Sports mega-events and shaping the international image of states: how hosting the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cups affects interest in host nations

The research presented in the article is dedicated to the issue of utilizing sports to positively affect a state’s image according to the example of staging sports mega-events. The aim of the research was to analyze if and to what extent hosting sports mega-events allows states to increase their international visibility and familiarity. The analysis was undertaken on the basis of fluctuations in the number of Google searches for the names of the countries that hosted the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cups between 2004 and 2018. Linear econometric models were constructed in order to measure the scale of the influence of hosting respective sports mega-events on the number of searches for respective countries in the Google search engine.