There used to be a time, not so long ago, when the announcement of the next Asian Games venue was an eagerly anticipated affair. The element of suspense would be palpable, with at least a handful of bidding cities in the fray — but that does not seem to be the case anymore.

The ad hoc manner in which the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) confirmed Indonesia, the only interested country, as hosts for the 2018 showpiece last week in Incheon betrayed almost a sense of relief on their part in doing so.

With Vietnam pulling out despite being awarded the Games earlier and India missing the deadline to catch the bus, the Asian body went through with the formalities a day before the general assembly and went on to ‘justify’ the decision the next day.

Does this mean the ‘Olympics of Asia’, as it’s called, is slowly becoming a behemoth nobody is willing to host? The fears of relevance of the future Games found a resonance in the statement of Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) supremo, when he said in a keynote address in Incheon that future Games hosts would have to prove their ‘sustainability’.

While Bach was speaking about the IOC mulling a shake-up of the bidding criteria for future Olympic Games, the same principle applies for its Asian equivalent. Like its predecessors in South Korea, which has hosted both Olympics and Asiad successfully, Incheon has hardly put a foot wrong so far — but the tag of being the most indebted city in the country (thanks to the nearly $2 billion cost, Dh7.356 billion, for the Games) already weighs heavy on them.

And this is in no way to suggest that the current hosts have overspent. According to figures circulating in the media, Busan incurred a bill of $2.9 billion in 2002, Doha shelled out $2.8 billion in 2006, while Guangzhou overshot them all in 2010 with a prohibitive $20 billion. It’s the cost factor that clearly deterred Hanoi from putting pressure on its fledgling economy from being in the running for the next edition, which was originally scheduled for 2019.

Interestingly enough, the Incheon Games are not short on corporate sponsorship at all — the lifeline of any sporting endeavour in today’s context. A host of leading Korean brands like Samsung, Shinhan Bank, Korean Air, SK Telecom and Kia Motors are the main sponsors, along with official partners in Tissot and Otsuka.

However, industry watchers feel that, while the Games will have no dearth of takers in developed sports markets like Korea, China or Japan — the scenario is bound to change when it’s the turn of smaller Asian countries. To this end, it’s time the OCA launched into a major hard-sell to rope in a number of long-standing partners like the IOC, Fifa or International Cricket Council (ICC).

It’s a challenge that the Asian body needs to tackle up front before this prestigious product loses it’s relevance further.