The legacy argument for hosting a tournament rarely defines what legacy means

A promise with no specified test

Legacy is offered as infrastructure, participation, tourism, national mood and international standing, often in the same paragraph and without distinguishing them. Each of those would require a different measurement, a different timescale and a different baseline to assess with any seriousness. Bundling them means the promise can be declared fulfilled by pointing at whichever component looks best afterwards.

A commitment that can be satisfied by any of several unrelated outcomes is not a commitment in any useful sense. The looseness is not incidental, because a precisely stated promise could be shown to have failed. Vagueness in a bid therefore serves the same function as vagueness anywhere else, which is to preserve the option of declaring success later.

The counterfactual that decides everything

Assessing whether hosting produced a benefit requires knowing what would have happened to the same city without the tournament. Stadium construction, transport upgrades and hotel capacity all occur in growing cities regardless of whether a tournament arrives. Attributing them to the event requires establishing that they would not otherwise have been built, which is rarely attempted.

Where the projects were already planned, the tournament may have changed their timing and their specification rather than their existence. Changed timing is a real effect and a much smaller one than the claims usually made.

Costs and benefits land on different people

The costs of hosting fall on public budgets and on residents displaced or disrupted by construction and by the event itself. The benefits accrue substantially to sectors positioned to capture visitor spending and to the organisations whose profile is raised. Aggregating both into a single figure conceals that distribution, which is the part most relevant to whether hosting was worthwhile for a population.

A net positive that is negative for most residents is a different proposition from one that is positive for them. Bid documents almost never present the distribution, and the aggregate is what enters the public argument.

The absent follow-up

The strongest structural problem is that nobody is assigned responsibility for assessing the promise once the tournament has ended. Organising committees dissolve, political terms end and attention moves on well before the timescales over which legacy was supposed to appear. Without a body obliged to report, the assessment is left to whoever is motivated, which is usually either critics or beneficiaries.

Both produce accounts shaped by their position, and neither is constrained by a definition agreed before the event. A promise that expires before it can be checked is a promise made under very favourable conditions.

What a checkable version would contain

A serious legacy commitment would name specific facilities, specific participation measures and specific dates at which they would be assessed. It would also name who conducts the assessment and would publish the baseline before the tournament rather than reconstructing it afterwards. Nothing about that is technically difficult, and its absence is a choice rather than a limitation of what can be known.

The reason it is absent is that the promise functions as persuasion during the bid rather than as a plan afterwards. Distinguishing persuasion from planning is the whole of the scrutiny available to anyone reading a bid. A document that names dates, figures and an assessor is planning, and a document that names aspirations is doing something else entirely.