Major sports event, a useful tool to promote the city?

The purpose of this study is to analyse the strategy, local authorities use to promote their city by hosting major sports events. Also the benefits and negative aspects a major sports event can have will be investigated. This analysis will occur by reading literature and doing field research to judge why a city has to promote itself and why it uses major sports events. The research question is: are major sports events a useful tool top promote a city? Firstly there will be looked at the differences between cities mutually. This distinction will be made by the classification of world, European and national/ regional oriented cities. Hence the impact of major sports events will be described. At last three case studies will be investigated to see how cities can deal with major sports events as a promotion tool.