What LinkedIn Polling Tells Us About World Cup, the Future Economy and China’s Zero COVID Policy

If these poll results are anything to go by, we should cut back the budget for the Olympics and ditch Meta stock.

Lance Ng
5 min readNov 30, 2022
Photo by Parker Johnson on Unsplash

The Olympics and World Cup are both global events that take place once every four years. They pit the world’s athletes against each other at a inter-country level. Only difference being, the Olympics hosts a variety of sports, whereas the World Cup does just one — soccer.

Typically they do not take place at the same time. But imagine if they did, would most people watch the Olympics? Or the World Cup?

That was the question I posed recently to my LinkedIn followers. 180 of them voted, and the single sport event won.

Unscientific survey notwithstanding, what really fascinates me is the cost-benefit analysis. The Olympics typically cost a lot more than the World Cup to organize. In fact, according to The New York Times, “every Olympics since 1960 has run over budget, at an average of 172 percent…”

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