Sport Tourism Sustainability and Event Schedule Architecture: A Narrative Review of Competition Scheduling, Conference Realignment, and Carbon Emissions

Drawing on sport tourism, sport ecology, and environmental policy scholarship, this narrative review argues that the event schedule architecture should be positioned as a strategic tool for managing sport-tourism externalities. Evaluation against standard instrument-choice criteria shows that the schedule architecture performs strongly in regards to cost-effectiveness, uncertainty handling, and institutional compatibility, but faces serious political feasibility constraints rooted in regulatory capture, the absence of mandatory environmental impact assessment, and misalignment between organization-level commitments and league-level scheduling authority. Five research gaps are identified and matched with a research agenda covering political economy, quantitative instrument comparison, procedural reform design, demographic and geographic extension, and causal evaluation. The contribution frames the event schedule architecture as a strategic-management instrument for sport-tourism sustainability and connects it to Sustainable Development Goals 11, 12, 13, and 17.