Is Attending Major Sporting Events Like the World Cup Unethical?

One of the biggest stories coming out of every major sporting event, it seems, is how little people in the hosting country actually want to host the sporting event. It’s most surprising with what’s going on right now in Brazil during the World Cup, because Brazilians are known to be absolute fanatics about soccer. But there have been pretty hardcore protests in Brazil over the World Cup for months now, generally over how much money the World Cup costs to put on, and how that money could easily be better spent on things like housing, education, and crime reduction.

As a traveler, one of the events I’d love to tick off of my to-do list is the World Cup. Because soccer is just so much goddamn fun to watch in a crowd, and being around fanatics from virtually every major soccer country has to be an absolute blast. But ethically, I worry about whether I’d be harming the people of the country I’m visiting by contributing to what is, overall, probably a negative event. So what’s the verdict? Can I travel to the World Cup and not be a part of the problem?

Am I Helping the Country Economically By Spending Money There?

Almost certainly not. First off, the World Cup is insanely expensive to host – with a cost in the billions –  and in Brazil’s (and most other cases) it isn’t planned with economy and sustainability in mind. Soccer stadiums as huge as the ones required for World Cup games are usually only used by the largest tier club teams – of which Brazil has plenty. But not all of the stadiums in Brazil are in the places where these club teams exist: take Manaus, for example, the Amazonian city where a number of World Cup games are taking place. There’s no club of that size there. That stadium will likely be used this month and this month alone, after which it will cost the city a ton on maintenance.

So a lot of the stuff that they’ve spent money on won’t really have lingering returns, and as Simon Kuper points out in his book Soccernomics, stadiums are not effective economic stimuli anyway. They’re usually only used a few hours a week a few months a year, and they don’t necessarily “create jobs” to the extent that many other urban policies could. And the cost of construction, which inevitably ends up on the shoulders of the local population and not solely on private investors, does take away from other public projects: as Kuper points out, “In New Orleans, for instance, the taxpayer paid for the Superdome but not for better levees.”

And ultimately, the payoff isn’t that great. Again, from Soccernomics: “Greek tourism officials estimated in late 2004 that there’d been a 10 percent fall in tourist arrivals during that year’s Athens Olympic, as vacationers choosing summer destinations steered clear of the frenzy.”

Brazil already has decent tourism, and the press around the crime and riots may actually hurt tourism in the future. Or in the case of Qatar, the press around the slave labor and the entire boondoggle clusterfuck that is the 2022 World Cup could absolutely fuck that country’s much smaller tourism industry – though in their case, they have much less to lose. Even if Brazil makes millions off of this World Cup, they’ll have spent billions. Billions that, as the rioters point out, could much more effectively be spent somewhere else.

Are there any benefits to hosting the World Cup?

Absolutely. Sports aren’t necessarily a economic boon for society, but studies have shown that they support social cohesion and national unity at levels only met otherwise by war and catastrophe. Major sporting events around the world tend to coincide with lower levels of suicide – and this result comes not only from the area that hosts the event, but all areas participating in it. So the Netherlands is getting the benefit of lower suicide rates as much as Brazil. Hosting the event itself doesn’t make the country much in the way of money – but it does increase local levels of happiness.

An important note is that economic gain tends to only influence happiness in poorer countries where it’s likely to be lifting people out of material poverty: once you reach a certain level of wealth, the influence of money on your happiness plateaus. So technically, in Brazil, while happiness may increase during the World Cup, it could just as easily have been increased by saving that money and spending it on education, environmental, anti-poverty, or anti-crime initiatives, all of which would have increased the standard of living and probably would have had longer-term effects on the country’s happiness. In richer countries, spending money on something that doesn’t make you any money back but does make you happier makes a whole lot more sense.

So What’s the Verdict?

The Venn Diagram of sports fanatics and anti-poverty political activists probably closer resembles Lennon glasses than it does a stack of pancakes. But activists should realize that sporting events do provide a social good – a good that we might have an easier time understanding if we thought of sports in the same terms as we do of music or art: sports are one of the activities in which we, as humans, find a lot of meaning. So extravagancies like the World Cup or Olympics aren’t evil across the board – they’re necessary for making life worth living.

What sports fanatics should realize is that we can maximize the benefit and minimize the costs. We can, for example, demand massive changes from the corrupt toolbags at FIFA (if you want to know more about that, check out John Oliver’s amazing takedown of FIFA from a few weeks ago).

They could lower their standards on the types of facilities that are used in the World Cup. They could ask the other participating countries to pitch more money into the actual construction needed for the event, rather than burdening the local populace with it. The burdens of budget overruns could be moved from the local hosting government to FIFA – which would probably make them a little less cavalier. Or they could build stadiums in a way that they’d easily be reusable once the event was over – or, here’s a thought, they could hold the events in areas that already have that infrastructure in the first place.

The end result is a strange one for many activists: the most ethical World Cups to attend are in developed countries. They aren’t as wasteful, and they aren’t as much of a burden on the local economies. In the less developed countries, you could certainly travel in a way that would benefit more local businesses than international corporate sponsors, but in the end, they’d still be losing money from the event.

So is it ethical to go to the Olympics or the World Cup? Sure. But only some of them. Not only do you want to make sure that the event isn’t going to lead to human rights abuses, but you also want to make sure they can afford it. Russia and Qatar can afford it, but their hands are pretty dirty on the human rights front. For the Olympics, there are the same problem with Rio 2016 as there are with World Cup 2014. But there are two upcoming Olympics you can probably feel pretty good about attending: Pyeongchang 2018 and Tokyo 2020.

What Can I Do to Make Sure the World Cup and the Olympics are Run More Ethically Next Time?

Honestly, sports are an area where we could use more political activism on the left. Not anti-sport activism, but responsible sport activism. We could push the IOC and FIFA (and let’s be clear: the IOC isn’t great, but they are much better than FIFA) to hold higher standards in terms of ethics, and to have lower requirements in terms of money spent for the events. As a world, yeah, we probably do need these events as rare reminders of global unity. But there’s no reason they can’t run the events less wastefully and more ethically.

Here are a few things you can do:

• Go to FIFA Think Again to petition against the 2022 World Cup being held in Qatar.
• Travel to developing countries that need your tourism dollars before they spend a ton on boondoggles that are justified with claims of increased tourism.
• Start making noise about the 2016 Olympics in Rio, the 2018 World Cup in Russia, and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar: contact your congressperson, and notify your local news station as well.
• Talk with your money: here are FIFA’s 2014 sponsors, and here’s the IOC’s 2016 sponsors.

Photo Courtesy of Ben Tavener