Introduction: ethical concerns in sport governance

Sport governance no longer stirs public opinion only when scandals surface; it has become a persistent concern for a number of stakeholders. A combination of the inexorable presence of the media, people’s scepticism of those who run their favourite sports, and vagaries of the moral economy of global sport capitalism since the late twentieth century has made governance a newsworthy, momentous and meaningful aspect of elite sports. The media has been attentive to the financial irregularities, the struggles for recognition, and the political and exploitative aspects of sport governance that have come to light rather frequently since the beginning of the twenty-first century. It has played a critical role in shaping sport governance too, especially after the advent of televised sport, sponsorship and marketing. Television forms the economic backbone of modern sport, and digital platforms are set to revolutionize sport coverage. Secondly, sport followers, who double as consumers of media content, understand the challenges of governing what has transformed in the twentieth century from local leisure cultures to highly capitalized industries with a global reach. Depending on their level of interest, they track governance of local clubs, national teams, international federations and similar entities. They are usually aware of the structures of power and ownership, policy-making at various levels, and violation of accountability. Finally, sport administrators, who are drawn from state representatives and the commercial elite operating in both national and transnational contexts, are obliged to run the show, maximize profit and connect with supporters. With the exception of the Middle Eastern monarchies and a few other authoritarian states, sport administrators often subject themselves to self-regulatory measures in order to be legitimized as custodians of the game. Ethical practice is probably one of the most important catechism they encounter at a quotidian level, as transparency and incorruptibility are widely considered necessary attributes of sport governance. The media and sport followers are no exception to the rule of ethics as stakeholders of governance.

This simplified account of the contemporary landscape of sport governance illustrates the tension between the characterizations of sport as a commercial activity and as a mechanism for moral education and social development. The perceived incompatibility of these two aspects has led to intense conversations in the media, administrative circles and the public sphere about the need for ethical concerns to be the key element of governance. The transformation of sport governance from organizing friendly matches to activities ranging from hosting 10,000 athletes and 500,000 tourists during a mega event to determining gender of athletes, has complicated the connotations of administration. Governance, as Hassan and Hamil acknowledge (2010, 343), has overgrown the pattern of club owners hiring athletes and rewarding them for delivering success with little concern for profit maximization. The ‘relatively benign business approach’ has dramatically changed into an industry-oriented model that contends with problems of racism, doping, match-fixing and money laundering to name a few. The undoing of sport’s amateur connections is now a foregone conclusion. The dynamics of revenue generation and redistribution, labour market sustainment, social responsibility, and outreach programmes constantly transform the practice of governance as well as ethics. The reception of Western sports in non-Western regions and the emergence of new sporting endeavours such as e-sports, have appeared to rework the understanding of participation and organization. New expectations and liabilities pose fundamental challenges to the balance of politics and ethics.

The history of FIFA exhibits the complexity of contemporary sport governance like no other entity. As Tomlinson (2014) remarked, it would be incorrect to think of the early presidents as idealist and the latter ones as dictatorial and unaccountable. However, allegations of corruption have escalated, the lack of ethical considerations exposed, and the crisis of integrity heightened since the 2000s, making malpractices from half a century before look like innocuous mistakes. How does one make sense of the shifting underpinnings of ethics in sport governance by inter- and supranational institutions? Many researchers have addressed the governance question in recent times, pondering social capital (Groeneveld, Houlihan, and Ohl 2011), club football (Hassan and Hamil 2011), corporate responsibility (Segaert et al. 2012), national contexts (O’Boyle and Bradbury 2013), and concepts and practices, global order, body enhancement, and sport for development (Auwele, Cook, and Parry 2016). A conference was organized in Oxford in June 2016 to discuss the inclinations of stakeholders as borne out by current tendencies in policy-making, out of which materialized this collection. The participants deliberated the forms of governance emerging from the aggregation of transnational networks, the shifting metonymies of ethical concern and new stakeholder identification. The two major directions of contemporary sport governance identified were the growing significance of the non-West, especially in relation to event hosting, and the need for controlling the behaviour of emergent interest groups. The latter is a complex constellation of athletes, officials, supporters, lawyers, and politicians who share power and collectively determine corporate and non-profit governance, legal aspects, and regulatory mechanisms from within their subjective locations.

The collection opens with Jean-Loup Chappelet’s article that ponders the need for administrators to embrace the relevant characteristics of both corporate and democratic governance, and develop international cooperation between state and private actors. David Hassan analyses the fissures between sport’s democratizing rhetoric and its increasing appropriation by authoritarian regimes in their quest for respectability. Susan Dowse and Thomas Fletcher complicate the politics of event hosting and power relations between the traditional arbiters and the developing nations. James Dorsey explores the influence of non-Western actors in global sport governance with reference to the Gulf States. While this set of articles interrogate the ethics of decision-making and hierarchy of governance in international sport, the next set examines specific issues that require greater regulation. Bruce Kidd discusses the disputed scientific and ethical substructures of the ‘gender eligibility’ tests conducted by the IOC and IAAF’s medical commission. Carrie Dunn reviews the fan experience of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup, identifying the nature of sexism at various levels of football governance. Seamus Kelly and Dikaia Chatziefstathiou look into the alleged unethical behaviour of sport agents and the consequences of their growing influence on club football. Finally, David Hassan and Chris Harding use social contract theory to examine the strategies of recruiting and retaining volunteers for motorsport. The articles recognize that the reinvention of the ethical standards of governance entails fresh challenges and the need for administrators to take up new priorities and responsibilities. This collection looks at the extent and nature of ethical concerns for the new directions in governance.

Disclosure statement

No potential confl ict of interest was reported by the authors.