Mega-events and tourism: the case of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and the 2016 Rio Summer Olympic Games

This chapter examines tourist arrivals in Brazil during mega-sporting events, updating Baumann and Matheson (2018) to include an examination of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. In order to justify the costs of hosting major sporting events, it is often claimed that these events attract large numbers of wealthy foreign visitors and can be engines of economic growth after the event. The 2014 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics were no exception. Both of these events took place in Brazil. Leading up to the World Cup, the Brazilian Ministry of Sports forecast that the event would be worth no less than $70 billion to the Brazilian economy and would attract 600,000 tourists to Brazil (Rapoza, 2011). Such claims were probably necessary to justify the extraordinary expense to host the event. The Ministry of Sports reported that stadium construction costs alone totaled $3.6 billion (Manfred, 2014). FIFA concedes that the overall cost of the event was $15 billion, though the organization contributed $2 billion towards operational costs (FIFA, 2017). Similarly, the 2016 Summer Olympics were an expensive affair that promised a large economic windfall, at least in part as a result of a deluge of tourists. According to Prada (2016), at least 500,000 foreign visitors arrived in Brazil to attend the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the government said on Friday, citing recent immigration figures that met a forecast made well before the Games. According to data compiled by federal police at immigration points and released to Reuters by the tourism ministry, a total of 572,961 foreigners entered Brazil between Jul. 1 and Aug. 15.