538861

research-article2014
IRS0010.1177/1012690214538861International Review for the Sociology of SportHorne

ISSA and IRSS 50th Anniversary Article

International Review for the

Assessing the sociology of Sociology of Sport

2015, Vol. 50(4-5) 466–471
© The Author(s) 2014
sport: On sports mega-events Reprints and permissions:
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and capitalist modernity DOI: 10.1177/1012690214538861
irs.sagepub.com

John Horne
University of Central Lancashire, UK

Abstract
On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, one of the leading international scholars on sport
and consumer culture, John Horne, considers the trajectory and challenges of research on
sports mega-events and their place in capitalist modernity. In anchoring work on this topic in
Roche’s definition of mega-events, Horne notes that sports mega-events are important symbolic,
economic, and political elements in the orientation of nations to stake their place in global society.
Fundamental issues about the concept of ‘mega-event’ pose challenges for scholars as questions
remain over what qualifies as a sports mega-event and how ‘lived experience’ with such events
transacts with media spectacularization and characterization. The essay closes by posing broader
questions for further investigation about the economic, political, and social risks and benefits
of sports mega-events and how these events may portend and relate to changing relations of
economic and political power on a global scale.

Keywords
mega-events, globalization, modernity, capitalism, media

On the trajectory of sports mega-events inquiry

One underlying assumption of this contribution, and the trajectory of much extant
sociological research to date, is that just as modern competitive sport and large-scale sport
events have developed in line with the logic of capitalist modernity, sports mega-events
and global sport culture are now central to late modern capitalist societies. As media
events, the Summer Olympic Games and the FIFA men’s association football World Cup
provide cultural resources for reflecting upon identity and enacting agency (for example,
on the Olympics, see Billings, 2008).1 Socially they provide resources for the construction
of ‘a meaningful social life in relation to a changing societal environment that has the

Corresponding author:
John Horne, University of Central Lancashire, Greenbank Building, Preston, PR1 2HE, UK.
Email: [email protected]

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Horne 467

potential to destabilize and threaten these things’ (Roche, 2000: 225). Structurally, sports
mega-events produce new opportunities for commercial and property developers in urban
areas, as well as experiential commodities important in the growth of consumer capital-
ism. In terms of policing they offer opportunities for experimentation in governance and
the mass surveillance of mobile populations (Eick, 2011; Giulianotti and Klauser,
2010). Sports mega-events are also important elements in the orientation of nations to
international or global society politically and symbolically. Hence sport, here in its
mega-event form, comes to be an increasingly central, rather than peripheral, element
of urban capitalist modernity (space prohibits a longer list but for further analyses of
these topics see the edited collections by Horne and Manzenreiter, 2002, 2006;
Tomlinson and Young, 2006).
Maurice Roche’s definition still provides the best way to understand mega-events
sociologically – as ‘large-scale cultural (including commercial and sporting) events,
which have a dramatic character, mass popular appeal and international significance’
(Roche, 2000: 1).2 For our purposes, two defining features of contemporary sports mega-
events are first, that they are deemed to have highly significant social, political, eco-
nomic and ideological consequences for the host city, region or nation in which they
occur, and second, that they will attract considerable media coverage. By this definition,
therefore, an unmediated mega-event would be a contradiction in terms, and for this
reason the globally mediated sports genre of mega-event has tended to supplant other
forms of ‘mega’, such as World’s Fairs or Expos, although these latter do continue to be
enthusiastically hosted and attract substantial numbers of visitors.

On the challenges of sports mega-events inquiry

Four issues with the concept of ‘sports mega-events’ need to be clarified. First, with the
obvious exception of the Olympics, it is arguable how many sports have championships
that qualify as mega-events. Indeed, after the Olympics and the FIFA Football World Cup
there is little agreement about which is the third largest sports ‘mega’. The UEFA Euro
(or as some would prefer, Euro™) Football Championship, the Rugby Union World Cup,
and even the Ryder Cup golf competition between Europe and the USA, all claim to be
the third biggest according to media audience. The cricket world cup has a vast media
audience in South Asia, and obvious interest in the other cricket Test Match-playing
countries, but like the American Football Superbowl final, cricket has a relatively narrow
fan-base, that makes it difficult to define it amongst the first rank of sports ‘megas’.
A second question is how big does an event have to be so that it is described as
‘mega’? There are different ‘orders’ of mega-event according to size, scope and reach of
the sports involved, their geographical location and appeal. The most obvious measure is
to refer to broadcast audience size. Yet if the size of an event is primarily related to the
overall television audience, this is an estimated figure for much of the world. The differ-
ence between TV audience numbers claimed and those actually verifiable can be enor-
mous. Hence whilst media audience size is a key driver of the definition, related
promotional opportunities for hosts and corporate sponsors and the potential for the
transformation of a location’s infrastructure, also play a part in defining particular sports
events as megas.

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468 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50(4-5)

Third, when it comes to talking about ‘events’ we find that for many the actual live
experience of the mediated spectacle can be a lot more mundane. The televised show is
spectacular; but from the stands the small figures performing are often only recognizable
because of TV screens in the stadium. Fourth, do we need the hyphen? It is useful to link
mega and event because otherwise the three words have a habit of moving about – ‘sports
mega-event’ can become ‘mega sporting event’. Rather than using the word ‘mega’ to
simply express that something is big or important, as it has come to be used in everyday
speech, I suggest that research interest in sports mega-events should be understood as a
specific social scientific focus on a particular genre of mega-event.
In the absence of a firmly shared definition of sports mega-events I am going to refer
to six sporting spectacles that can be considered as ‘first’ and ‘second order’ mega-
events: the Summer Olympic Games and the FIFA Men’s Football World Cup constitute
the first order of mega-events, and then follows the UEFA Euro (or, as some would pre-
fer, Euro™) Men’s Football Championship, the Winter Olympics, the Commonwealth
Games and the Pan-American Games. The development and expansion of these sports
mega-events in the past 30 years, and especially the continuing ambition of varied loca-
tions in advanced and emerging capitalist economies to host sport spectacles, raises a
number of pressing issues and challenges for our analyses. Examples include the gap
between the rhetoric and reality of sports mega-event ‘legacies’ as revealed in the differ-
ent forms of activism and resistance to them (Boykoff, 2014; Lenskyj, 2008); the rela-
tionship between sports mega-events and social exclusion (Horne, 2007); and the global
power shifts that hosting sports mega-events in emerging capitalist economies outside
the North reveal (Gruneau and Horne, 2015). These issues raise questions that sociolo-
gists and other social scientists will need to consider when analysing sports mega-events
in the future, alongside four interlinked developments affecting them: increased fre-
quency, expansion, proliferation and hierarchical consolidation.
At the time of writing (March 2014) since 2000 there have been 21 editions of the
sports mega-events mentioned earlier, staged in different continents throughout the
world. Another 11 are planned to take place between June 2014 and 2022 (although, on
the difficulty the Commonwealth Games has experienced in finding a host for its 2022
edition, see McLaughlin, 2014). The rhythm and frequency of the four-year cycle of
sports mega-events is indicative of the order and ranking of them. ‘Lower order’ megas,
in terms of audience size, reach and impact, have been moved to accommodate to the
rhythm of ‘higher order’ megas – hence the Winter Olympic Games were held in 1992
and 1994, and the Asian Football Confederation Championship was staged in 2004 and
2007 to adjust to a new cycle, avoid congestion with the higher order megas and to maxi-
mize revenue and their potential audience reach. Since 1992, when the Summer and
Winter Olympic Games took place in the same year for the last time, there has effectively
been a two-year cycle of higher order sports mega-events. The Summer Olympic Games
occupies the same year as the UEFA men’s European Football Championship, whilst the
Winter Olympics now shares its year with the FIFA men’s football World Cup finals and
the Commonwealth Games.
Despite the decision of the Olympic Programme Commission of the International
Olympic Committee (IOC) in July 2005 to reduce the number of sports from 28 to 26
from the 2012 Summer Olympics, the IOC Congress Commission held in Copenhagen

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Horne 469

in October 2009 voted to add rugby sevens – a seven-a-side version of rugby union – and
golf from 2016, and thus keep the number of events at 28. It is evident that the size of
these events, as well as the enthusiasm to host and participate in sports mega-events, has
grown in the past 30 years. This expansion and growing attraction of sports mega-events
has been for several reasons, which also explains their proliferation.
New developments in the technologies of mass communication, especially the devel-
opment of satellite television, have created the basis for global audiences for sports
mega-events. The expansion of mega-events has been the formation of a sport-media-
business alliance that transformed professional sport generally in the late 20th century.
Through the idea of packaging, via the tri-partite model of sponsorship rights, exclusive
broadcasting rights and merchandising, sponsors of the Olympics and the two biggest
international football events have been attracted by the vast global audience exposure
that sporting mega-events achieve. Interest in hosting sports mega-events has prolifer-
ated because they have come to be seen as valuable promotional opportunities for
nations, cities and regions. The aim being to generate increased tourism, stimulate inward
investment and promote both the host venues and the nation of which they are a part to
the wider world as well as internally. Mega-events fit very well with consumption-based
development strategies.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century the Olympics were exclusively hosted by
cities in western nations. There was greater global variation in host cities for World Cups,
largely due to the intensity of support for soccer in South America as well as FIFA’s
policy of spreading the event to its regional associations. Still, between the inception of
the World Cup in 1930 and the end of the 20th century the event was held in western and
northern nations 10 times in comparison to only five times in countries in the East or
South. The geographical distribution of host cities for World’s Fairs and major exposi-
tions in the 20th century reveals a similar geographical trajectory. There were occasional
international expositions in the colonies of the world powers during the 20th century but
until the 1970s, the majority of host cities were located in the West and North. By the
later stages of the 20th century World’s Fairs began to be awarded to Asian host cities, in
particular, in greater numbers.
Since the turn of the 21st century, there has been a trend for urban mega-events to be
awarded to cities in the East and Global South. Yet this apparent opening out has also
been accompanied by increasing hierarchical consolidation into capitalist modernity.
The so called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) have been especially nota-
ble here, with the Olympics awarded to Beijing in 2008, Sochi in Russia in 2014, and Rio
de Janeiro in 2016, whilst the Youth Olympic Games have been awarded to Nanjing in
2014 and Buenos Aires in 2018 (on BRICs and sports mega-events see Curi et al., 2011;
Horne, 2011). Since 2000, Men’s Football World Cups have been awarded to Brazil
(2014), Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022), whilst the 2010 World’s Fair was held in
Shanghai and will be staged in Dubai in 2020. The correlation between growing eco-
nomic ambition and event hosting appears to explain much of the attraction of global
mega-events for cities and countries in the East and Global South.
Whilst mega-events have routinely been viewed as economic stimulants that build
infrastructure, provide jobs, attract tourists and convention-goers, and leave positive
legacies from enhanced visibility, to upgraded urban transportation, convention and

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470 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50(4-5)

sports facilities, hosting international mega-events also has a symbolic effect, announc-
ing the status of the host city or country as an important site in global networks of
political and economic power. In this sense, the increasing visibility of cities and coun-
tries in the East and Global South in the hosting of spectacular mega-events might
arguably be taken as an indicator of global power shifts in an increasingly contingent
world order.
Yet, it is important to note that there has also been ongoing controversy about the
value, impact and legacy of global mega-events in eastern and southern nations, with
critics questioning their effectiveness as avenues for economic development and the gap
between the rhetoric and reality of the mega-event ‘effect’. They claim that hosting such
events is more likely to mean greater integration of aspiring nations into the economic
legacy of late 20th century neoliberalism. The pursuit of economic development and
political influence through the hosting of large-scale urban spectacles has also been said
to exacerbate the gap between rich and poor within the hosting cities or countries, whilst
potentially deforming democratic governance by subjugating local authority to the power
of so called ‘business friendly international non-governmental organizations’ (‘BINGOs’)
that lack any meaningful form of political accountability. The increasing power and
wealth of organizations such as FIFA and the IOC over the past three decades is arguably
an example of such a vertical shift in power relations on a global scale.

Looking to the future for sports mega-events research

At each of the sports mega-events that have taken place since 2000 we find debates
over the following topics (Horne, 2007: 86–91): the benefits of consumption-based
development versus social redistribution policies; regeneration (or ‘gentrification’);
displacement (more accurately expressed as ‘replacement’) of local communities; pub-
lic benefit versus private benefit; global impact versus local impact; spatial concentra-
tion of impacts; effects on employment and tourism; the manufacturing of consent by
boosters; and the existence of ‘opposition coalitions’. These topics will continue to be
central to sociological and social science research in the future.
Some of the broader questions in need of further investigation in relation to sports
mega-events therefore include: What are the economic, political and social risks and
benefits of hosting such events? What implications, if any, can be drawn from analyses
of recent spectacular events in the East and South for a broader understanding of
changing relations of economic and political power on a global scale? To what extent
do such events intervene in systems of governance at the local, national and interna-
tional levels? What do such events tell us about the significance or the effectiveness of
various forms of popular resistance to global power networks? What do such events
tell us about the role of communications media in the early 21st century political econ-
omy of global culture?

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

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Horne 471

Notes
1. Although it has become conventional to refer to the ‘Olympic and Paralympic Games’, as
hosts of both Summer and Winter editions of the Games are now expected to also host the
Paralympic event three to four weeks after the ‘main event’, I do not address the specifics of
this event here.
2. Research into mega-events is not however the monopoly of sociology. Other social sciences
interested in the challenge of investigating mega-events, in their sporting or other guises
(religious, cultural, political to name just a few), include anthropology, economics, geogra-
phy, media studies, planning, political science and urban studies. Partly as a result there is
no single agreed upon definition of ‘mega-event’. For example, economic geographer Martin
Müller (2013) suggests that mega-events might include international religious gatherings,
political and economic summits, as well as cultural events.

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