I was asked to write a quick op-ed for USA Today on winning the so-called NAFTA bid for the 2026 World Cup.

Obviously I’m hugely in favor of investing in and improving international relations, particularly as the USA is in such a delicate situation at the moment. I have my doubts, however, about the wisdom of investing so much hope and money in the World Cup as an agent of change.

In the op-ed, I mention some of the costs involved in hosting, but I was not given the space to back up those claims. So I thought I’d take the opportunity of using this (much smaller) platform to provide sources.

There is a lot of literature covering mega-event costs, and of course there is some debate and a lot of confusing and sometimes fuzzy math involved. Politics plays a role too, so supporters unsurprisingly tend to cite data that confirms their desires to host, while critics cite the more negative sources. But if you take a look at the literature overall, it’s pretty clear that there are some serious and symptomatic problems with hosting.

That hosting  always costs more than planned comes from:

Flyvbjerg, B., Stewart, A. (2012). Olympic proportions: Cost and cost overrun at the Olympics 1960-2012 (Said Business School Working Paper). SSRN Link. Google Scholar

Gold, J. R., Gold, M. M. (Eds.). (2016). Olympic cities: City agendas, planning, and the world’s games, 1896–2020 (3rd ed.). London, England: Routledge. Google Scholar

Yes, market-led democracies tend to fare better than more centralized, more autocratic countries, but every host endures negative outcomes. That data comes from:

Müller, Martin, and Christopher Gaffney. 2018. “Comparing the Urban Impacts of the FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games From 2010 to 2016.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723518771830.

And here’s only one small example of marginalized people being further pushed into the shadows due to hosting:

Kennelly, Jacqueline, and Paul Watt. 2011. “Sanitizing Public Space in Olympic Host Cities: The Spatial Experiences of Marginalized Youth in 2010 Vancouver and 2012 London.” Sociology 45 (5): 765–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038511413425.

There’s much more in support of these conclusions. Look at the “pacification” of the favelas in Brazil, the gentrifications in East London, or the dubious infrastructural benefits and clear environmental destruction in Sochi, to name just three. Not every mega-event host experiences the same negative outcomes, but taken in total there is a disturbing pattern that emerges. Under cover of the glitter of competition and triumph, and masked by an earnest desire to improve domestic conditions and international relations, ordinary people tend to suffer in one way or another.

The question is now: what are we going to do about this?