A Further Thought

That the Olympics is ultimately deleterious to their host cities is a counter-intuitive but well-established argument. The idea is that after the crowds leave, there is a big Olympic village and big Olympic stadia and none of them are seeing substantial use. Moreover, the costs to build the village and venues leave the city in a great deal of debt. According to the linked article, Montreal ran up so much debt that it took 29 years to pay it off. I was living on the South Side of Chicago when Chicago proposed its bid for the 2016 Olympics. Though many Chicagoans were excited, some South Siders were angry that their open spaces would be turned into stadia and even that rising property values would force out current residents. You can read about the kerfuffle here.
This post argues, with no evidence, that the World Cup does the opposite. The argument rests on the dilute nature of the World Cup: the entire nation participates, not just one city. This helps financially, since costs are absorbed nationally, or over many cities and not just one. More importantly, I suspect, all the host cities gain improvements, but none of the problem of too many buildings concentrated in one area.
This is just a hunch and I'm probably not going to research it more thoroughly. However, what little research I have done contradicts my thesis while not addressing the dilute city argument. From the above NYT article:

"Studies of the 2006 World Cup in Germany showed that the country experienced little in the way of improvements in income or employment figures, just as most economists would have expected. However, surveys noted a noticeable improvement in residents’ self-reported levels of happiness following the event. The World Cup didn’t make the Germans rich, but it appeared to make them happy."