Home-Field Advantage: Why the World’s Biggest Sporting Events Are Coming to the US

When it comes to major global sporting events, England is famous for hosting Wimbledon; France, for the Tour de France; and America, for the Masters Tournament.

But the U.S. is also on a streak landing more international events than ever.

UVA Darden Professor Stefan Ruediger

This year, the nation co-hosted the FIFA World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico. In September, rugby fans will descend on host city Baltimore for what is considered one of the world’s greatest rivalries: the Springboks versus the All Blacks. The U.S. will also host the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles and the Rugby World Cup in 2031 and 2033.

What’s driving the good fortune for sports fans living in the U.S.? Is the U.S. becoming the new global hub of sports? To learn more, the Darden Report spoke with Stefan Ruediger, an associate professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, where he teaches sports economics in the Global Economies and Markets area.

Why are we seeing more international sports organizations hosting tournaments in the U.S.?

There are several straightforward economic reasons. The U.S. is a very large and affluent consumer market with an established willingness to spend substantial amounts on sports and entertainment. That creates opportunities not only through ticket sales but also through sponsorships, media rights, hospitality and merchandise.

The U.S. also has an unusually large stock of high-quality sports infrastructure. International organizations can bring major events into many U.S. markets without first having to build a stadium or much of the surrounding infrastructure required to stage them. That can substantially improve the economics of hosting.

There may also be a longer-term market-development strategy involved. International sports organizations may see major events as a way to introduce their product to new consumers and build future demand. But I would separate that possibility from the more immediate commercial argument. We can see clearly why the U.S. market is attractive today. Whether hosting international events actually creates fandom that persists afterward is a much harder empirical question.

What does it mean for the U.S. economy?

For a U.S. host city, the calculation is different. Sports economists have long cautioned that the total amount spent around an event is not the same as its net economic benefit. Some local spending would have occurred anyway, some visitors may displace other visitors, some revenue leaves the local economy, and hosting itself has costs.

One potential U.S. advantage is the amount of infrastructure that already exists. Los Angeles is an especially interesting example for the 2028 Olympics because it can rely heavily on existing sports venues rather than building an entirely new set of permanent facilities.

Economically, that matters because using existing infrastructure can reduce the additional cost and financial risk of hosting. It can also limit the danger of being left with expensive facilities that have little use after the event.

So, I would not automatically assume that hosting a major international event produces a large economic payoff. But the economics can become more favorable when a city can accommodate the event largely with infrastructure it already has.

Are games like the South Africa-New Zealand rivalry rugby match in Baltimore an attempt to establish fandom early? Is that an effective tactic?

That may be one of the objectives, but I would be careful about assuming that market development is the only reason to bring an event like this to the U.S.

There is also a simpler economic motivation: a neutral-venue match can effectively export a home fixture into a market where the commercial return may be substantially higher. Those objectives are not mutually exclusive. An organization can earn substantial revenue from an event today while also hoping that exposure creates future fans.

From a market-development perspective, a major event gives consumers an opportunity to experience a product they may otherwise encounter only occasionally. It generates attention and can lower some of the barriers to trying a sport for the first time. The organization may hope that some portion of those consumers continue following the sport afterward.

The difficult part is establishing whether that actually happens. A sellout, a spike in television audiences or increased online searches tells us that an event generated attention. It does not tell us whether the increase will still be there six months or two years later.

And even if interest does remain higher, we still have to ask what would have happened without the event. Interest in a sport might be growing nationally at the same time. To determine whether the event itself caused a persistent increase in demand, we would ideally compare what happened in the host market with what happened in otherwise similar markets that did not host the event.

That is where I think the really interesting economic question lies. Do international sporting events in U.S. markets mainly capitalize on demand that was already there, or can they create a persistent increase in demand? And if the effects differ across markets, what explains the difference?

That is a question I am interested in examining more systematically in my own research.

Are there any lessons to be learned, good or bad, from the FIFA World Cup being held in America?

One lesson is already available: we should separate the success of hosting an event from its long-term economic effects. Those are not the same thing. We can evaluate relatively quickly whether the U.S. had the infrastructure, organizational capacity and consumer demand to stage and sell a massive international sporting event. It will take much longer to know whether hosting it changed soccer consumption, participation or local economic activity in a lasting way.

A successful tournament does not by itself tell us whether the World Cup created lasting additional demand for soccer in the U.S. To answer that, we would need to see what happens afterward. Do television audiences remain higher? Does attendance at domestic soccer increase? Does participation change? Do businesses or communities that experienced increased activity during the tournament retain any of it?

The same caution applies to broader claims about economic impact. A complete assessment requires information about additional visitor spending, displacement of other economic activity, costs associated with hosting and where the revenues ultimately went. I have not seen a comprehensive analysis of those effects yet, and given how recently the tournament ended, I would not expect us to have a definitive answer at this point.

These are answerable questions. They just require data collected over the next several years rather than the next several weeks.