The governance challenges of co-hosting major sport events

The increasing critical view of mega sports events such as the Olympic Games (Koenecke et al., 2016; Langer et al., 2017; Scheu & Preuss, 2018) is due, among other things, to the fact that more sustainability in the sense of ecological, economic and social contributions is demanded by society from the organising committees and the stakeholders involved (Babiak & Trendafilova, 2011; Smith, 2009; Taks, 2017; Trendafilova et al., 2013; Walzel et al., 2018). The co-hosting of mega sport events by several countries is an intensively discussed approach to more sustainability of the event (Heere et al., 2012; Horne & Manzenreiter, 2004; Kristiansen et al., 2016). In its 134th session in June 2019, the IOC decided that as part of the Agenda 2020, multiple cities and even countries can now bid to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games (IOC, 2020). However, the body of literature regarding co-hosted sport events, is limited to two sporting events, which has been the subject of sport management research so far. Heere et al. (2012) as well as Horne and Manzenreiter (2004) were the first ones who analysed the FIFA WC 2002. Kristiansen et al. (2016) chose the European Youth Olympic Festival in 2015 for their study. These studies identified some major challenges for the governance of co-hosted sport events and consequently for the success of the events. Considering the increasing number of co-hosted sport events in the recent years this research focuses on the following research questions: What are the specific challenges for co-hosting sport events from a governance perspective? Considering the exploratory nature of this study and the fact that co-hosting sport events is a quite new phenomenon with only a few events in the recent past, 23 semi-structured individual in-depth interviews with representatives from Local Organising Committees (n=7), hosted National Sport Federations (n=10), and International Sport Federations (IF) (n=5) of seven different co-hosted sport events in five different sports as well as with one policy maker were conducted in 2017. The interview guideline was developed based on first findings from the literature review. Questions included in the guideline were, for example: What were the main reasons for co-hosting the [event]? Which risks and challenges are associated with the [event]? The interviews were conducted personally where possible, otherwise via telephone or via electronic meetings. The time of the interviews varied from 18:40 to 147:09 minutes (Ø 37 minutes per interview), mostly limited to the available time of the interviewees. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. The transcriptions were the basis for the qualitative content analysis that followed. According to Miles and Huberman’s (2013) approach, we initially carried out an open coding of the interview contents. The interviewees mainly perceived the co-hosting approach of sport events positively. The major opportunities are seen in the chance to raise the efficiency of the event hosting, due to having more than one home team, shared risks, pooled resources and infrastructure as well as allocating the workload on different federations. However, during the interviews a number of challenges could be identified, too: different motives and interest, increased complexity for organising the event, tax and legal issues vary (tremendously) between the countries, language barriers, cultural differences, rivalries might create conflicts in the organisation. Furthermore, two different bidding approaches are used, which significantly influence the complexity for the governance of co-hosted sport events. All interviewed managers were aware of the importance of sport event’s sustainability. However, none of them considered the potential for more sustainability as a main motive for co-hosting the respective sport event. In addition, none of the considered co-hosted sport events had a leveraging strategy in place, which are increasingly deemed central in major event management. The following conclusions can be drawn from this research: 1) IFs should provide better suited framework conditions for more co-hosted sport events. 2) More research is required in terms of the cost-benefit ratio of co-hosting sport events. 3) Some international team sports federations use the co-hosting approach to allow even more teams to participate in the events, which has a negative impact on the sustainability of the respective sport events.