Economic impact of international second-rate mega-sporting events on tourism: case study of EuroBasket 2011 in Lithuania / Tarptautinių didelių sporto renginių ekonominis poveikis turizmui: 2011 m. Europos krepšinio čempionato Lietuvoje atvejo studija

According to Zipf’s Law, the scale (frequency, abundance, strength, popularity, etc.) of many real-world phenomena increases or decreases logarithmically depending on the class, rank, or weight of the studied phenomenon. This law also applies to the popularity and attendance of mega-sporting events; therefore, it is pertinent for the assessment of an economic impact of the event. If this peculiar feature of mega-sporting events is ignored, any accurate forecast of the popularity of the event and the assessment of its economic impact becomes difficult. The paper illustrates this thesis by highlighting the economic impact of the European Basketball Championship, held in Lithuania in 2011, upon the tourism and hospitality industry in this country. The aim of the study was to assess the applicability of Zipf’s Law in the case of mega-sporting events by surveying the popularity and economic effect of international second-rate sport event such as the European Basketball Championship, which was held in a small peripheral country, Lithuania. The ethnographic survey was based on a series of semi-structured in-depth face-to-face interviews (Tribe, 2010). It was conducted from August to September in 2011. The key interviewed persons were various stakeholders, representing Lithuanian tourism and hospitality industry on different levels – from local cafe owners, staff of tourism information centres in the cities where EuroBasket 2011 took place to the high-level officials of the Lithuanian Hotel and Restaurant Association. Altogether, 25 interviews have been accomplished ex-ante, during, and ex-post the championship. The results of the in-depth interviews were further supplemented, compared, and correlated with similar interviews that had been conducted ex-ante, during, and ex-post EuroBasket 2011 by different Lithuanian mass-media and had been available on the internet and various published sources. In addition to the ethnographic survey, we have conducted an internet survey, concerning the popularity of various team sports in selected countries of Europe. We have conducted a simple survey, aimed at assessing how many results for the terms defining team sports are extracted from the internet by the most popular web search engines (Google for the terms in the Latin alphabet and Yandex in the Cyrillic alphabet). Italian, Russian, and Lithuanian languages were chosen in order to eliminate the global scope of the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone terms and to avoid any confusion with ambiguous terms, for example “American football”. The mega-sporting events which Lithuania as a country is capable of organizing are unable to attract a substantial amount of foreign tourists, who could have any significant impact on the tourism and hospitality sector in this country. According to the head of the Lithuanian Hotel and Restaurant Association (interviewee #8), “hotels in Lithuania still have never received the promised massive wave of tourists neither in 1993, on the occasion of the Pope’s visit, nor in 2009, when Vilnius was designated the European Capital of Culture. ” Lithuania will not be capable of organizing any world-class mega-sporting events that had been really popular among foreign tourists such as the European or the World Football Cup finals, or the Olympic Games in the foreseeable future either alone or in cooperation with its neighbours. Therefore, mega-sporting events would not play any role in promoting foreign inbound tourism. If the Lithuanian Government wishes to promote foreign inbound tourism, it should rather look for other types of special mass-events or international tourism niches. However, even in that case, it is important to keep Zipf’s Law in mind: the more specialized nature of the event and the lower political rank of the city holding it there are, the less likely that it would receive enough visitors to pay off. This is a critically important condition, when planning and forecasting costs for holding the event and assessing opportunity costs for other investment alternatives. Keywords: Tourism, mega-sporting event, Zipf’s Law, EuroBasket, Lithuania. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.15823/sm.2017. 17