Meet Thomas Peeters

As a child, I always wanted to become a politician. My biggest dream was to be the Prime Minister of Belgium. When I was a student, I was a member of a student fraternity at some point. Also, I did a lot of voluntary work and even organised some concerts.

My path to becoming a researcher was a coincidental choice for me at some point. But once I had reached that point, I really wanted to excel in it as well; and that could only be done by working hard. If you want to become a researcher you have to be determined, especially in the first few years. At first, I thought some things would be too difficult for me, but I actually managed to study it. 

The main topics of my research are the economics of professional sports and the economics of how people matter to organisations. My paper about tourism and the 2010 World Cup was primarily motivated by a moral feeling about how the football governing body FIFA dealt with developing countries. We therefore felt that we needed to tell this story scientifically. Namely, that FIFA does not invest what it should in the development of the countries where its tournaments are held. The reason that these developing countries start to host more and more of these events is twofold, I believe. First, developing means that many sectors in a country will continue to develop as well, so they are not as poor as they used to be. Second, in many of these countries, the government has a bit of a bad reputation and feels that these tournaments can help polish the reputation of the country or at least of the regime. This is a motivation that is absent in many of the developed countries or western democracies.  

‘If people do not like your questions, you are probably asking the right ones’

Economic benefits 

From an economic perspective, I do not think that organising major tournaments in developing countries is a smart idea since most of these countries will actually lose money by organising an event. If you talk about economic benefit, it is probably negative. The organisation of these tournaments diverts money away from the needs, like education and healthcare of ordinary people, and directs it towards, in my opinion, wasteful investments in stadiums that nobody needs.  

If you think about the benefits, people always cite two main benefits. The first one is increased spending on tourism. The second one is the idea that you are more open to trade and that you will therefore attract more investments and so on. There is indeed some evidence that there are very modest gains to be made from these tournaments. The problem is that there is one big cost factor, which is the building of ten stadiums of 40.000 plus seats. Often, nobody needs them in these countries.  

A permanent Olympic village 

To make an event successful in terms of tourism for a developing country, you need a couple of things. First, you need a country that has room for tourism, so where it is a viable industry in the long run. You also need a country where tourism is still under development, so where it can still grow. Moreover, a country needs to be at least somewhat developed enough in terms of law, safety, and economic terms, so that tourism is in the end able to sustain even after the event is gone. With this in mind, it might be better to organise the Olympics in a permanent Olympic village. This would be built somewhere and everyone would contribute, which sounds great and in economic terms is probably an efficient solution. But, as with many things, efficiency is not the primary goal of policymakers. In this case, with everybody involved: the regimes that do organise these events, the people that give away the rights to organise these events, and to some extent, the building lobby and everybody who is behind this kind of industry, they all have incentives to not want this thing to happen.