The twenty-first-century SportsWorld: global markets and global impact

Twenty-first century sport is a global enterprise whose ramifications reverberate far beyond the playing fields, stadia and corporate offices. Elite commodified sports in particular have such significant economic clout that they have become dominant power players in regional and national political economies prompting trade deals and changes in government policy for the sake of winning the right to host a global mega-event. We call this new situation the SportsWorld and here we launch the project to examine how the SportsWorld operates in theory and practice.

The fundamentally anti-democratic and neoliberal economic foundations underpinning much of global sport development have been named and shamed during the past two decades. The world’s two largest sporting organizations, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA), have both faced major corruption crises and have been forced to instigate fundamental organizational and operational reforms. The most recent and significant of these was launched by the United States Justice Department against FIFA which had been embroiled in a rigged site selection scandal which effectively ended the career of its long-time President Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter who had managed to narrowly escape earlier scandals within the organization (Nauright 2015b).

As has been clearly demonstrated in these bidding processes, local community interests and democratic practices are often subverted as business and governments align in support of events-driven economies as part of pro-growth strategies. Business and political leaders embrace this powerful globalization process – ‘driven by a plundering financial capitalism which also controls all the trade on the planet’ (Perleman 2012) – wherein sports mega-events represent lucrative channels for local and regional economic development and as a way to facilitate urban redevelopment using the event as a catalyst to leverage additional resources (which they argue might not otherwise be as forthcoming). This strategy is justified through projecting tourism growth, touting resulting infrastructural improvements, and the generation of short-term employment opportunities. What we have been witnessing this century is a global sports-event-media-tourism complex (Nauright 2004, 2015a) driving political and economic development in an increasing number of countries as a strategy for attracting tourism, hard currency and global goodwill which, it is hoped, will translate into economic development and political and symbolic capital.

Diverting resources and subverting democracy

In the lead up to recent global sport mega-events, democratically elected governments enacted Olympic-related legislation that restricted public freedoms and rights and protected Olympic sponsors and Olympic-related logos, signs and phrases in draconian fashion to satisfy the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) requirements (Lenskyj 2002, 2008). Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard argued in the 1990s that criticism of the Olympics was ‘un-Australian’ in efforts to minimize protests against the requirements for Sydney 2000 and the country had to implement to satisfy the IOC. Protest and vigorous debate are hallmarks of the Australian tradition. Similarly in Britain, the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act of 2006 exacted even tighter control over what can and cannot be done or said in the lead up to the event and during the event itself. The subversion of democratic practices and public transparency were evident in South Africa in the lead up to the World Cup. In examining the covert government-led management practices in the city of Durban, for example, it is clear that the building of Moses Mabhida Stadium was part of a larger and secretive plan involving Durban municipal manager Michael Sutcliffe who managed the city’s 2010 build-up. While a new stadium in Durban was nice to have, it was not a FIFA requirement for hosting matches. The new stadium displaced spending that was badly needed elsewhere, but was constructed with a view to a future Olympic bid and as part of a massive urban beachfront redevelopment focused on increasing tourism and high-end leisure activities.

Today, elite sport appears more and more popular yet less and less accessible to the masses as corporate boxes and specialized event tourist packages price events beyond the means of the average citizen. In early 2013, the Joao Havelange Stadium in Sao Paulo was in disrepair and closed less than 18 months before the World Cup was due to start. Brazil managed to get through the event, but at tremendous economic and social cost. If Brazil with its vast and rapidly increasing economic resources struggles, if the United Kingdom subverts its own laws in order to host the London Games, if the Greek economy collapses in part due to the overspending and poor policy planning and implementation surrounding the Olympics, if South Africa spends millions to build a useless stadium to present the television images FIFA demands, where does that leave the vast majority of nations and cities around the world striving to get ‘on the map’ through sports? History matters, yet too often it is ignored or obliterated as the boosterist machine engages full throttle towards the objective of ‘selling’ an event or facility. Embracing an almost exclusive neoliberal, market-orientated approach, the idea among advocates of the FIFA World Cup was to position cities like Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town among a global hierarchy of competitive metropolitan areas. Yet, evidence from previous such events suggest that the results of hosting do not deliver on the promise of widespread community benefit. Basic infrastructure remains poor to non-existent for the majority of the population in those cities, unemployment is rampant, and crime is prevalent (Giampiccoli, Lee, and Nauright 2015).

The current state of affairs within the global sport industry are not unprecedented. As a human endeavour and commercial enterprise, sport has been inextricably linked to a broad spectrum of social, political, economic and moral trajectories (ethical/uplifting and dubious/sinister alike). The distinguished sportswriter Robert Lipsyte introduced the notion of Sportsworld – the title of his 1975 book – to characterize the then-emergent American sporting culture. In his words, it refers to a:

dangerous and grotesque web of ethics and attitudes, an amorphous infrastructure that acts to contain our energies, divert our passions, and socialize us for work or war or depression … a pacifier, safety valve … a concentration camp for adolescents and an emotional Disneyland for their parents … a buffer, a DMZ between people and the economic and political systems that direct their eyes. (Lipsyte 1975)

Sports critic, Marc Perleman (2012) suggests there is now even an entire mode of production that has emerged around globalized sport – a phenomenon that ‘plays a leading part in a new form of barbarism into which whole swathes of Western, Asian and Middle Eastern societies have collapsed’ and consequently, the ‘everyday lives of billions of individuals are thus contaminated, consumed, infected by its constant assaults, its capacity for insidious infiltration, its innocent-seeming mischief’. Jules Boycoff refers to Olympic spectacles as part of ‘celebration capitalism’ (Boykoff 2014), while Christopher Shaw calls the Games a ‘Five Ring Circus’ (Shaw 2008). These critiques plus those of Lenskyj and many others clearly demonstrate the psychic, political and economic power of the SportsWorld to shape the wider world we all live in.

Although the current trajectory of mega-global sport is the making of the power brokers and their state and private sector partners, the scientific study of sports – from physiology to management and marketing – has supported the global sports system as elite athletes are trained to go faster, higher, stronger (Beamish and Ritchie 2006) while others sell their talents to teams, sponsors and the media. Simultaneously, some historians and many sociologists studying sport have challenged the current system demonstrating the inequalities that it produces in humanistic terms, particularly as sport has become mapped onto the human body. While the majority of academic programmes around the world continue to ‘train’ students to become sport coaches, psychologists, athletic trainers, sport managers etc., a few are beginning to challenge the primacy of elite and global-corporatized sport.

Rather than simply viewing sport and development as another area in which to train students for sporting careers, this area offers the potential for a re-centring of sport in the academy as a transformative practice. However, if ill-conceived, sport and international development/sport and youth development run the risk of perpetuating the problem creating by neoliberal capitalism and its associated sporting enterprises rather than offering alternatives that include strengthening democracy, enhancing quality of life through health and fitness, and contributing to community-based sustainable economic futures.

In step with Andrews and Silk, we suggest that a physical cultural studies approach and one that is more centred on health and fitness rather than sport performance is a more sustainable future for the study of human movement and one centred within critical pedagogy that can claim a transformative future for democratic societies beginning with the freedom of expression through the joy of movement. Sadly many who advocate this view are tucked away in departments where ‘training’ of sports and fitness professionals is paramount. This is not an easy journey as it largely runs counter to conventional wisdom of global neoliberal capitalism whereby universities in general and academic programmes in particular have become increasingly commodified and have moved more and more towards training institutions for the service of global capital or what the British government cleverly calls ‘knowledge transfer’. Henry Giroux puts it this way: ‘Within the ongoing logic of neoliberalism, teaching and learning are removed from the discourse of democracy and civic culture and defined in often narrow instrumental and methodological terms. Increasingly stripped of its civic function, education becomes merely a matter of training and removed from any notion of power, critique, or imaginative inquiry’ (Giroux 2011, 68).

Following Giroux, we might advocate for ‘knowledge transformation’ rather than settling merely for knowledge transfer. This is an objective we plan for SportsWorld: The Journal of Global Sport, launched here as a special issue of Sport in Society. There is an emerging interest in Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) within sport management and sociology of sport (Nauright and Pope 2009; Schinke and Hanrahan 2012). Yet, even within this area originally conceived as a way to ‘do good’ in and through sport, there is much debate as to what the aims and objectives are and should be.

We hope that this special issue and subsequent journal SportsWorld: The Journal of Global Sport will provide a forum for scholars, students and practitioners to engage with fluid dynamics of global sport in all of its manifestations. We continue to find Earle Zeigler 2007 statement about the academic study of sport eminently useful for this endeavour. ‘What are we helping to promote and exactly why are we doing it?’ he asked. ‘I fear that we are simply going along with the seemingly inevitable tide. In the process, we have become pawns to the prevailing sport establishment by riding the wrong horse’ (Zeigler 2007). Getting back to basics, we should always be mindful of the explicit consequences of how we ‘do’ sport individually and collectively. Who gets to play? Who gets to watch? Who benefits? Why?

The papers in this collection demonstrate our vision of the convergence of theory and practice in examining global sport. The first contributions lay out the field for a future international sports studies, discuss the need to understand the crowd, as well as examining how we examine event legacies. We then turn to specific case studies in global sport, first exploring the transformation of a traditional Japanese sport into a globalized sport form. We then examine the bidding for major events, and the role of participants as ‘prosumers’ in producing their experiences while consuming the event. We then explore the areas of coaching and sport for development and peace. Taken together, these contributions demonstrate the array of topics and theories that combine to make up the twenty-first century SportsWorld. The SportsWorld is complex, contested, commemorated and increasingly cyber and real at the same time. We repeat a now often-quoted insight from the late Nelson Mandela: ‘Sport has the power to change the world, it has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than government in breaking down racial barriers’. Yet, we urge caution because sport also has the power to divide, to spark war, to promote violence and misogyny and to displace millions so the show can go on. At the end of the day, however, no one can deny the special place of sport in the global landscape and we ignore the SportsWorld at our own peril.

John Nauright
[email protected] Pope