It was announced this month that Glasgow will take over as the new hosts of the Commonwealth games for 2026, after Victoria in Australia pulled out over rising costs. This has raised many questions around the viability of the Commonwealth Games.

It has taken over a year since Victoria announced they were scrapping the Games to find a replacement host. This is mostly due to the enormous cost of hosting a large sporting event. Victoria’s costs were set to rise to over $6 billion (AUD), far over the $2.6 billion they initially allocated themselves.

This is not the first time the Games have had to change hosts due to financial constraints. The last Commonwealth games in 2022 was meant to originally be hosted in Durban in South Africa but costs were too great. But in this case, the Commonwealth Games had five years to find a replacement, later found in Birmingham as the British Government swooped to the rescue of the Games.

“The greater knowledge around the cost of hosting will only turn more potential host cities away”

Glasgow’s Games’ will therefore be a slimmed down version to cut costs. It will host 10 sports instead of the usual 18 and the total budget of the games is expected to be £114 million. The lack of an athletes’ village and scaled down opening and closing ceremonies are part of how the city expects to keep to this budget.

Victoria’s state auditor called the cancelled Games a “waste of taxpayer money” and the State Premier, Daniel Andrews, described it as “all cost and no benefit”. This damning review of the Games doesn’t bode well for the event as it nears its hundredth year in 2030. The greater knowledge around the cost of hosting will only turn more potential host cities away.

The Commonwealth Games isn’t the only event that suffers the financial burden of hosting. The Olympics has a marred past of cost overruns, debt and dilapidated venues. The 1976 Olympics left Montreal paying off debt for three decades and the Rio Olympics in 2016 required the city to receive a $900 million bailout by the federal government, and nearly half of the venues becoming disused post-games.

However the Games is important for sports that aren’t usually represented at the Olympics, such as netball, cricket, squash and lawn bowls. The Commonwealth Games offers athletes from these sports to perform on a greater stage than the international competitions each event individually holds.

“An event which… seems to be hanging desperately onto the fleeting togetherness of the Commonwealth”

All this begs the question on whether the Commonwealth Games is worth it anymore. An event which began as the British Empire Games, seems to be hanging desperately onto the fleeting togetherness of the Commonwealth.

The notion that the Games gives smaller nations and territories an opportunity to compete on the global stage in a way that the Olympics doesn’t is true. Smaller territories that don’t compete individually in the Olympics can compete at the Commonwealth games, such as the British Virgin Islands, Niue and even Wales.

But due to the cost of hosting the Games, these smaller nations and territories will never have the opportunity to host the Games themselves. The event having only been hosted outside of the UK, Australia and Canada three times.

Even if the cost is becoming less of an issue, with Glasgow possibly starting a new trend of a scaled-down Games, does this make the event even less worth it? Will athletes want to attend a multi sporting event which only has 10 sports, where they’ll be housed in student accommodation and receive a budget reception. The BBC was concerned in 2016 that big sporting stars wouldn’t even turn up to compete at the Games and that this would affect viewership. Popular athletes like Tom Peaty and Dina Asher-Smith did in fact show up, but concern from the home broadcaster doesn’t bode well for faith in the Games.

All in all, the Games in 2026 are looking like they will go ahead, albeit at a smaller scale than seen before. But the question is what will happen to the Commonwealth Games beyond that. It’s hundredth year event is still yet to have a host, with two cancelled bids already. Will the Games have to continue in this stripped down format or will they go out with a bang in 2030 and call it quits?