As the guest editors of this Special Issue in Sport in Society, we would like to begin this editorial by paraphrasing sociologist Maurice Roche, who must be considered a key scholar in the social and historical study of mega-events. For Roche (2000), who initially and predominantly focused on the Olympics and World Fairs, mega-events constitute some of the modern society’s great shows. In his 2000 book, Roche further concluded vis-à-vis mega-events that ‘[w] e are likely to see much more of them, in both “official” and “alternative” forms, as “global society” and its culture begin to take on a more patterned and institutionalised character in the early generations of the twenty-first century’(p. 235).

Fast forward 20 years, and the social scientific study of sport mega-events has increasingly taken new turns and followed new avenues. As Roche (2017) argued more recently, mega-events always have the capacity to surprise us and provide us with a glimpse of broader processes and tendencies at play in the global life. Here, we concur with Roche and, in distinctive ways, this Special Issue is firmly rooted in such perspective. Sport mega-events, in our view, can help us better understand and make sense of the world that we live in. However, if we are to expand our knowledge on exactly how or why mega-events have the capacity to surprise us and tell us new things about societies, then we would argue that a continued and comparative study of megaevent is as necessary as it is scholarly important in the current world. It is well-established that sport mega-events are socially, culturally, financially, politically and historically important and valuable. For example, in the modern world, sport mega-events are commonly utilized by states as tools for soft power, nation branding and public diplomacy (Rookwood and Adeosun 2021). Events are collectively memorized and work as reference points in communities’ social calendars and in the broader public structuring of time (see Roche 2003). And, indeed, each sport mega-event is filled with anticipation of sporting success, Olympic records, defining moments and atmospheric expectations. Though, sport mega-events must not be unequivocally glorified. They have also been subject to increased opposition, criticism and scrutiny. These typically relate to their astronomical economic costs, their physical, social and spatial impacts on public space and their failure to produce those ‘legacies’ that regularly are promised or exaggerated in the bidding stages (Boykoff 2020). All these social realities feed into the three subthemes of this Special Issue. These include governance, impactsand controversies. As we argue, these three themes will follow most–if not all–mega-events in the 2020s. Simultaneously, these subthemes often inter-link and may reinforce each other, as we will unpack further next.