Mega-events are massive commercial and cultural undertakings with effects on multiple scales, from the global to the local, and have inspired a rapidly growing body of academic inquiry (Roche 2002, 2017). These are patterns seen worldwide when conducting the Olympics, the Football World Cup, the World’s Fair (also known as Expo), and a multitude of other mega-events with sometimes smaller sports or media profiles but significant urban, economic, environmental, and social impacts. Nonetheless, excited or not, all these people will be affected to a certain extent.

Others ignore it or profess not to care, while still others plan acts of protest and resistance. Some of them anticipate the celebrations, catching the waves of increasing excitement. And within that host city, in a growing hailstorm of media attention, residents pursue their daily lives in the context of these changes. Elsewhere, the newly christened host begins preparations through costly, sometimes controversial, and transformative urban development plans. Transnational business plans worth billions of dollars in construction, broadcast media, and sponsorships start heating up. Others applaud politely or are crestfallen. Some people in the audience – and around the world – leap from their seats, cheering in triumph. With great fanfare, a man pulls a card from an envelope and reveals the name of a host: ‘The winner is…’. Introduction: from mega-events to giga-events All told, the articles in this special section explore how the Olympics, the FIFA Men’s World Cup and the Commonwealth Games deploy different mechanisms to transform urban space, and offer innovative means of understanding what mega-events can do to the people and places that host them. This introduction offers a brief overview of the landscape of the existing research before summarizing each contribution and placing them in context within the broader literature.

Combined, these contributions unpack how socio-economic and cultural contexts shape the organization of events and impact hosts in variegated and contingent ways in the Global North, South, and East. The authors explore different dimensions of the recent mega-event experience from around the world, proposing novel ways of theorizing these outsized expressions of transnational sport, politics, commerce, and culture. This special section in Sports in Society centers on the urban and economic impacts of mega-events on the societies that host them, offering an examination of individual cases and emerging patterns. Mega-events are global affairs with profound effects across a variety of scales, and are the focus of a large and growing body of academic inquiry.

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