Crisis and Disaster Management for Sport

Richard Shipway, Lee Miles, Richard Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138364578
• eBook ISBN: 9780429775482
• Topic: Physical Sciences

Crisis and Disaster Management for Sport is the first book to introduce key concepts and best practice in crisis and disaster management in sport and international sports events.

The book draws from multiple disciplines to provide insight into the issues and challenges involved in planning for, and managing, crises and disasters in the context of sport. With an initial focus on sports event and venue resilience, the book also explores social, community and individual resilience within sport and examines concepts and issues such as fandom, risk perception, crowd control and management, crisis communication and reputational risk and the growing challenges posed by climate change. The book includes real-world case studies as well as disaster management-related simulation and scenario-building exercises and looks ahead to what might be the most significant threats in future to the safe and sustainable management of sport.

With the devastating impacts of COVID-19 illustrating the central importance of resilience and proper preparation for crises and disasters, this book is an essential read for all researchers, students, practitioners and policy-makers working in sport, tourism, entertainment, leisure and critical event studies.

1
AN INTRODUCTION TO MANAGING CRISES AND DISASTERS IN SPORT

Key learning objectives

This chapter will:

• Introduce the student to the study of crisis and disaster management within the context of the sports industry, and more specifically with reference to international sports events (ISEs);
• Explain the structure and rationale for the book and provide a contextual overview of each chapter;
• Explore the different levels of analysis of studies on international sports events and their interaction with studies on crisis and disaster management;
• Provide a working definition of the concept of resilience and its applicability in a sport-related setting;
• Introduce the ‘International Sports and Venue Resilience Continuum Model’, which helps better understand the concept of resilience within a sport setting.

Introduction

Overview

‘Crises’, ‘disasters’ and ‘emergencies’ are commonly used terms that constitute the typical vocabulary used to describe and categorise the major threats and hazards to life that can occur at, and during, international sports venues and events where global attendances regularly exceed 100,000 people. Some of these threats and hazards are classified as ‘natural’ (such as floods, earthquakes and storms), whilst others are commonly referred to as ‘man-made’. Both natural and man-made threats occur that are publicly explained as unexpected or expected, random or intentional. However, governments and event organisers today are under increased scrutiny to justify the credibility of arguing that any hazard or threat is genuinely unexpected, whether random or intentional (Shipway and Miles, 2020).

The interdisciplinary study of crisis, disaster and emergency management has become increasingly sophisticated. Critical issues such as governance, business resilience and continuity, international humanitarian assistance, climate change and sustainable development, strategic communication and media management as well as core ‘duty of care’ systems, such as casualty tracking and victim identification, have received considerable attention both within the academic literature and in professional studies and development.

The authors of this book have identified, however, a consistent lack of work in identifying from within this growing body of literature of crisis and disaster management those key synergies, concepts and research agendas that could be usefully applied to inform the literature on sport management studies.

This book seeks, therefore, to critically examine the interaction between sports events, venues, stadia and arenas within the overall context of national, regional and local crisis and disaster management. The book will explore eight key thematic chapters (two to nine) and conclude with the identification of future multi-disciplinary directions for managing crises and emergencies in sport.

Aims of the book

The protection of people, property and the environment constitutes a central pillar of a resilient society. Indeed, a resilient society is one in which each sector of society has been included within a ground-up strategy for risk reduction, early warning, response and recovery that has been, itself, enabled by top-down legislation, empowerment and resourcing.

The sports industry is one such sector of society. Indeed, this sector has become, along with society as a whole, progressively more complex with higher levels of connectivity leading to increased public awareness and interest not only in ‘what’ crises, emergencies and disasters are likely to affect major sports events but also in ‘how’ such events could have been managed. This book is, therefore, timely, as increased public and media interest in both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ is leading to demands for greater effort and transparency in public safety in sports events coupled with a growing expectation for duty of care within the industry. These requirements open up the need to address the duty of care required of event organisers, event location owners and wider governance and response within both the industry and the host country and community. In addition, there is a need to actively demonstrate such duty of care to a wider international audience, itself informed by a 24/7 media, in order to demonstrate competence in business resilience and trust in business reputation. The catastrophic global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic further illustrated the need for better understanding resilience within the context of international sports events (ISEs) and likewise for the wider domain of festivals, events, urban recreation gatherings, tourism and entertainment venues.

The book starts with this introductory chapter, in which the management of crises and disasters at sports events and venues is discussed in general terms, before continuing with eight main chapters that scope the resilience landscape for sport. These chapters range from exploring the criticality of venue and event resilience to discussing social, community and individual resilience perspectives. The book also includes chapters that address issues linked to sports fandom and risk perceptions, along with crowd control and crowd management within the sporting context.

Building resilience is a consistent theme that threads its way throughout the chapters. We look at the public and private dimensions of sporting resilience by drawing upon recent emergencies. For example, in the UK societal context, the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire and the Ariana Grande Manchester bombing are both examined and lessons identified. In the sports events context, the 2015 Stade de France attacks and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings are also explained, with lessons identified. Central throughout this text is a close scrutiny of crisis communication and the related issues for sports managers linked to reputational risk, culpability and litigation.

Whilst the majority of this textbook adopts a somewhat traditional format and structure, the penultimate chapter takes an innovative approach towards the use of emergency management simulations and the use of crisis and disaster management scenarios. This chapter advocates the use of scenario-planning exercises within a sports context that students can test, whilst also adopting various role-play situations. We conclude with a final, broader chapter that considers a range of future directions for managing crises and disasters in sport that draws from empirical research findings and the broader interdisciplinary study of crises, disasters and emergency management. It is envisaged that this book has relevance for all sport management-related degree courses, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Empirical results and conceptual frameworks, ensuring a robust and rigorous academic foundation, underpin the book. The textbook addresses fundamental issues that have contemporary resonance for studies in sport management, as well as broader studies in leisure, tourism, event and entertainment management.

Synopsis of book chapters

There will be a diverse range of typical issues when dealing with disasters in a sports event context. These will range from situational awareness, stress upon host and sporting communities or coordination of multiple sport and non-sport agencies to the overloading of medical services at the sports event/venue, the ability to identify and track victims and all aspects of media and communication. This book will address a range of these areas.

The basic structure of each chapter will include an introduction followed by a summary and a selection of sport-related case studies to support the underlying chapter theme. These often draw on the emergency and disaster management literature. A series of practical exercises, activities and tasks are provided towards the end of the chapter.

In this first chapter, following the overview of the structure and content of the book, we first review the importance of managing crises and disasters in sport and explore general issues relating to building resilience and planning for emergencies at sports events and venues. In doing so, we assess differing benchmarks used by sport management to define and classify major international sports events and suggest that, at present, crises and disaster management considerations are largely ignored or underestimated, even though such classifications have major implications and connotations in terms of understanding resilience. Second, this chapter evaluates how relevant approaches and perspectives from crises and disaster management can provide value-added to sport management and understanding major sporting events and where there are appropriate synergies for development in the future. Finally, the chapter concludes by arguing how the authors’ self-developed concept of ‘sport event and venue resilience’ can provide further added value in understanding why and how sports events, stadiums, venues and arenas practice resilience and seek to become more robust at handling the onset of crises and disasters.

This introductory chapter logically progresses to Chapter 2, in which we assess the criticality of sport venue resilience. From a crisis and disaster management perspective, sports events and venues have important spatial and temporal considerations. First, they can be understood through the disaster management lenses of critical infrastructure (CIs), even before discussing and factoring in the complex characteristics of size, scale, reach and duration that characterise sports events. The severity of the impact of a crisis or disaster at a major sporting event can be largely contingent on the differing degrees of criticality and vulnerability of each of the particular venues and the resilience of an event to proceed with or without them. Second, venues often have multiple usages (space) and are in constant use (time). Third, sports venues also host non-sport events such as indoor/outdoor concerts, where performers, like sports teams, attract large crowds. Thus, the criticality of venue resilience for future sports events is more complicated than it first appears, and Chapter 2 explores these challenges. By bringing in a resilience perspective from the literature on disaster management, the criticality of the relationship between sports venues and events can be better understood within sport management.

Chapter 3 is entitled ‘Fandom and risk perceptions in sport’ and looks at risk perceptions of sports events and venues, drawing from previous work within the tourism domain and examining risk perceptions of sports fans. This chapter includes our empirical findings from the 2016 Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games. The chapter assesses the levels of risk, risk analysis, risk management and resilience associated with the size and levels of internationalisation, complexity and importance/resonance of major sports events. The chapter argues that sports events are not typical tourism attractions and sports venues can always be treated as standard infrastructure, given the specific nature of sports events and their audiences.

In this chapter, we examine the role of fans as a particular form of sport tourist and identify their perceptions of risk, which shape where they travel and seek to identify where their perceptions may be different from those usually equated with tourists or the travelling public. Given that fandom incorporates tribal allegiances and qualities, the chapter tries to understand whether sports fans are more open to risk-taking (or less risk-averse) in attending sports events and tournaments around the world, since they prioritise fan allegiance and fan behaviour more strongly. One of the underlying argument proposed in the chapter is that there may be specific assumptions relating to the behaviour of fans and sports crowds that make them different from the normal assumptions about crowd control used in emergency and or disaster planning.

Chapter 4 begins to explore linkages between sport management and disaster management in terms of understanding the nuances and roles of social/community and individual resilience. We argue that it is useful to develop more advanced appreciations of the wider communities in terms of their respective community resilience and its relationship to sport event legacies. In the chapter, greater emphasis is placed on understanding the role and participation of community resilience in order to support and facilitate disaster management and to not focus exclusively on one specific site (or in this case, a sports venue or event). We also explore the particular nature of sports fans and wider sporting communities and key stakeholders as individuals and their individual resilience. In summary, the chapter is based around three central notions: social, community and individual resilience.

There is clear overlap and synergies between Chapters 3 and 5. Following the previous review of fandom and risk perceptions, and the detailed explorations of social, community and individual resilience, Chapter 5 then moves to look specifically at crowd management and control. This topic remains an increasingly important element of venue safety and security. Though spectator security has always been a priority, large-scale threats, such as terrorist attacks or natural hazards, have become even greater management concerns. As such, the importance of communities, identities and the social constructions of fans and their fan bases assumes greater importance from the sport management perspective, and these ideas are explored. Studies from sport management understanding the collective identities and behaviour of fans can help further understand the identity functions of crowds, which in turn can enhance risk assessments and contribute to more accurate exercising and simulations (see later coverage in Chapter 9), which constitute a key part of crisis and disaster management studies.

The sixth chapter is relatively broad and is entitled ‘Sport event resilience and cascading disasters’. The chapter suggests that each crisis or disaster will involve a unique mix of impacts and consequences, but there are likely to be commonalities with both similar events in different areas and past events in the same area. As such, we argue that given the repetitive nature of disasters, there is no excuse for failing to plan for them. Additionally, there is both a moral and a practical imperative to plan in order to reduce the effects.

One major theoretical contribution made by this chapter is its exploration of the concept of resilience in relation to how sports events and venues incorporate more sophisticated assumptions of ‘cascading disasters’. Studies within crisis and disaster management are concerned with this phenomenon, whereby events, a primary threat and/or an incident, are then followed by a sequence of ‘secondary hazards’ or events. Like ‘toppling dominoes’, the implications of the first event (topples the first domino) lead to a sequence of events and impacts (with other dominoes toppling). Each of these subsequent events has its own importance, degree of damage and degree of consequence. Cascading events therefore are events that occur as a direct or indirect result of an initial event, and this concept will be critically examined, with the use of sporting examples. It is suggested this is an innovative approach and a significant contribution within the sport event management literature.

Chapter 7 then examines both the public and private dimensions of sports and venue resilience. Often emergency and disaster planning has been seen as a primarily public sector-orientated activity given that disasters often require collective responses involving state actors, public agencies and first responders. In the sports context, there is also an assumption that a disaster would overwhelm existing social systems and that responding to a sporting disaster will inevitably involve escalation that requires regional, national and even international coordination and assistance. It is not always the case that sports venues and sports facilities are public owned, and similarly, the go...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• 1 An introduction to managing crises and disasters in sport
• 2 Criticality of sports events and venue resilience
• 3 Fandom and risk perceptions in sport
• 4 Synergising social, community and individual resilience perspectives
• 5 Crowd management, control, safety and behaviour
• 6 Sport event resilience and cascading disasters
• 7 Synergising public and private dimensions of sport event and venue resilience
• 8 Crisis communication for sport: handling issues of reputational risk, litigation and culpability
• 9 Simulating disaster scenarios for international sports events and international sports venues
• 10 Future directions for managing crises and disasters in sport
• Index