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The FIFA World Cup is an archetypal first-order mega-event: that is, it is a large-scale and prestigious sports competition among elite athletes held on a regular and rotational basis in different locations across the world. Sport mega-events are marked by the high levels of interest they evoke internationally; the resultant high levels of spectatorship they draw; and the volumes of corporate investments – and revenues – that they can command. In terms of revenue, the FIFA World Cup is the largest sport mega-event, closely matched by the Olympic Games. The World Cup differs from the Olympics in that it is a multi-site (or multi-city) tournament. Both are however global media festivals with major economic importance for sport and nonsport stakeholders. The 2004 Summer Games in Athens drew an estimated television audience of 3.9bn viewers and a cumulative audience of 40bn (Horne 2008). The 2006 FIFA World Cup hosted by Germany, by contrast, had a cumulative television audience of 26.3bn (FIFA 2006). As an indication of the extended ‘mediatising’ of sport mega-events in recent years, the sale of global television rights for the 2006 FIFA World Cup generated US$1.97bn in revenue for FIFA, six times the value of television receipts for the World Cups hosted in the 1990s (Horne 2008). Television sales for the 2010 World Cup were worth just over US$2bn, causing it to be the most profitable tournament thus far for the FIFA federation.

It is not only the commercial scope, but also the size of sport mega-events that has grown over the years. Seven new sports were added to the Summer Olympics, for instance, between 1980 and 2000, so that the programme of the Games today consists of twenty-eight different sports.¹ A decade ago the number of national teams participating in the FIFA finals was expanded from twenty-four to thirty-two, extending not only the geographical representation but also international interest in, and the reach of, the tournament. The programme and format of the FIFA tournament was concomitantly broadened, so that since 2002 sixty-four matches are played over a four-week period.

Sport mega-events are defined by their scale and the opportunities they present to hosts and corporate sponsors for profiling and promotion. There has been growing enthusiasm over the past number of decades to host such events – which has much to do with the desire by public (particularly urban) authorities to catalyse local regeneration through the expansion of service-led consumer-based industries. It is notable therefore that many of the recent hosts of the Olympic Games (such as Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney and Athens) and the smaller-order Commonwealth Games (in particular Manchester and Melbourne) have aligned their hosting of the event with other infrastructural and sectoral developments aimed at stimulating, variably, local culture industries, sports tourism economies or local business (also see Euchner 1999; Harvey 1989). Strategies toward re-imaging or re-branding are generally a key part of cities’ mega-event campaigns (see A Smith 2005 and Smith & Fox 2007).

It is worth noting that the ambition to use mega-events to rejuvenate urban economies is also common to hosts from the developing world. Cape Town’s bid for the 2004 Olympic Games, for instance, intended to use the city’s staging of the event as a platform to stimulate development across the city, to help foster physical integration by means of new transportation and other infrastructure linkages, and to boost foreign and domestic tourism (see Swart and Bob 2004). Kuala Lumpur, host to the 1998 Commonwealth Games, sought to use its staging of the event inter alia to advance the diffusion of technology in the city (Dobson and Sinnamon 2001). However, there are some significant differences in the motives for holding a mega-event between aspiring hosts from the developing world, and those from the developed world, that can influence how they view and design events. In the cases of the 2008 Beijing and 1988 Seoul Olympics, for example, the Games were as much aimed at displaying the host city’s features to the outside world as they were intended to demonstrate national achievements. To a significant extent the Beijing 2008 Games were designed to represent ‘the shop window for a Chinese economy that is experiencing record growth rates and one that seeks international recognition for its relatively recent re-entry into the world economic system’ (Poynter 2006: 6). While an important concern for the Chinese authorities, boosting Beijing’s local economy was not the prime motivation for their staging of the Games (also see Brownell 2008). The city nonetheless benefited by new and upgraded infrastructure, most prominently the newly built Olympic stadium, the refurbished international airport and the new rapid rail connection to the neighbouring city of Tianjin.

In general, therefore, hosts from the developing world seek to use mega-events to stimulate local economic development (mostly coupled with wider national objectives which could range from boosting macroeconomic growth to providing dynamism to national tourism economies) or to achieve greater exposure for the nation-state and its foreign policy (also see Black 2008). Host cities from the developing world also differ from their counterparts in the developed world in that they aim for widespread development, rather than targeted regeneration of specific, dilapidated local areas (such as London’s aim to regenerate its impoverished East End with the staging of the 2012 Olympics). These nuances in economic ambitions and the way they shape developing and developed countries’ and cities’ hosting of mega-events, or the extent to which these influence economic legacies, have not yet been studied in systematic detail (Cornelissen 2009a).

Although contexts may differ and there are local variations among hosts it is possible to identify a number of common legacies from sport mega-events. These include tangible and intangible impacts which may be grouped into primary and secondary legacies in terms of the short-, medium- and long-term consequences of events on aspects such as infrastructure, design, image and tourism, and governance structures. Primary legacies relate to the effects on a given city or region which could be directly attributed to its hosting of an event. These generally refer to the development of event-specific infrastructure such as competition venues, stadiums and event tourist lodgings and other facilities to accommodate visitors. Secondary legacies are the indirect and induced effects that stem from wider infrastructural investments made in anticipation of, or contingent on, the event and that provide the substance to subsequent development trajectories in the host location. These could include changes in infrastructure, including transportation networks and nodes; alterations in the design of a city; changes to the built and physical environment; and the establishment of new sporting venues that have the potential for post-event utilisation (see for example Cashman 2006). Stimulation of tourist arrivals after the event could also be classed as secondary legacies. The two kinds of legacies are of course interwoven. By the nature of urban economies, for instance, infrastructural development of any kind has an impact on the wider economy. This is even the case for stadiums or other sporting venues, for they lock into the particular infrastructure matrix that exists in the host city (Bale and Moen 1995). Similarly, transportation is a basic infrastructure, which means that even if transport links are developed for the specific purposes of an event, they will have ramifications for the wider urban or regional setting.

Poynter (2006) provides further breakdown of the secondary legacies of mega-events stemming from investments that are not exclusively event-related. Such investments include infrastructure development (transport, telecommunications, sport facilities), environmental improvement (decontamination, water usage, parklands), housing, parks, and the contribution to what has been termed the ‘urban culture’ (which includes leisure, entertainment and recreation facilities).