Past, present, future major sport event management practice: The practitioner perspective

Abstract

The last decade has seen unprecedented demand to host major sport events, since they can potentially fulfil multi-levelled economic, social, and political agendas. However, despite their universal appeal and long history of implementation, the emergent industry is too often associated with examples of mismanagement. In the light of these continuing major sport event management incidents, the purpose of this study is to provide a review of current management practice and to place this in some sense of temporal context by reflecting on the historical as well future development of the evolving industry. Adopting a practitioner focus at the local organising committee level, a self-administered postal questionnaire was sent to 178 major sport event organisers from 11 countries. Based upon a stratified sample of the 20 priority sports of England, the most senior manager of these sport governing bodies and local authority hosts was invited to participate in the study. Providing a questionnaire response rate of 26% a second phase of data collection was undertaken. This entailed 10 in-depth face-to-face semi-structured interviews selected on the basis of a geographical convenience sample (50 mile radius of author) of returned questionnaire respondents. The findings reveal that current success is based upon effective and efficient management of the tripartite relationship of sport, media, and the event funders, as well as limiting chance occurrences. Reflecting on the historical and future drivers of the event industry, it was further concluded that a better understanding of economics, technology and culture are fundamental to ensuing a safer and new era of global professionalism.