By Paul Nicholson
October 15 – The second day of the IFA conference in Zurich, October 29, has picked a topic that goes to the very heart of questioning the existence of major world championship sporting events in their current form. Titled ‘Is there a future for Mega sports events?’ a panel will discuss the demands major events put on host nations and whether the model is broken or not.
The recent social unrest in Brazil and protests around the Confederations Cup may have caught FIFA unawares, but Christopher Gaffney, an author and university lecturer based in Brazil, says that they aren’t going away and that “it’s a mistake to separate social from football in Brazil. Football is ingrained in the culture”.
Gaffney maintains that the top down imposition of mega events on countries, developing countries in particular, needs to change.
“Mega events have not dealt well with social change, if at all. They are planned behind closed doors, the agreements become the law of the land…If there is to be a change then rights holders have to justify events, to explain them to the public. There needs to be more social engagement on the front end,” says Gaffney.
The problem will not be exclusive to FIFA World Cups or Brazil, where the Rio 2016 Olympics follows hard on the heels of the 2014 World Cup. But it is the World Cup that has focused attention as this is the next major event in the world’s sports calendar.
Gaffney will be joined on the panel by Ian Burrows of F1 Racing, FIFA communications director Walter de Gregorio, Oliver Kaiser of Ledavi, and international football consultant Fedor Radmann. Undoubtedly opinion will differ, not least over how the money generated by hosting a World Cup should be dispersed.
Gaffney maintains that the economic benefit should be distributed within the host country but that there should also be a package of initiatives sharing the event much further than is currently happening. He says that it is still not too late for this to happen for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
How? “Profitsharing, transportation, more collective registry for use of homes by visitors, FIFA profit could be put into Brazilian schools, not have privatised stadiums,” says Gaffney.
His views are unlikely to be shared 100% by the panel at IFA. The World Cup is also FIFA’s major revenue generating event, without which it would be unable to continue much of its other activity in the four-year cycle between events.
“The World Cup is a perfect storm of a problem. FIFA came with a top down approach into a system that was already inefficient, corrupt and wieldy. Mega events reach right into those channels,” says Gaffney.
Even though major events are awarded many years in advance, Gaffney sees extending the time frame in which the games are realised as part of the solution. “We need to grow into the games rather than have the games grow on to us,” he says.
Will there be more social unrest in 2014 at the World Cup? The protests around the Confederations Cup involved the middle classes as well as the poorer parts of Brazilian society. “I don’t think you will see such a broad-based protest,” says Gaffney. “I expect there will be smaller and more intense protests – you have to take into account there are new laws covering terrorism.”
Registrations for IFA Zurich, 28-29 Ocotber, are now open and applications can be made at http://www.internationalfootball.com/user/event-registration. There is a limit to the number of participants. Insideworldfootball is a media partner of IFA. For more information on IFA go to http://www.internationalfootball.com.
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