An Undervalued Economic Sector

Sport occupies an unusual position in economic policy. Governments spend on it, celebrate it and use it extensively in national branding, yet it is rarely subjected to the same strategic analysis applied to manufacturing, energy or financial services. It is filed under culture, recreation or youth affairs rather than economic development, and consequently its potential is seldom fully realised.

This is a significant oversight. Sport generates employment across a remarkably wide skill range. It attracts visitors who spend in hospitality, retail and transport. It creates demand for construction, broadcasting, technology and professional services. It produces international visibility that would cost enormous sums to purchase through conventional promotion. And unlike many sectors, it delivers measurable social returns in public health, youth engagement and community cohesion alongside its economic output.

My involvement in this area, including my role as Vice President of IFA7, the International Seven a Side Football Association, for the UK and the UAE, has convinced me that the countries treating sport as economic infrastructure rather than as a leisure expense are capturing returns that others are leaving unclaimed.

The Employment Case

The most persistent misunderstanding about sport as an industry is that its employment consists of athletes. In reality, athletes represent a very small fraction of the jobs sport creates.

A functioning sports sector requires coaches, physiotherapists, groundskeepers, facility managers, event organisers, security personnel, medical staff, referees, administrators, marketing professionals, broadcast technicians, data analysts, equipment suppliers and hospitality workers. Around any significant venue, an ecosystem of catering, transport, accommodation and retail activity develops. Construction and maintenance of facilities generates further employment in the built environment sector.

Critically, this employment spans the full skill spectrum. It includes entry level roles accessible to young people with limited formal qualifications and highly specialised professional positions requiring advanced training. For economies with large youth populations and significant underemployment, that breadth is unusually valuable. Few sectors offer credible pathways from an unskilled first job to a professional career within the same industry.

Tourism and the Visitor Economy

Sports tourism has grown into one of the more resilient segments of international travel. Spectators travel for events. Participants travel for competitions, training camps and amateur tournaments. Both groups tend to spend generously and, importantly, they often travel outside conventional peak seasons, which improves utilisation of hospitality capacity throughout the year.

The Gulf region has demonstrated this strategy with considerable sophistication. Sustained investment in venues, event hosting capability and supporting hospitality infrastructure has established the UAE as a recognised destination for international competition across numerous disciplines. The economic effect extends well beyond ticket revenue into aviation, hotels, restaurants and retail, and it contributes to a broader diversification agenda by building sectors that do not depend on hydrocarbon income.

My consultancy work with Marco Polo Resorts on tourism and hospitality development intersects directly with this. Sport and hospitality are not separate propositions. A destination that hosts events without adequate accommodation, transport and visitor experience captures only a fraction of the available value, while a destination with excellent hospitality but no reason to visit at particular times struggles with seasonality. Planned together, each strengthens the other.

Visibility That Cannot Be Purchased

International perception is an economic asset with real consequences. It affects tourism demand, investor confidence, talent attraction and the ease with which a country's businesses can operate abroad. It is also notoriously difficult to change through conventional promotion, because audiences discount advertising almost automatically.

Sport alters perception in a way that promotion cannot, because it is experienced as entertainment rather than persuasion. A successful international event places a country in front of global audiences in a context of competence, hospitality and modernity. Athletes competing internationally become recognisable representatives of their nation. The association formed is emotional rather than transactional, and it persists.

For economies whose international image lags behind their actual capability, this is a genuinely strategic instrument. Pakistan, for instance, possesses considerable sporting heritage and a young, enthusiastic population. Developed with proper governance and investment, sport represents one of the more accessible routes to reshaping international perception, with economic benefits that extend into sectors having no direct connection to the games themselves. My broader work on investment facilitation across these markets is outlined within my advisory practice.

Health as an Economic Variable

Public health is an economic issue that is frequently discussed as though it were purely a social one. Populations with high rates of inactivity related illness carry substantial costs in healthcare expenditure and lost productivity. Chronic conditions reduce workforce participation and increase absence. These costs accumulate quietly over decades and dwarf the investment required to prevent them.

Grassroots sports infrastructure is among the most cost effective preventive health interventions available. Accessible facilities, organised community competition and school programmes produce measurable improvements in population health at a fraction of the cost of treating the conditions they help prevent. The difficulty is political rather than economic. The expenditure occurs now and the savings appear over a generation, which does not align neatly with electoral cycles.

This is precisely the kind of long horizon investment that benefits from institutional advocacy outside the political cycle, and it is one reason I regard sport as belonging in economic planning rather than in a discretionary spending category.

Inclusion Is Not a Side Issue

A sports system that excludes people arbitrarily is failing economically as well as ethically. Every person prevented from participating represents lost talent, lost consumption and lost social benefit.

I encountered this directly through a campaign that occupied five years of sustained effort, working to secure the first professional boxing licence in the United Kingdom for a boxer with Type 1 diabetes. The exclusion had not been imposed maliciously. It reflected a regulatory framework built on outdated medical assumptions that had simply never been revisited. Changing it required medical evidence, engagement with governing bodies, persistence through repeated setbacks and the patience to sustain the case over years.

The outcome mattered for one athlete, but its significance was structural. It established a precedent, demonstrating that a category of exclusion could be examined and revised on the basis of current evidence. Every such precedent widens the pool of people able to participate, and a wider pool produces both better competition and a larger economic base. Governance reform of this kind is among the highest return interventions available in sport, because it requires very little capital and permanently increases capacity.

Building Systems Rather Than Events

The most common failure in sports led development is over reliance on individual events. A country secures a major tournament, invests heavily in venues and delivers a successful competition. Then the event concludes, the venues fall into partial use and the legacy is a maintenance liability rather than an economic asset.

Durable value comes from systems, not occasions. That means facilities designed with credible post event use built into the plan from the outset. It means grassroots and youth structures that continuously produce participants, coaches and officials. It means governance capable of managing competition, resolving disputes and safeguarding participants over decades. It means commercial development of domestic leagues so that sport generates revenue rather than requiring perpetual subsidy.

My work with IFA7 across the UK and the UAE addresses this through format innovation. Seven a side football requires substantially less land, lower construction cost and smaller squads than the eleven a side game, which makes competitive structures viable in urban environments and in markets where full scale facilities are financially unrealistic. Accessibility of format is not a compromise. It is a mechanism for widening participation, and participation is where every subsequent benefit originates.

Where Private Capital Fits

Sport cannot be developed by public funding alone, nor should it be. Private capital brings commercial discipline, marketing capability and an incentive to build sustainable revenue rather than to spend an allocated budget.

The appropriate division of responsibility is reasonably clear. Governments are best placed to provide grassroots access, school programmes and the governance framework, because these produce broad public benefit that private investors cannot easily capture. Private capital is better suited to professional competition, commercial venues, broadcasting, sponsorship and hospitality, where returns are identifiable and can be earned.

The partnership fails when these roles are confused: when public money underwrites commercial ventures that should stand alone, or when private operators are expected to fund public health objectives without a route to return. Clarity about who is responsible for what, established at the outset, prevents most of the disappointment that follows sports investment programmes.

A Sector Worth Taking Seriously

Sport deserves a place in economic strategy rather than a line in a cultural budget. It creates employment across the skill range, attracts visitors, improves health, reshapes international perception and builds social cohesion, and it does so with capital requirements that are modest compared with most industrial development.

Realising that potential requires treating sport with the same seriousness applied to any other sector: proper governance, long term planning, honest assessment of facility utilisation and a clear division of responsibility between public and private participants. The countries that have done this are already collecting the return. A record of engagements and events across this work can be viewed in the photographic archive, and enquiries regarding sports development advisory are welcome through my office.