Does Country Attractiveness Matter in International Competition? The Case of Countries’ Bidding to Host Major Sports Events

ABSTRACT

A country’s attractiveness is a factor in its success in many areas of international competition, such as encouraging international investment, but its impact on international sporting events remains unexplored. Using various measurements of country attractiveness, statistical tests of the proposition that a country’s economic, social, and environmental attractiveness are correlated with its success in bidding to host international sporting events were conducted using data on the results of competitions to host 54 world championships in Olympic sports/disciplines from 1990 to 2012. The results presented here affirm the impact of country attractiveness on the success of bids to host such events.

KEYWORDS:

• Country attractiveness
• country marketing
• sustainable development
• sports event bidding
• olympic World Championships

Acknowledgments

This paper is based on part of one of the authors’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation of the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Notes

1. As event owners, international sport governing bodies organize international competitions, such as world or continental championships, and they allocate the hosting rights and related protected properties to event bidders. Thus, in the field of international sport-event bidding, event owners can be regarded as relevant stakeholders who are “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objective” (Freeman, 1984, p. 25).

2. Many sport consulting companies became specialized in the bidding process, and such companies are in charge of preparing bidding files, assisting bidders with communication campaigns, and lobbying for votes from the governing bodies (Diaey et al., 2011).

3. To test the soft power theory, the dataset starts in 1990, the first bidding year after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

4. The IOC establishes a hierarchy of sports, disciplines, and events. Thus, the term “sport,” by IOC definition, refers to all the events that are sanctioned by one international sport federation, and each sport is subdivided into multiple disciplines that comprise several events for which medals are actually awarded in each competition.

5. Among the 33 core Olympic sports in the 2012 London Olympic Games, tennis was excluded from the sample because it has no equivalent to a world championship or the relevant bidding procedures.

6. The world championships in men’s soccer, or the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup™, are excluded because bidding for mega-sports events, such as the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup, has different features from bidding for the other major (i.e., relatively smaller than mega) international sports events, such as the World Championships (Chappelet & Lee, 2016). It is commonly agreed that hosting “expensive” mega-events like the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup requires more resources in terms of time and space, such as the preparation period, size, scale, scope, and so on. (Chappelet, 1996). Additionally, competitive pressure in bidding for the two mega-events is much higher than that for other medium and large-scale world championships.

7. Because sporting activities are highly interlinked with the natural environment in which a sport is performed, suitable environmental conditions, such as a mild climate, non-extreme temperatures, or even significant snowfall (Arne & Maennig, 2012), are prerequisites for athletes to safely participate in sporting matches. As these events are tourism destinations that millions of spectators visit to experience vivid games, countries located in hot climates may be less likely to be selected as the hosts by event owners owing to heat-related problems in the venues.

8. Count data regression models in which the dependent variables are non-negative integers have been widely applied to various empirical fields (Hausman et al., 1984; Hellström & Nordström, 2008; Jaggia & Thosar, 1993; Nelson & Young, 2008; Van der Heijden et al., 2003; Yang, 2007).

9. A frequently illustrated example in the econometrics literature is length of hospital stay counts for patients staying for at least one day.

10. Although the most basic event count model (i.e., a Poisson regression) is premised on the assumption that the probability of an event occurring at any instant is constant in period i and is independent of all previous events during that observation period, this assumption is not plausible when past events may affect the likelihood of additional events occurring during a period. According to Balla (2000, p. 641), this type of dependence in event counts, which is manifested through overdispersion or inflated variance, can be accounted for by a negative binomial regression.

11. The dataset in this study is assumed to be chosen from a population of all kinds of international sporting events, which can be regarded as “panel” data according to Beck and Katz (1995) and Beck (2001). Panel data can be analyzed with either a fixed effects or a random effects model to avoid omitted variable bias and endogeneity problems because some unobserved variables can be differenced out of the regression and, thus, need not be measured. Based on the results of Hausman’s (1978) specification test, this study uses a random effects model.

12. Several independent variables have high correlations, suggesting possible multi-collinearity (Gujarati, 2003, pp. 341–386) in the regression models. Thus, this study applies stepwise methods when performing each regression analysis.

13. However, it is interesting to find that market growth (i.e., the GDP growth rate) has no significant effect on bidding for major international sporting events like world championships. Conversely, faster economic growth, representing an emerging market, is essential for winning sporting mega-events, such as the Olympic Games (Lee & Chappelet, 2012). This result suggests that event owners of relatively smaller world championships choose their host countries regardless of the level of economic growth, whereas mega-events owners, such as the IOC and FIFA, prefer countries with faster economic growth as hosts. One possibility explanation for event owners’ different preferences for countries’ economic standing relates to the need for the potential host of a mega-event to equip large-scale infrastructure and finance extensive budgetary support (Poast, 2007).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea grant from the Korean Government [NRF-2017S1A3A2065838].