now, i have long held the view that "professional" sports are nowhere near as fantastical as they're hyped up to be - that while games are fun to play, the act of watching games, (especially golf), and beating each other to a pulp over which team you support is frankly retarded and that the entire edifice of modern sport is constructed around fleecing a childishly non-critical populace through marketing and pageantry... (naturally, this means i'm not invited to many sport-type gatherings and i get punched a good deal more often than is healthy... )The health and socioeconomic impacts of major multi-sport events: systematic review (1978-2008) wrote:Conclusions The available evidence is not sufficient to confirm or refute expectations about the health or socioeconomic benefits for the host population of previous major multi-sport events. Future events such as the 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, or the 2014 Commonwealth Games, cannot be expected to automatically provide benefits. Until decision makers include robust, long term evaluations as part of their design and implementation of events, it is unclear how the costs of major multi-sport events can be justified in terms of benefits to the host population.
it is, however, rewarding when the scientific community weighs in and reveals that, (in a result which can only be surprising to babies and politicians), there is zero evidence supporting the notion that professional sports has any benefits for the population in general...
would love to see a cochrane review approach to analysis on the data before actually adopting it as hard fact, but we've been fed so much political fertiliser over sport in the past it would make for a refreshing change...
tl;dr: science nerds prove sport's purported benefits are absolute bogus... and that the sharks can't play rugby...