The international organisations argue, in return, that they also contribute to the costs of staging the contests: in particular, FIFA funds the entire World Cup operating budget. However, “operating” costs account for only a small portion of the price of hosting tournaments. The lion’s share is spent on construction, both on stadiums and on transport capacity to shuttle people between events. Those expenditures are borne entirely by the host. Although there is no formal requirement that such venues be new, the IOC and FIFA have consistently selected cities with the most ambitious plans for custom-built facilities. It is the need to build so much, so fast that leads to taxpayer-funded cost overruns that would be comic were they not so tragic, running from a low of four times the original estimate up to ten times or more.
To justify this spending, proponents of hosting often argue that these infrastructure projects will provide continuing benefits long after the events end. Such claims are almost offensively misleading. Mr Zimbalist offers a whirlwind tour of the “white elephants” that litter host cities following the Olympics or World Cup: in Athens a volleyball stadium inhabited by squatters and a softball park overgrown with trees; in Beijing a weed-infested cycling racetrack; in Brazil a football pitch with 40,000 seats now used by a second-division team that draws around 1,500 fans a match. All of these structures cost millions of dollars a year to maintain, making the games’ costs their enduring “legacy”.
Perhaps the only encouraging finding in Mr Zimbalist’s work is that potential hosts are getting wise to the bad deal the IOC and FIFA seek to foist on them. Twelve different cities bid for the 2004 Olympics, whereas the 2020 edition drew just five applicants. After Oslo dropped out last October, only two cities—Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan—are now candidates to host the 2022 winter Olympics, providing further support for a prediction in a 2012 report commissioned by the Dutch government that in the future only non-democratic countries will pay up to host the events. If the IOC, which markets the games as a force for peace and harmony, wants to avoid being turned into a propaganda tool for autocratic regimes, it may need to rethink. Thomas Bach, its head, recently established a working group to propose changes to the host-selection process.
Mr Zimbalist offers a number of proposals for reform. The most important would be for the IOC and FIFA to abandon their preference for new construction and give a fair hearing to bids relying on existing facilities. He also suggests limiting the number of cities bidding, adjusting the split of television revenue to favour host cities, making the organisations’ voting systems more transparent and imposing term limits on their members. The IOC has clamped down on corruption. Both bodies need to do far more to curb costs and improve transparency and accountability. Nothing less than an Olympian advocacy campaign will be needed to change a system that has served many bigwigs so well.