A major event is a rallying point for civic pride, and just as easily a rallying point for protest. The difference is usually whether the people who live with the event can see what it does to their street.
A city that wins a major event gets two things at once. A reason for civic pride, and a reason for civic anger. Which one the residents feel depends less on the event than on whether anyone explained what it would do for them, in language that referred to their street rather than to the region’s GVA.
Most economic-impact cases are written for the funder and the press. The people whose roads close and whose rents move read the same headline number and, reasonably, ask what it has to do with them.
A regional impact figure is true and useless to a resident. It does not say whether the cafƩ on their corner will be busier or blocked off, whether the jobs will go to local people, whether the short-term rentals on their block will double, or whether the promised community fund will arrive.
Each of those is measurable at the level of a district or a street. Most event cases do not measure them, because nobody asked, and because the answer is sometimes not what the host wants to hear.
Effective storytelling that connects the economic impact of events directly to residents' lives would go a long way to heading off concerns.
Where visitor spend stays local and where it leaks. Whether housing stock and rents move with visitor demand. Whether the jobs, procurement, and funding promised in the bid reached local people. Whether the event’s carbon and disruption were what was declared.
None of these is a value judgement. Each is a measurement, and a measurement that the side which did not commission it can check is worth more to a host than any amount of advocacy.
A host that cannot answer residents’ questions with evidence answers them with reassurance, and reassurance is what turns a sceptic into a protester. A host that can show, district by district, what the last event did, has a case for the next one that does not depend on being believed.
The economic case for an event is not finished when the funder accepts it. It is finished when a resident can find their own street in it. Until then, the number that was meant to build support is the thing being protested.
The method is on the pages for communities and event impact and attribution.
For further reading, see OECD Recommendation on Global Events.
Before the next bid, produce the event’s case at neighbourhood level, with the leakage, the housing effect, and the local-benefit test stated. Publish it. A case that can be checked by residents is a case that survives them.
None of the three states what it includes, what period it covers, or whether the money stayed. A footprint figure is only useful when it carries its own definitions, and it is only defensible when it is kept separate from impact.
Oman has announced plans for a high-altitude destination at Jabal al Akhdar, combining sports training, wellness, and tourism at 2,400 metres. It is the kind of project a Gulf government can commit to at once, and the kind that lives or dies on a demand case nobody has yet published.
A major event is a rallying point for civic pride, and just as easily a rallying point for protest. The difference is usually whether residents can see what the event does for their street, in terms they recognise, before the road closures start.
The owners of the Bulls and the Blackhawks are putting a reported US$7bn into 55 acres around the United Center: housing, a music hall, a hotel, retail, a park. The arena already hosts more than 200 events a year. The question a developer should ask is what the other 165 nights are worth.
During the 2026 World Cup, host-city hotel rates rose 13% on average. Miami rose 30.3%. New York fell 4.5%. The average was true and useless: it would have told all 16 cities the same thing, and been wrong for most of them.
Tourism is close to a tenth of the world’s output and employment, and almost every government still plans it in pieces. A country that governs its visitor economy as one system keeps more of what it pays for. On an illustrative US$20bn economy, five points of retention is US$1bn a year.
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