“We wouldn’t have missed it for the world”: Hosting a polycentric sporting mega event in pandemic times

Abstract

This paper examines the polycentric hosting of a Sporting Mega Event (SME) in pandemic times. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 stakeholders in senior management positions who were involved in the planning, organisation, and delivery of the UEFA EURO 2020 football tournament in a sample of host cities. Three themes were developed that describe the varied perspectives of UEFA and host city representatives on how they responded to the challenge of hosting a SME during a pandemic. The first theme ‘Reorienting pre-pandemic plans’ presents an alternative model of tournament planning as a system of spontaneous order (Polanyi [1953] 1998), involving a large number of host cities mutually adjusting to COVID-19 policies and guidance. The second theme ‘Dialogue and managing conflict’ demonstrates how the usual overarching system of rules proved difficult for UEFA to standardise. The third theme ‘Putting COVID-19 policies into practice (or not)’ revealed that pandemic rules were not seen as useful to some fans and stadium staff, making their enforcement more difficult to implement. It remains to be seen whether the polycentric hosting of EURO 2020 will have lasting implications on UEFA’s governance over SMEs.

Rights

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/19406940.2024.2424576

Repository URI

http://hdl.handle.net/1893/36519