The Multi-Sport European Championships Pioneers: Paul Bush

With the second edition of the multi-sport European Championships in Munich taking place 11-21 August and European Championships Management developing the host city appointment process for the third edition in 2026, the future looks bright for the innovative event that aims to ‘Elevate the Champions of Europe’. The inaugural European Championships in 2018 were a voyage of discovery for organisers. Paul Bush OBE, Director of Events, VisitScotland, explains why Glasgow and Scotland wanted the event, and what they gained from hosting it.

For Paul Bush, the events veteran who heads up EventScotland, a division of national tourism body VisitScotland, the fact that the European Championships 2018 was a brand-new event was part of its appeal.

The brainchild of experienced sports industry professionals Paul Bristow and Marc Joerg, who went on to form the management company European Championships Management, the inaugural edition of the was co-hosted by Glasgow (aquatics, cycling, golf, gymnastics, rowing and triathlon) and Berlin (athletics) in 2018.

Bush recalls: “We had faith and trust in Paul and Marc in terms of their vision. [Hosting a new event] also meant that we didn’t have to go through a long bidding process. They were mutual negotiations. That saves you a lot of time and money.”

That ‘vision’ cited by Bush was of a single, aggregated event bringing together the (existing) European Championships of several sports to take place at the same time and place: a whole that would be greater than the sum of its parts.

So, instead of individual sports federations following the traditional model of holding their own European Championships in isolation, they would combine forces with a broadcast partner to form a new multi-sports event, taking place every four years on a continent that, unlike, say, Asia (the Asian Games) or the Americas (the Pan American Games), had never had its own continental multi-sports championships.

It was a vision that was enthusiastically supported by the European Broadcasting Union, the umbrella body of the continent’s free-to-air public-service broadcasters, whose participation was crucial to the success of the event, according to Bush.

“Aggregating sports from a consumer perspective is much stronger than having them as single sports…”

He says: “There is now a very strong indicator – and the EBU have a very strong view – that aggregating sports from a consumer perspective is much stronger than having them as single sports, which was one of the drivers to get the European Championships off the ground.

“Very few people will probably watch rowing and triathlon at nine o’clock in the morning. But if you aggregate it as part of a daily programme, consumers change their habits in terms of what they watch. And that was borne out by 2018.”

For Glasgow and Scotland, which had been building up a major sports event-hosting portfolio that included the Commonwealth Games and golf’s Ryder Cup (at Gleneagles) in 2014 and the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in 2015, moving on to host the European Championships in 2018 was a “natural step,” according to Bush.

“The Commonwealth Games were successfully delivered in 2014,” he says, leading to “the regeneration of the east end of Glasgow, and new facilities: the Emirates Arena, the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome and also the OVO Hydro [the Emirates Arena and the OVO Hydro are both multi-purpose indoor arenas that are now used for a wide variety of sporting, cultural and community events].”

Bush continues: “We felt that the European Championships were right for us for a number of reasons. In particular, they had secured the EBU platform and because of that and the nature of the event, the European Championships were guaranteed to get the best athletes.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge of hosting the event, Bush admits, was explaining to the people of Glasgow and Scotland, and sports fans in general, the exact nature of the new aggregated championships.

“The normal person in society understands what the Olympic Games in London was and what the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow was,” he explains, “and they clamoured to get a ticket. It was much more difficult to get the message across as to what seven sports coming together in a European Championships format was.”

“The biggest framing and selling tool ultimately became the BBC…”

Bush credits the UK’s EBU member the BBC for helping to overcome the problem of explaining the novel event. “The biggest framing and selling tool ultimately became the BBC,” he says. “Wall-to-wall coverage on BBC1 and BBC2. They had a studio in George Square [in the centre of Glasgow]. People suddenly thought: ‘This is a big event!’

“TV did it in the end and people got excited by it, whereas when you go back to London 2012 and Glasgow 2014, we didn’t need to excite the population because people knew what it was.”

The success of the 2018 event in establishing the concept of the European Championships means, Bush believes, that Munich, host of the 2022 edition, “will have a much easier challenge to manage that, with people both in the city and in the country.”

It has also led to Glasgow and Scotland achieving another first. In 2019, they were awarded the inaugural combined UCI Cycling World Championships, which are set to take place over two weeks in August 2023, bringing together 13 individual UCI World Championships for cycling in a single place for the first time.

Costs and benefits

Bush says: “It’s important to be able to demonstrate the benefits which events can bring. The benefits are sporting, economic, cultural and social. For example, one benefit of building Emirates Arena for Glasgow 2014 is that it is also the venue for a very busy and popular gym open to all members of the community.”

Moreover, he says, “We were able to re-utilise the venues that were built for 2014 for the European Championships. The only new one [built for the championships] was BMX, which is now being used in 2023 [for the Cycling World Championships], so that’s a good legacy in terms of capital investment.”

Other benefits of hosting the European Championships included, Bush says: “The opportunity for British and Scottish athletes to compete on home soil, which I think is always important.

“There’s also a cultural benefit: it gives something back to the city in terms of something that people can take part in and get involved in. And it encourages people to lead healthier and more active lives.”

Close to Bush’s own heart are the tourism benefits of hosting the event, in part through the pictures of Glasgow and Scotland that were relayed around the world by championships broadcasters. “The TV pictures – it was on terrestrial platforms across key markets in Europe, like Germany, France and Italy – they’re important markets for us from a tourism destination point of view,” he says.

“To get the amount of coverage, which was similar to an Olympic platform, for the European Championships in Germany was huge…!”

“The number-one European tourism market for Scotland outside England is Germany, and to get the amount of coverage, which was similar to an Olympic platform, for the European Championships in Germany was huge!”

The Scottish Government and Glasgow City Council provided public investment to support the delivery of the event, with spectators and audience (of ticketed and free events) generated £37.8 million of expenditure, of which £27.3 million represented additional (new) spending. This in turn created £16.5 million of Gross Value Added (the net additional benefit going back into the economy).

Public investment in major events like the championships is important because of the wider benefits they bring. It’s about getting across to politicians and society that this is an investment comparable to investing in other services like health and education because it will give health benefits, societal benefits and educational benefits. “The investment was around reinvestment in facilities that we’d spent capital funds on in 2009 to 2012, reinvestment in our sports performance pathway programme, reinvesting in people in Glasgow in terms of giving them something back for their taxes. And then the whole educational, social, cultural programmes. Five of the 12 championship disciplines could be seen free of charge, which had an estimated audience of 178,000.

“We’ve now turned the model on its head. Most governments and even the United Nations have a strategic framework for life. We’re saying that we have a responsibility to demonstrate that this is not just about people winning medals. This is about how it can impact on young people, diversity, inclusivity, how we engage with society, how we engage with women, and that’s front and centre in everything we do in Scotland now – not just around 2018. We have to be able to report back on that.

“Unless you have these cross-cutting societal benefits, you’ll find it much harder to gain the funding for these events. Most people did it [bidding for major sporting events] from a tourism-positioning, world-positioning perspective 10 or 20 years ago, but we’ve got to be a bit cleverer and a bit smarter than that now.

“Volunteering is probably a classic example. There was not a volunteering culture in Glasgow before 2014. There is now a database of several thousands of people who want to continue to be volunteers at future events. That’s a societal, cultural change, and the fact they’ve been retained is a positive outcome of those events in 2014 and 2018. For 2023, the volunteer call will be oversubscribed because it always is in Scotland for every event that we do.”

The total TV audience for the 2018 European Championships in Glasgow and Berlin was 1.4 billion, while its public relations value from broadcast, online and social media was £256 million and it offered £197 million in brand exposure.

“If you’d told us beforehand we were going to get these figures out of it, we’d have said ‘No way!’…”

“Those are really powerful figures for future hosts,” says Bush. “If we look back retrospectively, I don’t think we really knew how big this was going to be from a platform perspective. If you’d told us beforehand we were going to get these figures out of it, we’d have said ‘No way!’ They blew us away.

Bush’s own fondest memory of the European Championships 2018 is of the last day when, after days of mainly good weather, the men’s road cycling race took place in the kind of rainstorm often associated with Glasgow.

“It rained terribly at the European Championships on the last day – like it did at the Commonwealth Games, ironically,” he says. “But the fact was that the people of Glasgow still stood on the streets during the cycling road race. They didn’t mind getting wet; they were quite happy to watch something that was quite special. It was great to see the people of Glasgow and Scotland come out and watch an elite sporting event in the most inclement of weather.”

So are the European Championships sustainable as an event in the long term, in sporting, social, economic and ecological terms?

“Absolutely,” Bush says. “And if you said to me, ‘would you host it again?’, I’d say ‘yes’. It’s a strong brand, it’s got a great platform and I think it can only grow and get better and be one of the stronger propositions from a continental perspective moving forward.

“It took some time for people to understand what it was, but I think the outcome, both in terms of TV ratings but also the delivery of sport – the city came alive again – showed that it was the right thing to do; and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in Germany!”