The West Midlands: great sporting stories start here

Joel Lavery, Strategic Lead for Major Sporting Events at the West Midlands Growth Company, shares his learnings from more than three years as the West Midlands’ sporting specialist and looks ahead to an exciting pipeline of regional sporting activity

Earlier this autumn, the West Midlands Growth Company launched a dynamic new promotional campaign to transform perceptions of the region on the global stage. The campaign – called It Starts Here – celebrates the West Midlands’ innovation-led strengths, highlighting the ingenuity from our past and present, and positioning the region as a creative destination where “disruptive minds meet” and “breakthroughs begin”.

It’s a campaign, which is a great match for our sporting activity. The West Midlands has played a unique, instrumental role in shaping the UK’s sporting tradition. Lawn tennis and rugby started here. The region created the Football League, and also hosted the forerunner to the Olympic Games in Much Wenlock.

I was inspired by our It Starts Here messaging, as it perfectly encapsulates my journey since I started developing the West Midlands’ major sporting events strategy three years ago. We want to become known globally as a great sporting city region, hosting major sporting events which deliver positive benefits for our partners, business and communities. We want to bring a ‘golden decade’ of major sporting events to the West Midlands, and have made a promising start.

The start of this journey came when the international sporting spotlight fell on Birmingham during the 2022 Commonwealth Games. Delivered in just four and a half years and within budget, the Games were our postcard to the world. There would never be a better platform to promote our great city region, showcase our world class venues and tell our story to a global audience.

The 22nd Games delivered a series of significant wins for the West Midlands. The largest multi-sport event held in England for a decade brought people together for a festival of celebration. A record 1.5 million spectators bought tickets for the event, making it the most popular Commonwealth Games to ever be hosted in the UK. New infrastructure – including housing and transport improvements in Perry Barr, the new Sandwell Aquatics Centre and redeveloped Alexander Stadium – will have a lasting impact on communities across the region. The Games also delivered a series of important firsts – a carbon-neutral legacy, an integrated para sports programme and the first major multi-sport event to have more women’s than men’s medal events.

One of the most noteworthy aspects – and something that I believe has been overlooked in the post-event glow and subsequent debate about future Commonwealth Games – is the phenomenal success of our Business and Tourism Programme (BATP).

The £24 million programme, funded by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) and the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) and supported by the Department for Business & Trade (DBT), VisitBritain and the West Midlands Growth Company, aimed to use the spotlight created by the 2022 Commonwealth Games to embed positive perceptions of the West Midlands into the international mindset, bringing the region long-term economic benefits.

The programme was the reason I joined the West Midlands Growth Company. I was excited by what I called the first ‘grown up’ legacy programme, a first serious attempt to use the platform of a mega event to help drive tourism, trade and inward investment in a very targeted and collaborative way. With a substantial budget behind it, and the opportunity to focus on target markets such as Australia, India and Canada in the post-Brexit era, BATP attracted record visitor numbers and inward investment for the West Midlands. It provided us with the platform to promote our ambition nationally and internationally, and launch our sporting vision and plans for the wider region.

We said at the very outset that we wanted to attract sporting events with purpose and impact. Of all the many thousands of event prospects we could attract, we made it our intention to focus on those sports and audiences, which best aligned to our values. We are welcoming and inclusive, young and diverse, and bold, innovative, collaborative and sustainable.

This attracted a lot of interest from rights holders and international federations, who enjoyed their Birmingham 2022 experience and understood that we wanted to approach this in a unique, attractive way. We developed a pipeline of opportunities and helped to pique the interest of a number of high-profile national and international sporting event organisers.

Our ambitions were given a further boost when we were able to make the business case for a proportion of the £70 million of Commonwealth Games underspend to be set aside to establish a major events fund, into which our Local Authority partners could bid.

Alongside this new fund and with the support of industry experts, we developed a Major Events Evaluation Framework, based around our values – such as social and economic outcomes, sustainability, media profile and – importantly – power and partnership. We wanted to target the events, which would give us not only the biggest return on investment, but the most significant return on influence.

One of the first events to benefit from this investment was the bid to host the 2024 SportAccord World Sport and Business Summit, which took place in April at the ICC Birmingham. The event represented a unique opportunity for West Midlands partners to design and curate an event of global significance which sits at the intersection of sport, culture and business events.

Bringing together more than 1,700 decision-makers involved in the business of sport, the event was a collaborative effort between stakeholders such as DCMS, DBT, UK Sport, the WMCA and Birmingham City Council, and highlighted what is possible in a young, diverse and growing region.

With a conference theme focused on the ‘power of sport’ and diversity, inclusion and sustainability at the heart of the summit’s event programme, SportAccord enabled local leaders and regional bodies to make and strengthen relationships with more than 140 different international federations. The feedback we received was phenomenal, with attendees giving the summit an overall rating of 9/10. Expressions of interest have been sought from Birmingham and the West Midlands for over 200 new event properties, which are currently being evaluated and assessed.

In recent months, the West Midlands has hosted the FISE Xperience – an eye- catching festival for BMX, scooter and breaking, which saw thousands of young people descend on Wolverhampton. Leading up to the event, we ran an e-FISE event, enabling youngsters to show off their talents via an online competition. Blending the use of social media into the overall experience helped to create a successful, all-embracing spectacle, taking place for the first time outside France.

Building on the first Commonwealth Esports Championships in Birmingham in 2022, we’ve funded major esports events – with more than 15,000 fans coming to Solihull last April and many more watching online for the ESL One Grand Final. We’ll be welcoming many more young fans to the borough’s bp pulse LIVE arena next March for the 2025 Rocket League Championship Series. A few weeks before the main event, members of the public will be invited to take part in the ‘British Esports Cup’, with a business esports summit (WM Esports Unwrapped) also planned for the event weekend.

The Kabaddi World Cup will be taking place across the West Midlands next March. The sport is the fastest growing in India behind IPL Cricket, with staggering viewing figures of nearly 250 million people watching the Pro Kabaddi League finals in 2022. The World Cup – to be hosted in Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Coventry and Walsall – will be the first outside Asia, and builds on the success of the British Kabaddi League, which has just celebrated its third year.

We also led a successful bid to host the International Working Group (IWG) on Women and Sport – the world’s largest network dedicated to advancing gender equity and equality in sport, physical education and physical activity. Taking place in July 2026 in Birmingham, the event will unite more than 1,200 delegates, including ambassadors, thought leaders and academics in the global women’s sport movement, with a focus on realising change and empowering women.

With the return of world-class athletics to the West Midlands in 2026 thanks to the European Athletics Championships at the Alexander Stadium, the Invictus Games Birmingham 2027 promising an incredible, inspirational showcase to remember and UEFA Euro 2028 at Villa Park, we are well on our way to delivering our golden decade.

We hope that these events illustrate our commitment to attracting and hosting events, which match our values of youth, diversity, innovation and collaboration. They sit alongside regular fixtures on our West Midlands sporting calendar, which include the YONEX All England Open Badminton Championships, Premier League football, international cricket, the British Open Squash, the Horse of the Year Show, and British Masters golf, to name a few.

We have learned many lessons along the way and are far from the finished article, but we have a clear plan and set of guiding principles, which will help bring more exciting sporting events to the region. As the only UK destination to increase its position in the 2024 Ranking of Sporting Cities, Birmingham and the West Midlands is waking up to its massive potential as a major sporting events host. Our distinctive history has set the pace, and now – with substantial advances to infrastructure at venues such as the Birmingham Sports Quarter, The Belfry and Edgbaston Stadium – we’re ready to embrace and welcome more sporting championships.

The next chapter of the West Midlands’ sporting story… starts here.