Does international elite sporting success or hosting major events affect self-rated health? An examination of potential positive externalities related to international sporting tournaments

ABSTRACT

Research question: It is a common expectation among politicians, civil servants and sport managers that hosting a major sporting event or achieving international elite sport success yields a variety of positive externalities grounded in the “Virtuous Circle of Elite Sport and Events” model. However, over the years various studies have shown that this model is not necessarily an accurate depiction of reality. This paper adds to existing research by testing whether elite sport success or hosting a major sport event can have any positive effects on citizens’ health.

Research methods: By employing multilevel regression models to nine rounds of the European Social Survey – consisting of individual-level data from 2002 to 2019, covering 37 countries, 219 country-survey-years, and almost 400,000 respondents – we test whether health-related impacts of elite sport success and hosting major sport events can be identified.

Results and findings: The model output from our regressions does not indicate that sporting success or hosting major sport events contributes to better health.

Implications: The results question the “Virtuous Circle of Elite Sport and Events” model and stipulate that politicians, practitioners, and sports managers should be aware of overestimating potential positive externalities from elite sport.

KEYWORDS:

• Elite sport
• externalities
• major sporting international events
• health

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We understand health in a broad sense, i.e. both mental and physical. A more specific definition and discussion of health is given in the theoretical section of the paper.

2 We exclude the role model dimension here because we do not have any relevant data on this variable and are therefore not able to conduct a reliable test in our design.

3 As mentioned earlier, we omit studies focusing on inspirational trickle-down effects from role models. Therefore, we only touch upon studies focusing on trickle-down effects from international elite sport success and hosting major events in this literature review.

4 The countries included are Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

5 The data applied in the analysis in this publication is based on the ESS Multilevel Data provided by the European Social Survey and prepared and made available by NSD, the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Neither the European Social Survey nor NSD are responsible for the analyses of the data presented here.

6 The results presented are from linear multilevel models. In addition, we ran sensitivity models using multilevel ordered logit and multilevel logistic regression (on a dichotomized dependent variable), the results (which can be accessed upon request) from these models did not differ substantially from those in the present paper.

7 As some of our explanatory variables vary from one year to another (within each country), country-survey-year thus constitutes our level 2, with individual respondents being level 1, and countries level 3.

8 We have tested other hierarchical models, including two-level, and three-level including time as a covariate, and the results from these are substantially similar to our main analysis.

9 For the Olympics, this is based on the total medal count.

10 The wording of this variable is: “Take part in social activities compared to others of same age” and the answer categories are: 1 = Much less than most; 2 = Less than most; 3 = About the same; 4 = More than most; and 5 = Much more than most”.

11 A variable, Household income (1–10), measured in quartiles was excluded from the main analysis due to missing data. We performed a sensitivity analysis including this data, which did not differ substantially from the results presented in this article. The sensitivity output can be accessed upon request.