preparedness.
• Executive Order 14328: Establishing the White House Task Force on the 2028 Summer Olympics.

The guides are explicitly “tailored for major public gathering events such as FIFA World Cup 2026, America 250, and 2028 Summer Olympics,” but their recommendations are broadly applicable to any large venue. This matters in litigation: the guidance was written for the biggest stages, but the principles—adequate screening, crowd density management, emergency communication redundancy—apply equally to a 5,000-seat arena or a county fairground.

Why This Matters

In negligent security and premises liability cases, the central question is whether a venue took reasonable steps to address foreseeable hazards. These CISA guides reshape that analysis in several ways.

First, they define what “reasonable” looks like. Before these guides, plaintiffs’ experts had to build the standard of care from scratch using industry custom, academic literature, and comparable-venue analysis. Now there is a detailed, publicly available, federally endorsed framework that articulates specific measures for specific threat categories. A venue operator who has never reviewed these guides—or who reviewed them and chose not to implement key recommendations without a documented rationale—faces a much harder time arguing that their security posture was reasonable.

Second, they expand the scope of foreseeability. The Dependency Disruptions guide is particularly significant here. If a power failure knocks out a venue’s access control system and an unauthorized individual enters during the confusion, the question is no longer just whether the venue had adequate access controls. The question is whether the venue had a contingency plan for operating without power—something CISA now explicitly tells operators to prepare for.

Third, the “voluntary” label is a double-edged sword. CISA emphasizes that these are optional considerations, not mandates. Defense counsel will argue that failing to adopt a voluntary recommendation is not evidence of negligence. But the counter-argument is powerful: when a federal agency publishes detailed, freely available guidance on how to prevent exactly the kind of harm that occurred, the fact that it was labeled “voluntary” does not insulate an operator who ignored it. Voluntary industry standards have been admitted as evidence of the standard of care in negligence cases for decades.

Practical Takeaways

• Download and review both guides. If you believe you have a venue liability case, you should be as familiar with these documents as the operators should be.
• The guides may be useful in discovery. Interrogatories and document requests should ask whether the venue reviewed CISA’s guidance, what measures it adopted, and what measures it declined and why.
• Identify experts who know the guides. Security consultants and crowd-management experts should be prepared to map the guides’ recommendations against the venue’s actual practices.
• Watch for updates. CISA has signaled that it will continue to develop venue security resources as the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics approach. Additional guidance may follow.

Official CISA Resources

• Venue Guide for Security Enhancements (PDF)
• Venue Guide for Security Enhancements — Resource Page
• Venue Guide for Mitigating Dependency Disruptions — Resource Page
• CISA Announcement — Dependency Disruptions Guide
• CISA Announcement — Security Enhancements Guide
• CISA: Securing Public Gatherings (Topic Page)
• Public Venue Security Screening Guide (June 2021, PDF)

Disclaimer: This blog post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The discussion of CISA’s voluntary guidance and its potential relevance to litigation reflects the author’s analysis and should not be relied upon as a substitute for consultation with qualified legal counsel regarding specific matters. This blog post was created with assistance from AI.