The world is full of surprises. The least of them is that the FIFA World Cup games in Vancouver will cost more than anticipated even months ago.
Such is the splatter of taxpayer provisions on these political fanboy baubles that it begins to anesthetize the mind’s requirement for sense in the world. Millions here, millions there, millions and millions everywhere, and economic modelling defiant of basic gravity.
Two years ago, when the plan was to host five games, the tab was going to be $230 million. Last year, after a new plan emerged to host seven games, the province, the City of Vancouver and the Crown corporation that owns 小蓝视频 Place estimated it would be more than double that—$483 million to $581 million.
Now—or, I should say, at least for now—the tally is between $532 million and $624 million.
Roughly throwing around the numbers, it means that every person attending a match will be supported by tax expenditures of about $1,780 a ticket. Actually, the expenditure is larger—more like $2,500 per ticket—because the organizers have bent the meaning of revenue by counting the $116 million in federal support and another $82 million in government-to-government transactions as revenue and not as an expense, or a subsidy or a picking of one pocket to place in another. I guess this is known as the New Math.
As for actual revenue, well, a significant portion of it ($250 million or so) will come from extracting a tax on hotel visitors over seven years, a plucking of Peter to pay for Paul, even if they have never even heard of the sport.
And the eternal optimists among the organizers hold to the view that somehow $1 billion-plus from one million people will flow to the province in tourism over the five years following the World Cup. We will never, ever, ever know if that is faintly true or one of those familiar delusions that typically accommodate sport economic impact models.
But the conceit of that assumption is profound. It suggests, for instance, that the global television production will take sufficient time from the Beautiful Game to show Beautiful British Columbia and attract three times the number of people actually at the matches next summer to visit by 2031.
Let’s be clear: that’s ludicrous.
Remember, Vancouver is by no means a focal point of the world’s largest sporting event. There are 16 host cities, all of them eager to be seen and subsidized by the travelling public, and the preliminary round games will be scheduled back-to-back. The TV shows won’t be sports interspersed with tourism videos a la the 2010 Winter Olympics; they will be hop-scotching the continent from game to game to game. I suspect any commercial benefit to Vancouver will only come through a paid (by taxpayers) advertisement on the broadcast.
Besides, the notion that Vancouver is some sort of mystery destination that will spur sudden discovery is in some marketer’s fertile imagination and ought not to invade ours. Canada is breathtaking and 小蓝视频 is one of its best-known features. The world broadly knows this. There won’t be—there can’t be—a million “a-ha” holiday ideas hatched while watching the World Cup. And when Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim says the post-event tourism allure embedded in the games’ business model is “a no-brainer,” he must not mean that it doesn’t require a lot of thinking to agree with the claim, but that it doesn’t involve a lot of thinking if you do.
The late John Horgan, then premier, initially balked at the offer to host, surmising that it would offer the FIFA governing body a blank cheque to come to town. He was wrong: the cheque will be festooned with zeroes at the end of a number. What he was also wrong about was to change his mind and consent to the spectacle, but those were times of budget surpluses and a centrist government with Donald Trump in the rear-view mirror, so he can be forgiven. These are times, though, of horrific deficits—probably $14 billion or $15 billion next time Premier David Eby fills us in—and nothing in the way of a prosperity plan or a competent steerage of the ship with Trump breathing on our necks.
Eby’s sport minister, Spencer Chandra Herbert, even mused this week that he’d be delighted to take on more than the seven games if any of the other 15 hosts get the buyer’s remorse of the FIFA fiasco. I say this as an avid sports fan and Whitecaps season ticket holder: cross your fingers those hosts are as indifferent to the plight of the taxpayer as is this lot.
Kirk LaPointe is a Lodestar Media columnist with an extensive background in journalism. He is vice-president in the office of the chair at Fulmer & Company.
