The Economic Impact of Major Sports Events: A Review of Ten Events in the UK

Abstract

Over recent years there has been a marked contrast between the discussions around the economic impact of major sports events in North America on the one hand and most of the rest of the world on the other. In the USA the sports strategies of cities in the USA have largely been based on infrastructure (stadium) investment for professional team sports, in particular, American football, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey. Over the last decade cities have offered greater and greater incentives for these professional teams to move from their existing host cities by offering to build a new stadium to house them. The teams sit back and let the host and competing cities bid up the price. They either move to the city offering the best deal or they accept the counter offer invariably put to them by their existing hosts. This normally involves the host city building a brand new stadium to replace the existing one which may only be ten or fifteen years old. The result is that at the end of the 1990s there were thirty major stadium construction projects in progress, around one-third of the total professional sports infrastructure, but over half of all professional teams in the USA have expressed dissatisfaction with their current facilities.