Whirlwind month for World Cup

By Andrew Hammond

Many governments still perceive that hosting major sporting contests command significant prestige. Yet that has been tested in recent weeks with the challenges facing the soccer World Cup whose much anticipated France-Argentina final ended on Sunday.

Qatar is rightly taking pride in the fact that it is the first Arab Muslim nation to host the tournament, and there has been substantial viewer interest around the world. Take the example of the average audience of 36.37 million people in Japan who saw the match with Costa Rica, 74 percent higher than the average group stage audience during the 2018 World Cup.

Meanwhile, the United States (U.S.)-England game became the most watched men's football match in the United States ever. A peak audience of 19.65 million tuned into watch the English language broadcast in that country.

Yet, positive as this may be for Qatar and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the world soccer body, the event has become only the latest sporting contest to be beset by political plus wider reputational risks and controversies. This is not least because of issues including the treatment of migrant workers.

Despite these challenges, Qatar has sought to portray to the world an image as a modernizing, economically dynamic state building from its energy powerbase. It produces 77 million tons of liquefied natural gas a year, about a quarter of the world's production, making it as big a player as the United States and Australia, with that figure increasing to a forecast 126 million tons by 2026-27.

The challenges facing the Qatar event come hot on the heels of those facing China with the winter Olympics earlier this year. There was a western diplomatic boycott by multiple countries, including the U.S., United Kingdom, and Australia, over concerns about human rights in Xinjiang.

The challenges facing the Qatar and Chinese events are by no means unique. Last year's Japan Olympics, postponed for a full year from the original date in 2020, for instance, saw a state of emergency in Tokyo and nine other regions for weeks beforehand to try to control the pandemic. Meanwhile, overseas fans were barred from attending.

The Brazil 2016 Summer Olympics offer another stark example of the pitfalls of hosting major sporting events. When Rio won in 2009 the right to host the games, the national economy was booming and the country was enjoying significantly enhanced international prestige as a leading emerging market within the so-called BRICS group of nations.

In 2016, however, Brazil was mired in a political crisis surrounding the impeachment of then President Dilma Roussef, and the then worst recession in decades which forced significant spending cuts to the Olympic budget. Further, more than 100 prominent doctors and professors wrote to the World Health Organization (WHO) asking for the games to be postponed or moved from Brazil "in the name of public health" in light of the-then widening Zika outbreak which, prior to the coronavirus pandemic, was the worst health crisis facing Brazil since at least 1918.

Previous football tournaments have not emerged unscathed either. Take the European football championships (Euro 2016), awarded to France to great fanfare in 2010 by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), but which took place in a country operating under an official state of emergency following the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015.

The U.S. State Department issued a warning that the event could be a target for further terrorist atrocities, only the third time in some 20 years that such cautionary advice has been issued by the U.S. government for European travel. With this tournament, and also the Tour de France cycling event, potential targets, French authorities had to deploy some 90,000 police, soldiers and security guards for Euro 2016 alone.

The cost of this security underlines how hosting such sporting contests also has massive expenses. In addition to the policing cost for Euro 2016, the total investment in modernizing new stadiums was some 1.6 billion Euros which, by itself, was larger than the reported target of 1.4 billion Euros for broadcast rights and sponsorship income.

The mismatch between revenue and expenditure is, if anything, even starker with some of the Olympics. In 2016, Brazil spent at least 10 billion U.S. dollars on the event, and probably much more in practice, in excess of any revenue the Games could generate, especially with many tourists put off from travelling to the country because of the Zika virus.

Despite all these pitfalls, however, there remains no shortage of cities wanting to host the 2032 Olympics which will follow up on the Los Angeles-hosted event in 2028 and Paris-hosted games in 2024. Meanwhile, numerous countries have already expressed firm intent to host the 2028 European soccer championships which follow the 2024 event in Germany.

Moreover, there is also a long list of states which have also expressed interest in bidding for the 2030 soccer World Cup, which comes after the 2026 event jointly hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the United States. What this collectively underlines is that, in the short term at least, the perception that hosting such events is a major symbol of national prestige will continue to supersede the headaches that can come with them.

Andrew Hammond (Andrew.korea@oulook.com) is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.