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Mega‐events like the Olympics and the football World Cups remain popular around the globe, regardless of their record of damaging host cities and societies. In parallel, research on mega‐events continues to grow across a range of disciplines, including geography. Much of this literature remains fixed at global levels of analysis. In this light, mega‐events suffer from a double problem: their planning and articulation too often cause harm to cities and societies and, simultaneously, research on mega‐events focuses too much on the macro. This paper endeavours to address both problems by proposing to make sense of mega‐events by thinking through the minor. This concern valorises micro scales and marginalised people, those who most often lose during mega‐event hosting. The paper argues that geographers are uniquely positioned to conduct nuanced mega‐event research across a globally diverse range of political‐economic contexts, and calls for more geographers to contribute to this project in a move towards a critical geography of mega‐events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the growth of the Olympic Games against that of former host cities to understand whether this mega-event may have 'outgrown' its hosts. The increasing hosting requirements and governments' expansive use of mega-events as tools for urban development would suggest that the 'Olympic city' – a term we use for describing the size of the Olympics as hosted in different cities over the decades – has grown at a faster rate than former host cities. The analysis contrasts historical indicators that capture the evolving size of planning for the event based on four dimensions – sport, spectators, marketing and costs – as well as the urban dimension of hosting experiences (venues and infrastructure) with city trajectories based on demographic and economic indicators. This is done through a longitudinal analysis of former Olympic host cities from the 1960s and 1970s and from which continuous longitudinal data are available: Tokyo, Munich, and Montreal. The findings indicate that the Olympic city has grown more strongly than these former host cities, although not uniformly across trajectories. This gives evidence for the need to review the size of mega-event impacts if they ought to continue to generate interest in hosting them in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mega-events like the Olympics and the Football World Cup routinely harm host cities and societies, largely due to their linkages with ambitious urban development agendas. Concurrently, resident protest has had only limited success in mitigating mega-event-related damages, notwithstanding the growth of resistance networks at local, national, and transnational scales. Contextualised within the broader processes of the Agenda 2020 and New Norm Olympic reforms, this paper explores the tactics of protest against the Summer Olympics in Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how the reforms have moderated some of the more egregious aspects of mega-event harm, while nevertheless preserving some fundamental problems with hosting, albeit in more diffuse or disguised forms. The paper makes sense of these processes through the notion of Potemkinism, conceptualised as a dynamic between the superficial and the substantive, and predicated on obfuscation or concealment. The paper also presents a taxonomy of tactics adopted by host city residents to counter the problems that persist in these processes of Potemkin reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mega-events are global affairs with profound effects across a variety of scales, and are the focus of a large and growing body of academic inquiry. This special section in Sports in Society centers on the urban and economic impacts of mega-events on the societies that host them, offering an examination of individual cases and emerging patterns. The authors explore different dimensions of the recent mega-event experience from around the world, proposing novel ways of theorizing these outsized expressions of transnational sport, politics, commerce, and culture. Combined, these contributions unpack how socio-economic and cultural contexts shape the organization of events and impact hosts in variegated and contingent ways in the Global North, South, and East. This introduction offers a brief overview of the landscape of the existing research before summarizing each contribution and placing them in context within the broader literature. All told, the articles in this special section explore how the Olympics, the FIFA Men's World Cup and the Commonwealth Games deploy different mechanisms to transform urban space, and offer innovative means of understanding what mega-events can do to the people and places that host them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Olympic Games and the Football World Cups are among the most expensive projects in the world. While available theoretical explanations suggest that the revenues of mega-events are overestimated and the costs underestimated, there is no comprehensive empirical study on whether costs exceed revenues. Based on a custom-built database from public sources, this article compares the revenues and costs of the Olympic Games and World Cups between 1964 and 2018 (N = 43), together totalling close to USD 70 billion in revenues and more than USD 120 billion in costs. It finds that costs exceeded revenues in most cases: more than four out of five Olympics and World Cups ran a deficit. The average return-on-investment for an event was negative (– 38%), with mean costs of USD 2.8 billion exceeding mean revenues of USD 1.7 billion per event. The 1976 Summer Olympics in Montréal, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2002 World Cup in Japan/South Korea recorded the highest absolute deficits. The Summer Olympics 1984 in Los Angeles, the Winter Olympics 2010 in Vancouver and the 2018 World Cup in Russia are among the few events that posted a surplus. The article concludes that the Olympic Games and the Football World Cup suffer from a structural deficit and could not exist without external subsidies. This finding urges a re-evaluation of these events as loss-making ventures that lack financial sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although events such as the Olympic Games and World's Fairs are among the largest of mega-projects, there is little systematic data to evaluate their outcomes over a longer period of time and across multiple sites. This research note describes the first longitudinal database on mega-event outcomes. It lays out the rationale and major goals of the database, its methodological approach and content, and its challenges and limitations. The database allows analysing larger patterns of mega-event contexts and outcomes, and helps evaluating mega-events as public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tracks the growth of two of the largest tourist events: the Olympic Games and the Football World Cup, drawing on a dataset containing all events between 1964 and 2018. Overall, the size of the three events has grown about 60-fold over the past 50 years, thirteen times faster than world GDP. We identify an S-shaped growth curve and four different growth periods, with an emergent crisis phase in the late 2010s that may have brought us to 'peak event' – the point at which these events have reached their largest size. Outlining three different scenarios, we argue that the Olympics and the World Cup are at a critical bifurcation point, which also requires new bidding and hosting policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]