Long-term cultural and sporting events legacy

Open UKRI funding opportunity · Grant. Closes 2026-12-01. Total fund £1.32 million. Opportunity page: https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/long-term-cultural-and-sporting-events-legacy/

Apply for funding to research the long-term impact and legacy of major sporting and cultural events in the UK, focusing on running a live experimental evaluation of a major event that fills gaps in existing methodologies.

You must be based at a UK research organisation eligible for AHRC funding.

The full economic cost (FEC) of your project can be up to £1.32 million. AHRC will fund 80% of the FEC.

Projects will be funded up to a maximum of 34 months and must start on 1 May 2027 and must be completed by 31 March 2030.

What we're looking for Aim

Major events are a primary policy intervention for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), intended to drive local investment, job creation, and social outcomes. However, evaluating the long-term legacy of these events, particularly in a way that is compliant with established government monitoring and evaluation principles, has historically been difficult. An inconsistency in methodologies, short-term funding structures, and a lack of robust counterfactuals, have limited the sector’s ability to measure impacts once a core event concludes or to compare outcomes accurately across different interventions.

To look at addressing these challenges, the DCMS Research and Development Science and Analysis Programme published new research in March 2026 on Measuring the legacy and impact of major events. This pilot project delivered a proposed core set of baseline metrics for long-term tracking, developed evaluation methodologies utilising counterfactuals to establish causality, and tested these models by retrospectively analysing the legacy of a varied set of past events, including the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Women’s and Men’s Cricket World Cups (2017 and 2019 respectively), the UK City of Culture Programme…