ABSTRACT
The belief that sport events have the potential to contribute to the local economy, as well as to destination branding and promotion, has led to the strategic development of sport events in regional areas (Chalip, 2004; Gratton, Shibli, & Coleman, 2006). These strategies are often predicated on the proposition that the event will create positive economic benefit for the host community. Yet there is empirical research to suggest that while sport events offer potential economic benefit for host communities, the costs of holding an event may outweigh the benefits. This has been repeatedly demonstrated for mega-events (Preuss, 2004), but also for college sports (Baade, Baumann, & Matheson, 2008, 2011) and medium-sized events (Taks, Kesenne, Chalip, Green, & Martyn, 2011). Event visitor income provides a source of ‘new money’ to local economies, nonetheless a range of other costs are also attributable to the event including changes to visitation patterns of ‘time switchers’ or ‘casuals’, leakage of injected income, and the effect of opportunity costs (Crompton, 2006; Mules & Dwyer, 2005). The potential for economic
gain is also limited by the capacity for visitors to spend money in the destination, as related to their consumer behaviour (Kruger, Saayman, & Ellis, 2012), the event duration or venue (Wilson, 2006), or the event type as a participant/spectator event (Gratton et al., 2006). In some cases, it is difficult to truly assess the net benefit of the event due to the misuse of income and employment multipliers, and other creative accounting techniques (Crompton, 2006).
