1. Introduction
Over the past few decades, event tourism (culture, sporting and business-related events) has become a rapidly expanding segment of the leisure travel market [
1,
2,
3]. The connection between sport and tourism is not new, and scholars have considered the rise of sporting events as one of the most significant components of event tourism and one of the most extensive elements of sporting tourism [
4,
5]. The growing use of sporting events is an attempt to expand economic development opportunities and achieve tourism growth [
6].
Management and planning issues are a key focus [
7,
8] and researchers are interested in the impacts events have on the host community [
9]. Therefore, the impacts of sporting events on destination are many. The triple bottom line (TBL) is arguably the most widely accepted approach to identifying and measuring impacts [
10], which is an assessment of economic, socio-cultural and environmental influences as pertinent to sporting events and sport tourism on the local communities [
11,
12,
13,
14,
15].
Economic and related tourism benefits are seen as tangible or ‘hard’ impacts, and thus local stakeholders see the hosting of events as beneficial. Economic benefits include target investments in sport and event infrastructures, employment, prolonged tourism season, increased tourism, and new tax revenues [
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21]. Economic benefits also include some non-monetary effects, such as generating media attention and destination image enhancement [
22,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27]. One point of concern is the high (and sometimes excessive) costs and spending involved with building and preparing infrastructures, and this can result in increased taxes, higher prices and housing costs locally [
28,
29].
Social/cultural impacts are often considered ‘soft’ impacts [
30,
31], and scholars view the assessment, measurement and management of these impacts as more difficult [
2,
32]. Among these intangible impacts is a focus on local resident quality of life, enhanced social cohesion and pride in place, a new perceived destination image, and the potential to increase sport participation among locals [
33,
34,
35,
36]. However, a concern is that an increase in tourism can result in cultural conflicts among residents and tourists, traffic congestion problems, security and crime concerns, as well as vandalism—these are seen as negative impacts among local stakeholders observed in recent research [
28,
37,
38].
Environmental impacts are also an important but challenging area of focus among scholars today. Some findings suggest that positive environmental impacts result when new sport infrastructures are built on devastated or reclaimed land and are a strategy to improve a site (see [
39,
40]), but in most cases local stakeholders perceive environmental impacts negatively. Without appropriate regulations and careful planning, new sports tourism infrastructure can lead to environmental consequences in a given area [
28] and with high concentrations of people attending events, mass gatherings of event-goers see increases in waste, air and water pollution, as well as higher noise levels [
28,
29,
41].
Although the main dimensions of sport event impacts are established (i.e., economic, socio-cultural and environmental), the scope of these dimensions are not unified—and sometimes result in very different impact outcomes. What is also noticed is that particular impacts could belong to different dimensions. Furthermore, some impacts are mentioned more often than others, leading to a conclusion that not all type of impacts are equally important, or at least not equally assessed. This makes this area of research open to further scrutiny and systematization. In addition, different stakeholders (e.g., organizers and managers, sponsors, spectators, active participants or locals) can have very different perspectives and impressions of an impact. Thus, an impact depends on many factors (type of the event, type of sport, demographics of the host community), but an accepted conclusion among researchers is that larger events result in greater impact, and these impacts can be positive and negative. In case of large-scale events, the impacts could spill over to non-host peripheral communities [
40].
A challenge that researchers need to consider is that because each stakeholder group is involved differently in an event, they each have different expectations from an event, and thus value the importance of particular impacts of the event quite differently. While the event organizers and managers are actively involved in the event organization, the local population can also be actively (e.g., by volunteering or spectating) or passively involved into the event. However, considering the fact that locals live in the host destination, an event held in close geographical proximity will directly affect local residents. Their support plays an important role in making decisions about hosting and organizing the sporting event, the success of the event and further tourism development in the destination. It is therefore necessary to have a wide support and participation of the local community to ensure a long-term growth [
42]. However, the extent of local resident support will depend on a balance between perceived benefits and costs of the event [
40]. A critical point to consider is that not all members of the hosting community, such as local residents, local business organizations or financial institutions (see [
43]) have an equal (positive or negative) perceptions of the impacts that the event they will host will have on their local community [
44,
45].
In general, event organizers want events to be sustainable, meaning that events will produce (in each dimension) more social benefits than costs to the overall community. It means that they seek, in collaboration with other stakeholders, to ensure financial viability and maximize other positive impacts, while eliminating or minimizing the negative ones in order to respect and appreciate the interests of all those directly or indirectly involved and interested in the event itself. This certainly does not happen by chance, and sporting events need careful planning and implementation. In the planning stage, it is important to define specific (strategic) elements. This means defining event and destination attributes that will be a mandatory content to include when planning and preparing the event (e.g., ecological public traffic, recycling program, offer of local products, cultural program, employment of local population, event legacy), so that aspects can stay permanent over a prolonged period of time [
6,
46].
Consequently, in order to direct events on positive results and sustainability, for both the organizers and for the local population, it is necessary to focus on strategic elements necessary for efficient and effective event planning and organization. Indeed, decision-making, participation in events and loyalty to an event very often depend on satisfaction with various event elements/attributes in addition to entertainment, attractions, and supplemental destination activities [
47,
48,
49,
50,
51]. Event practitioners have created a several important guides linking the need for sustainability principles within sporting event organization, including the Gold Framework [
52]. While these guides provide just a framework, previous research has failed to study the relationship between specific strategic event and destination elements or attributes on one side, and event impacts on the other. If a relationship between a particular strategic element and a specific event impact exists, one can presume that putting more emphasis on that element during the planning stage will positively contribute to the realization of the related impact. In other words, there is little explanation of what strategic planning actions are necessary to undertake to produce specific positive impacts. This is especially the case with the staging of outdoor sporting events, which are more sensitive in ecological terms (see [
53]).
This paper will address the wider impacts of sport-tourism events as well as strategic planning elements for achieving outdoor sport-tourism events’ sustainability based on a systematic literature review of published journal articles. More precisely, it will review the published literature in order to systematize a wide spectrum of social impacts that outdoor sporting events create from the perspective of key stakeholders, as well as the strategic planning elements necessary for achieving sustainability. To accomplish this, we define the following research questions:
RQ1: What is most commonly mentioned impact in sporting events relevant literature?
RQ2: What types of sporting events are studied the most?
RQ3: What strategic planning elements are necessary for achieving sustainability, based on what the literature assessed mentions as the most important?
This paper continues with a description of the methods used to conduct this systematic literature review before presenting the findings. The discussion and conclusion highlight key results to identify directions for future sport-event tourism studies.
4. Discussion and Research Directions
Confirming the fact that research conducted on this subject relates to the more recent past, only a few research publications on impacts appear between 2002 and 2011, with most papers published 2012 to present. When taking into account the strategic planning elements and attributes together, those two terms belong primarily to research published in the second decade of the 21st century. While being aware that there is surely a number of papers on these topics published in the last century (but not included in the WoSCC database), these results demonstrate the novelty of the subject and mentioned terms in the research area, which suggests a lack of literature in the field of sport-tourism and events. It is important to note the increasing popularity of sport-tourism event research, which has high research potential, especially with a focus on economic development across different geographical scales—regionally, nationally and globally.
When considering event host locations, regarding the sample of papers in this study, Europe (18 publications) and Asia (17 publications) are most represented. If taking North and South America as one, there are 13 publications altogether. Africa (nine publications) and Australia (three publications) saw fewer studies. The reasons why Africa and Australia lag behind in the academic literature is because these two continents do not host large-scale sporting events as often as Europe and Asia, and this can be due to the influence of recent mega-event hosting in emerging economy countries such as China and Russia, especially in recent years [
87]. It can be because of the lack of existing and available large-scale sporting infrastructure on the Africa continent or the distance of the Australian continent given its geographical remoteness. Planners and organizers seek to improve the security level and prevent disorders and conflicts, choosing secure locations, especially when considering major sport events that require high-tech and modern infrastructures, which can be targets for causing alarm/disorders and even for crime and vandalism [
2,
38]. In addition, as participants and visitors who attend major sport events come from all over the world, venues have to be accessible and it is often preferred that host cities can be easily reachable from different parts of the world—so locations which are more distant rarely enter the final bidding stages.
When speaking about the different countries, South Africa and South Korea each appear in five publications. Next, a number of papers refer to China and USA, as high-economy center locations, but also, and surprisingly, Croatia (four publications). This result for South Africa contradicts previous conclusions about fewer studies focusing on Africa, but the reason why South Africa and Croatia were often studied lies in the fact that these destinations are economically stabile and popular tourist destinations (given the substantial amount of revenue that comes from tourism). Wise [
88] added that sport research on Africa primarily focuses on South Africa. While this does not mean that South Africa or Croatia host many events (like large countries such as USA, the UK or China, who do host more large-scale events), when these countries host events, they are intriguing cases for academics to study event or tourism impacts. Other countries, like Brazil and the UK (three publications), Canada, Greece, Japan, and Portugal (two publications) were also identified as popular touristic destinations, and in that sense, are readily equipped with existing infrastructures, accommodations and hospitality-service providers necessary for event organizing and hosting to cater to participants and visitors. In fact, an important focus is attracting and retaining visitors to capture subsequent visitor spend before, during and after event, and stakeholders who will invest in certain business ventures are crucial for creating economic benefits for any country [
16,
18]. Synergistic impacts of hosting sporting events and touristic development, such as increases in tourist figures, seasonality fluctuations, new jobs, increased revenues and tax revenues from expenses were proven in previous studies [
17,
20,
21,
89,
90,
91]. Additionally, the impacts of sporting tourism will depend on the achieved level of development, numbers of sport tourists, size of local community, level of development and investment in other tourist activities, and if the local community accepts the hosting of sports tourism and sporting events. If the local community is underdeveloped (like in the case of Croatia), more products and services will be imported from other local communities or from abroad to provide service to the sport tourist, which would reduce the economic benefits for that place/country [
92].
The results on sporting event impacts confirmed previous assertions that most of the focus was on positive as well as economic impacts. The results show that economic impacts mostly include benefits, such as new investment in infrastructures, new employment opportunities, increased tourism figures, and new tax revenues [
16,
17,
20,
21,
89,
93]. Another impacts that is considered a non-monetary effect is destination image enhancement [
23,
25]. Alternatively, planning for and hosting sporting events results in excessive spending (on the event), increased taxes locally, and higher living costs for local residents [
28,
29,
94] as investors seek higher return yields. However, a new broad economic impact suggests economic sustainability has a positive perception. When compared to other impact types, the number of economic impacts identified in the sample confirms that they are more visible, easier to measure and perceived as more beneficial than other types of impact which are somehow ignored [
32,
42].
Socio-cultural impacts have become a focus of attention mainly in the last few years. This research discusses the importance of non-monetary impacts. Studies have focused on sport participation, quality of life, social cohesion, formation of social capital, pride in place, and new or increased interest in a foreign country’s culture and visitor attractions (see [
33,
34,
35,
36,
94,
95,
96,
97]). Each of these points on socio-cultural impacts can all lead to or enhance social sustainability. Given the short duration of the project with accent on economics impacts and necessities of long-terms policy initiatives, it is very important to direct future research to the benefits of socio-cultural impacts on the wellbeing of the community and residents.
Regarding environmental impacts, the results suggest that sporting events produce more positive than negative environmental impacts. This is opposite to many previous findings that highlight only/mainly negative environmental impacts, or where new sport events are a threat to the host community’s environment. Considerations of threats found by studies include increased traffic problems and air pollution, high quantities of garbage, and higher noise levels (see [
28,
41,
95,
98,
99]. Enhancing new infrastructure and dedicating urban regeneration/development strategies that focus on territory attractiveness and green technologies, resources and transportation are among the most often mentioned positive environmental impacts.
Negative economic and socio-cultural impacts of both small and large sporting events were not a key focus of study, and when assessed, they are always together with positive impacts outlined above and observed in recent studies [
28,
29,
98,
100,
101]. A common conclusion is that academics prefer to emphasize positive event impacts and that they are not so keen to examine negative impacts of any type (economic, socio-cultural and environmental). As claimed by Getz and Page [
2], Giampiccoli, Lee and Nauright [
102] and Müller [
103], opportunistic and/or political motives often lie behind this pattern of behavior, which presents an intriguing issue for future studies.
Furthermore, the fact is that the hos t destination is under the spotlight. The host community, first of all event organizers as well as local residents, is one of the most important stakeholders of an organized event. Without the support of locals, the organization of events will be difficult, especially in case of sport-tourism events which strongly depend on local public institutions, local companies and local volunteers [
42]. The aforementioned studies mainly examined the attitude of local people concerning how sporting events in the host town will affect them and their communities [
104,
105].
Larger-scale events are not possible without the support of the wider community—that is, the non-host community. This offers an ambience where the social interaction between the visitors and local population facilitates and develops a positive image of the destination [
106,
107]. The communities that are not hosts can generate some benefits from sporting events especially for two reasons. First, the initial finance investment of larger events in non-host destination is minimal, in regards to the host destination. Secondly, the non-host destinations can dedicate themselves to the utilization of all resources because the event organization and management is not limited [
95]. This research found only two existing studies that focused on the impacts of sporting events on non-host communities [
37,
69]. Still, previous studies noted differences in perception between host residents and non-host residents based on the proximity of the town to the event [
108]. However, local residents of non-host towns are usually not questioned about the impacts of sporting event on their town (the so-called spill over impact) but about the impacts for the host town [
95]. Therefore, the way that residents of places not hosting can estimate the impacts of sporting event on the actual host destination and its residents is still under-researched, and this need considered in future work going forward.
When looking at the context of sustainable tourism, outdoor sporting events must be sustainable, taking into account the above-mentioned impact dimensions on stakeholders. The legacies need advance planning from the early stages of event design and development. Legacy planning of the event and aspects which remain permanent, or which take some determinate period as well as human health and well-being and education, are factors that can aid organizational success. Therefore, except for the impacts, specific strategic elements and attributes of sustainable sport-tourism events become very important characteristic when determining sustainability surrounding the organization of outdoor sport-tourism events. In order to focus on event elements and attributes, as the results of this research suggest, we identify several strategic elements/attributes and grouped them into eight distinctive categories, namely organizational, logistic, social, cultural, economic, tourism, environmental and communication dimensions.
Economic dimensions focus on costs and benefits (as suggested by Perić et al. [
70] and Aicher and Newland [
72]), while tourism dimensions refer to new or complementary markets and increasing the number of tourists to events and in destinations. Social dimensions involve the hospitability of local residents, safety and political issues (see Kaplanidou et al. [
83] and Mohan [
86]) as well as participant preferences. Cultural dimensions relate to local culture, art and historic attractions, sport culture and cultural development. Environmental dimensions are also important (see for instance [
79,
85]), and reveal geographical location, natural setting and attractions (especially clean and green environment) and traffic elements/attributes, as each important. All of this was coordinated from the event and destination, for instance organizational and logistical dimensions (elements/attributes such as management, coordination, infrastructure, resources, facilities, entertainment, strategy and monitoring) and the communication dimension (which puts focus on promotion, image, branding, identity and popularity as exposure in mass media). These destination and event strategic elements and attributes are important for designing strategies for planning and development of future events (see for instance [
73,
75]). In other words, all these dimensions can guide strategies to help better understand different stakeholder needs, improve event organization, and leverage event legacies. As the 17 publications about strategic organizational elements/attributes did not address the direct relationship with events impacts, the direction for future research suggests the need to analyze those relationships: between event strategy and/or destination elements/attributes (or dimensions) and specific event impacts.
Indeed, societal needs, shared values and meeting individual group needs, equal rights/access are important points of focus. As suggested by Zhang and Park [
6], legacy planning and aspects that last, human health and education, policy and principles, monitoring and evaluation processes, and reduced consumption of natural resources are the most important factors (from the perspective of the multiple event stakeholders) when considering sustainable development and responsible hallmark event planning and operations. Comparing this study’s results with factors suggested by Zhang and Park [
6], organizational, logistic and communication dimensions can be considered legacy planning and aspects that last, monitoring and evaluation processes and policy and principles while social and cultural dimensions can be considered as human health and education. Zhang and Park [
6] concluded that these dimensions are even more important for sustainable event organizing. Economic and tourism factors are new dimensions necessary for planning and achieving business legacies, better organization, and preventing risk. Special emphasis is given to the environmental dimension. Global concern now suggests the need to focus on event impacts alongside biodiversity and the environment, and urban renewal and biodiversity. Therefore, some considerations for event planners focusing on environmental impacts include being conscious of any ongoing ecosystem regeneration and dedicated preservation areas, as these are protected areas and events can harm such efforts. These are important to understand when implementing and preparing for future planning and organization of sport-tourism events. For this reason, the category named the environmental dimension is proposed. This category matches the reduced consumption of natural resources category that relates to development over time [
6]. Those factors, and not only, should be used in planning for future sustainable sporting events. It is crucial to use the findings of previous studies in combination with good practices as a base to contribute to the given theoretical framework. In terms of practice, events should have a dedicated cultural program. To achieve this, it is important that the local residents are involved with the event and participate in the event(s), and (perhaps most importantly) jobs are created for local residents (and these jobs need to be sustained, opposed to seasonal or temporary).