NEXT week sees the kick-off of a summer of sporting risk and uncertainty with the European soccer Championships, the world's third biggest sporting event, followed hot on the heels by the opening of the Tokyo Olympics in July which the Japanese government insists is going ahead, despite growing public opposition to it amid the continuing pandemic.

Last Friday, Japan extended the state of emergency in Tokyo and nine other regions for another three weeks with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga saying that although infections were falling they remained high, and that some hospitals were still under strain. Restrictions will be in place until at least June 19, five weeks before the Olympics are due to start, and overseas fans have already been barred from attending.

While hosting such major contests still commands national prestige, both this year's Olympics and Euro soccer event have been plagued by very high risk from the coronavirus crisis after initially being postponed last year. The pandemic is only the latest example of health, economic, political and wider risks and controversies afflicting such tournaments underlining the potentially massive challenges associated with them, not least given the huge operating costs from their running and security.

Take the example of the last European football championships (Euro 2016), awarded to France to great fanfare in 2010 by UEFA, but which took place in a country operating under an official state of emergency following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. With the US State Department then issuing a warning that the event could be a target for further terrorist atrocities, only the third time in some 20 years that such cautionary advice has been issued by the US government for European travel, the French authorities deployed some 90,000 police, soldiers and security guards.

The Brazil 2016 Olympics offered an even starker example of the political and wider risks of hosting major sporting events. When Rio won in 2009 the right to host the Games, the national economy was booming and the country was enjoying significantly enhanced international prestige as a leading emerging market within the so-called BRICS group of nations.

In 2016, however, Brazil was mired in political crisis surrounding the impeachment of then-president Dilma Roussef, and the-then worst recession in decades which had forced significant spending cuts to the Olympic budget. Further, more than 100 prominent doctors and professors wrote an open letter to the World Health Organization asking for the Games to be postponed or moved from Brazil "in the name of public health" in light of the-then widening Zika outbreak.

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CHALLENGES AND EXPENSES

The problems afflicting both sporting contests underlined the massive challenge and expense of hosting such mega tournaments. For instance, the total investment in modernising new stadiums, alone, for Euro 2016, was estimated to be some 1.6 billion euros (S$2.6 billion) which, by itself, is larger than the reported target of 1.4 billion euros for broadcast rights and sponsorship income.

The mismatch between revenue and expenditure was, if anything, even starker with the Rio Olympics. Brazil spent at least US$10 billion on the event, and probably much more in practice, reported to be in excess of any revenue the Games can generate, especially as many tourists were put off from travelling to the country because of the Zika virus.

The problems associated with the huge costs of staging the Olympics are also exemplified by Athens 2004 which occurred just before Greece's slide into economic turmoil. Those Games, at that stage the most expensive Olympics ever, are estimated to have cost around US$12 billion but only generated about US$3 billion in income.

The Athens Olympics became a symbol for the period of profligate public spending and unsustainable borrowing in the country at the turn of the millennium. Within days of the Olympic closing ceremony that summer, the Greek government warned Brussels that the nation's public debt and deficit would be significantly worse than anticipated, and in 2005 the country became the first eurozone country to be placed under fiscal monitoring by the EU authorities.

So despite the fact that hosting major sporting events continues to be seen as a source of national pride, growing evidence indicates that they do not generally provide a substantial economic boost to national economies from stimulus like capital investment and tourism. For instance, many of the visitors tend to come from the host country whose spending often simply displaces that on other domestic leisure services.

Moreover, the legacy value can be limited too. In the case of the Olympics, for instance, newly built facilities (aside from the Olympic Village which can be sold as high-end apartments) are often too large for most conventional sporting uses, and have significant maintenance costs, often leading to these facilities being dismantled after the Games.

After the Athens Olympics, for instance, many facilities built at high cost simply became 'white elephant' projects falling into disuse. For example, a multi-kilometre walkway linking sports stadiums became a waste ground where people dumped rubbish.

THE DRAW OF HOSTING

Despite all these pitfalls, however, there remains no shortage of cities wanting to host the 2032 Olympics, with Brisbane the frontrunner, to follow up on Paris in 2024, and Los Angeles in 2028. Meanwhile, numerous countries have already expressed firm intent to host the 2028 European soccer championships after Germany in 2024, including Romania, Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia.

Moreover, there is also a long list of states which have also expressed interest in bidding for the 2030 soccer World Cup, including Morocco, the United Kingdom and Argentina, which comes after the events scheduled in Qatar in 2022, and Mexico, Canada and the United States in 2026. What this collectively underlines is that, for the foreseeable future, the perception that hosting such sporting events is a major symbol of national prestige will continue to trump the headaches that can come with staging them, an assessment that may be sorely tested this summer with the Olympics and European soccer tournaments.

• The writer is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics