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The battle to host the world’s most-watched sporting event is over before it even begins. The men’s soccer World Cup will be held in Riyadh in 2034, with Saudi Arabia’s bid to host the event unopposed. Spain, Portugal and Morocco will jointly host the 2030 Games after their rivals were rejected.
The reservation-based hosting system adopted by the International Olympic Committee as a policy in 2019 is becoming increasingly mainstream in global sport. Britain and Ireland’s joint bid for Euro 2028 has comfortably won a one-horse race, with Turkey and Italy confirmed to qualify for the 2032 tournament. World Rugby has hand-picked the United States to host the Men’s Rugby World Cup and Women’s Rugby World Cup in 2031 and 2033, respectively.
It wasn’t always like that. The competition to host top-class sporting events used to be fiercely contested. The British Royal Family, the President of the United States, and French football stars have flown around the world, befriending officials, and, if their country gets the go-ahead, the physical feats that would be built at taxpayer expense. They will advertise their high and luxurious temples.
But as the cost of winning has risen, what was once a noisy lobbying jamboree has turned into a papal conference, with officials making deals behind closed doors and presenting results in a haze of white smoke. Saudi Arabia’s bid for 2034 followed a series of sudden changes to the bidding process by governing body FIFA, which eliminated serious rivals before they could even think about it.
Andrew Zimbalist, author of CIlux Maximus: The economic gamble behind hosting the Olympics and World Cupbelieves that the move to replace the open bidding process with internal appointments is a face-saving move by the organizers, who are trying to appeal to a decline in interest in them. “Market conditions have softened,” he said. āWe donāt get the same bids we used to.ā
Indeed, the very future of the Commonwealth Games is in serious doubt, with the Australian state of Victoria canceling its plans to host the next edition and other potential hosts refusing to participate. The World Cup and Summer Olympics are expensive, especially if infrastructure needs to be overhauled. Is required. Rio de Janeiro spent more than $13 billion to host the 2016 Olympics, but needed an $895 million government bailout to successfully complete the games. In 2006, Montreal taxpayers finally celebrated paying off the debt they incurred for hosting the Olympics 30 years ago.
Soccer tournaments have been hit by rising costs as organizers push to add more teams to sell extra games to broadcasters. The 2026 World Cup will consist of a total of 104 matches, up from 64 in Qatar, as the number of participants jumps from 32 to 48. UEFA, the governing body for European football, is considering something similar to the Euro. Most countries don’t have the facilities to accommodate so many teams and their fans for so many weeks on end, let alone host games.
With liberal democracies reluctant to foot the bill, governing bodies have turned in recent years to authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, and the Gulf states of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. But Zimbalist argues that these decisions created a feedback loop that further narrowed the pool of potential bidders. “Why do you want to join a club in Saudi Arabia?” he asks. “Why do you want to join Putin’s Russian club?”
Zimbalist’s radical solution is to choose a permanent host with all the amenities and end the white elephant construction project. Los Angeles, which will host the 2028 Summer Olympics, successfully hosted the Games with a budget surplus in 1984, and hopes to achieve a surplus again by curbing spending. After all, who needs a new Olympic Village when the UCLA campus is empty in July? Oklahoma has a perfectly good kayaking center, so why would a new kayaking center in California have anything to do with it? Will you spend a million dollars?
Selecting a host is the biggest decision most sports organizations face, so tighter controls make commercial sense. But moving these deals to take place behind closed doors will do little to improve the reputation of an industry not always known for its commitment to transparency and accountability.
josh.noble@ft.com