- Start date
- Duration
- Format
- Language
- 16 sep 2025
- 40 hours
- Online
- Italian
Offer sports organizations know-how, rationales and tools to support and “professionalize” management and managerial activities.
To celebrate 50 years since the founding of SDA Bocconi, this space hosts a selection of ideas generated by our Faculty that have made their mark in the landscape of management research. Relevant and concrete, conducted with scientific rigor and impactful for our society: these are the four pillars underpinning the pathway we propose. The SDA Insight initiative falls under the broader umbrella project, “50 Years of Ideas.”
In the coming years, Italy will host the Winter Olympic Games in Milan-Cortina (2026), the Mediterranean Games in Taranto (2026), and will bid to host the European Football Championship (2032). In addition to these are a series of major sports events held every year in this country; topping the list is the Giro d’Italia, the Formula One Gran Prix in Monza, the ATP tennis finals in Torino (from 2021 to 2025). But with a major sports event, what remains after the last race is run and the last match is played? How can we justify the massive expense of staging these events if the host city gets saddled with huge debt, a negative social and landscape legacy, and costly, underutilized sports facilities. Case in point: the 1976 Montreal Olympics were a success on the sports front, but the residents of that city didn’t finish paying the bill until 2006.
Greece gave the world the unforgettable 2004 Summer Games, as did Torino with the 2006 Winter Games, but much of the sports infrastructure that remained sees little use today. These examples explain the growing concern of the IOC (and FIFA) to ensure that the scope of these major sporting events is not limited to a few moments of glory, as extraordinary and exciting as they may be. More and more often, in fact, it’s not enough that these events are a success; they must also bear the weight of the high expectations from the public: to renew the city, improve the economy, and relaunch the country. So what’s essential to realize that a negative legacy is not only about infrastructures that are no longer used after the event is over, but rather a missed opportunity to fully exploit the potential of the event itself.
Institutions and national governments, bombarded with political fallout and scathing public opinion for cost overruns, are frequently finding themselves having to consider not only the sports competition itself, but also the relevance of the event as a sustainable investment, and the relative risks and benefits. Leaving behind something valuable for the community is the best way to contend with these criticisms. In other words, the legacy justifies the cost, both for the promoting body and for the host country or city. And just like the IOC has formally included legacy in its statute, FIFA too is focusing more attention on utilizing sports events for the economic and social development of communities. Yet major event organizers and rightsholders are more likely to think in terms of a series of economic benefits deriving from exception staging and international broadcasting of a given event. In doing so, they leave it up to the event hosts to work out the legacy on their own, when the show is over.
These economic/managerial considerations lay the groundwork for the Routledge Handbook of Sport and Legacy. Meeting the Challenge of Major Sports Events, which I edited in collaboration with Richard Holt. In our book, published in 2015, various authors offer case studies to illustrate the advantages and risks that public decision makers have to face when organizing a major sports event. The constant aim underpinning this undertaking is guaranteeing a solid plurality of impacts: economic, social, political, cultural, and naturally, in terms of sports.
This handbook identifies the legacies in all these categories, in various combinations, while acknowledging the fact that these is no single theory or one-size-fits-all model that applies. In fact, the wide array of cases included in the book demonstrate that the opposite is true: short and medium-long term impacts that are consistent with the characteristics of the event and the host community can be a varied and complex.
Conventionally speaking, “legacy is broken down into hard and soft, tangible and intangible.” Hard or tangible legacy is more obvious and easier to understand, and is almost always linked to short-term economic impacts, although the assorted manifestations of this type of legacy are complex and interconnected. A key objective of this handbook, instead, is to explore the vast range and the critical role of soft or intangible legacies. These ties into social, political and sports aspects as well as legacies associated with human capital, which range from basic training for volunteers to highly specialized management skills. These are all types of impacts that a territory can attain exclusively by organizing a major sports event, and not though financial investments alone.
We should also draw another distinction between planned legacy, which means integrating a major event into a broader transformation strategy for a city or a region, and emerging legacy, which consists in unplanned impacts generated by the event itself which usually come up over the long term. What emerged in Italy, for example, beginning with the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, were skills, networks and human capital that developed around the major events industry. Even though there are no objective data, it’s obvious that all this subsequently led to Italy hosting the World Expo 2015 and winning the bid to host the upcoming Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina. This will be the first Winter Games to be held in two different regions and several cities, presenting the opportunity to consolidate the Italian Alps as a sport and tourism destination. And Milan will the prestige of being one of the few cities in the world to have staged both the Olympic Games and the World Expo.
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