Peak Event: The Rise, Crisis and Decline of Large Events

This paper tracks the growth, and recent crisis, of two of the largest tourist events on earth: the Olympic Games and the Football World Cup. It draws on a unique longitudinal dataset that contains 43 events since 1960, with a total cost exceeding USD 120 billion. Overall, the size of the three events has grown about 60-fold over the past 50 years reflecting its ballooned urban, sporting and tourism impact. We identify four different growth periods and show an emergent crisis phase in the late 2010s that likely has brought us to ‘peak event’ – the point at which the size of mega-events starts to decline. Outlining three different scenarios, we conclude that mega-events must transform along with modernity if they want to avoid a terminal decline and maintain its appeal as urban development and place marketing tools.