The Role of Public Sector in Managing Mega Sport Events: might different reporting rules help in organising and managing future events?

Mega sport events are nowadays widely considered having a positive impact on hosting cities and their countries, and always more cities are becoming interested in winning the candidature to host a mega sport event. On the other hand this aspect is not free from critics that come not from the fact that mega sport events are expensive, but especially from the fact that most of them, and Olympics in particular, always had a high cost overrun, being nowadays perceived as a kind of risky investment for hosting cities and their national governments. Different studies has been conducted in order to look at this phenomenon as well as the IOC is trying to improve the instruments of monitoring and knowledge transfer among events. The aim of this paper is to look at this aspect by a different angle: it is not the importance of mega sport events that is challenged, not even the way in which is developed by IOC and/or Federations. The topic in this paper is the role of national and local public bodies in hosting such events and the correlated risks in terms of budgeting. The aim indeed is to define some other accountability aspects to add to the requested indicators able to better define the efficiency and effectiveness of the role of Public Authorities in taking part to the event organization. The analysis is concentrated on a theoretical base in order to find out other possible indicators able to add some other aspects that are not important by the point of view of the IOC but that are crucial by the one of the organising Public Authorities. The paper reports some preliminary aspects on an ongoing research such as: The logic at the base of the organization of sport events appears to be developed by a traditional incremental budgeting way having a great impact on the increasing of expenditures. The cost overrun is a kind of normal practice due to the different requirements in winning as candidate city (and national government) when the bid book is presented and being the actual organising city (and national government), when expenditures really occurs, having a great impact on public spending, due to the fact that requirements of providing guarantees to ensure the financing of all infrastructure are, nearly in every case, given by the government. There is rarely use of ways to measure the effectiveness of Public Authority in implementing the event being in many cases the measuring of the impact of the event the really aspect taken into account.