International Experience in the Post-Event Utilization of Major Event Venues and the Limits of Its Local Transfer

Abstract

When Chinese scholarship on large sports venues introduces foreign experience, it commonly reduces the practices of other countries to a menu of selectable operating models. This treatment involves a twofold stripping: it strips away the institutional preconditions on which each model depends, and it strips away the record of failure those models have generated in their own settings. Once these are restored, a different picture emerges. The core of the American model is competitive subsidy bidding by local governments under a closed-league franchise structure, and its economic performance is judged negatively by economists in its home country. The success of the British anchor-tenant model turns on the bargaining power of the public party; in its flagship case, conversion costs overran substantially, the stadium company has sustained persistent operating losses, and the contract terms tilt in one direction only. The substance of the German model is not the organizational form of club operation but a self-organized social structure of some 86,000 membership-based sports clubs that carries the everyday running of public facilities. None of the three is a detachable technical solution. On this basis, four constraints on local transfer are identified: demand density, recipient operators, bargaining power, and the boundary of fiscal responsibility. The article argues that transfer should shift from wholesale transplantation of models to the selective borrowing of elements that do not depend on particular preconditions; that policy attention should shift from choosing a model to cultivating the conditions a model requires; and that venues should be differentiated according to the demand conditions they face.