The new politics of sport

Abstract

Since 2020, the politics of sport have been transformed: traditional assumptions about the role of sport in exercising its power and exerting its influence in areas once regarded as taboo have changed. This commentary paper is based on qualitative responses drawn from an online sample of 1067 participants, who were invited to share their perspectives on a variety of issues regarding the politics of sport. It documents the end of the separation of sport and politics and explores how fans respond to sport’s new involvement in social and moral affairs, such as racism and other forms of inequality. The majority of fans understand that sport offers an effective platform and think it should use its capacity to influence change. However, a minority maintain that sport’s independence from political and social spheres should remain.

Keywords:

• Athlete activism
• sports fans
• social media
• Black Lives Matter
• politics

‘Politics don’t belong in sports’ – 35-year-old American male

‘Athletes like all of us have a right to free speech’ – 38-year-old British female

‘It is a myth that sports and politics are not intertwined. Sport can create positive change in society, and an open stance should be encouraged to drive this change’ – 29-year-old British male

The perfect platform

Not a single member of the Iranian football team sang their country’s national anthem before their match against England at the Fifa World Cup in Qatar in 2022. There had never been a World Cup in which so many geopolitical strands were entwined but the decision of the Iranian players to remain silent stood out as the most powerful symbolic gesture: it signified support for the protest movement that started after the death of Malisa Amini in police custody after she was arrested for not wearing the hijab in conformity with Iranian law. As a result of such action, the players faced the risk of reprisals against them and their families. The gesture would have been unimaginable at previous World Cups or, for that matter at any major sporting occasion before that. It was a brave feat and it prompted searching questions.

Should sport be a platform for promoting social justice causes? Or should it return to the neutrality that characterized the period when Avery Brundage was president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from 1952-72? Brundage strongly condemned political interference in sport, which, he maintained, should be pure (New York Times 1964). Despite his idealism, social and political issues occasionally broke through. Since the death of George Floyd in 2020 and the surge in popularity for Black Lives Matter (BLM), many athletes – four-time tennis grand slam champion Naomi Osaka among them – have signalled their desire to use themselves and their sports as catalysts for social and political change (Germano and Lewis 2020).

It seems sport is moving towards becoming a vehicle for advocating any number of issues, from mental health (Dixon et al. 2019) to social inequality (Parnell et al. 2015). But is this desirable? Sports organizations, commercial companies linked to sport, and athletes, have a platform to express their views (Kunkel, Doyle, and Na 2022; Towler, Crawford, and Bennett 2020), but what of sports fans? As consumers of sports: those who pay for season tickets, satellite television subscriptions, merchandize, and effectively underwrite the athletes’ wages, in this commentary paper we set out to discover what this silent majority stakeholder thinks and feels about ‘the new politics of sport’.

Methodology

To gather our data, we engaged with a range of different sports message boards (including football, basketball, baseball, athletics, ice hockey, motor racing, tennis, soccer) provided permission to use their specific platform for the distribution of an online survey. Ethical approval was gained from one of the author’s institutions and throughout the research process we closely adhered to the ethical guidelines established by The Association of Internet Researchers concerning privacy, harm, informed consent, and deception when engaging with the participants. Each opening post in the sports message boards contained an overview of the study and a hyperlink to the survey. Those who showed some interest by clicking on the link were immediately taken to the participant information sheet describing the study, their role as a participant, the level of confidentiality afforded to them (for example, no personal details were recorded outside of age and sex), how their data would be stored, and the contact details of the lead researcher and the university ethics committee that had approved the study. No rewards were offered for participation; instead, participants were reminded about their anonymity and were asked to be as honest as they could in their responses to the questions.

The study was conducted from May 2022 to June 2022 and received 1067 responses. Our strategy for capturing the large number of responses was to reduce the impact of those participants who completed the survey simply to try and distort the findings, as more responses lessen the impact on the final results (Cleland, Dixon, and Kilvington 2020). Despite this large number we make no claim to be representative of all sports fans’ views. Indeed, the most obvious limitations of the study are: (1) only those who engaged with each of the message boards utilized for this study had access to the survey; and (2) online surveys often adopt non-probability sampling methods through the choice of self-selection.

The survey comprised closed-ended and open-ended questions to gather a range of different forms of quantitative and qualitative data. The closed-ended responses were analyzed as percentages whilst the open-ended responses were inductively analyzed in an initial period of open coding that began establishing first and second order themes before further phases of data reduction took place to categorize patterns, commonalities, and differences in the responses.

Supporting athletes rights

Perhaps our most fundamental question was this: do fans support an athlete’s right to use sport to promote social, political, and sometimes moral issues that are important to them. Sixty two percent of our participants did. A London man, aged 47, summarized:

Sport, especially, some of the sports where the ‘star’ players are known worldwide, is a perfect platform to bring attention to inequality and the political divide. Too much of the news coverage now is dominated by right-wing media, who downplay issues, such as racial inequality and inequality towards women and the LGBTQ + community. When your ‘hero’ brings your attention to something, people, especially the younger generation, are more likely to listen and learn.

Others thought differently, such as this 23-year-old man from Melbourne, Australia:

We live in a world that has now made politics so accessible and hard to ignore that it has polluted almost everything. I am incredibly exhausted and almost desensitized to all of it now. Everyone has a right to express an opinion on anything, but I really cannot stress how little I am interested in some athlete or any millionaire celebrity getting on their soap box to preach to us regular joes. What makes them so special that they get to lecture us on topics that are incredibly complex and nuanced? Athletes are just as qualified to talk about politics as every other normal person. I am pretty cynical and would not be surprised if they are doing it for PR or brand purposes. Just let me enjoy my sport without being preached to or being made to think of anything but my team and the game in general.

Sport’s establishment (and we use this term to mean the people and organizations that exercise power and influence over matters of policy in sport and have typically resisted change) have fought attempts to politicize events. One of the most notorious sport protests of all time — the raised fists of US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City games — was met with draconian punishment (Edwards 1969; Hartmann 2003). Muhammad Ali was also denounced for railing against racial inequality in the 1960s, a fact often overlooked today. He is, of course, venerated as one of the iconic athletes of the twentieth century (Gorsevski and Butterworth 2011).

As recently as 2016, Colin Kaepernick, who led the San Francisco 49ers to the 2013 Super Bowl, was effectively hounded out of the National Football League (NFL) for protesting against police violence: his protest took the form of kneeling while the American national anthem played before games (Martin and McHendry 2016). But four years later, sport underwent the equivalent of a Gestalt Switch (when someone’s perspective changes from one thing to another) when athletes, often muted on social and political issues, suddenly started to use their offline and online platforms to become prominent activists on a range of issues.

The event at the heart of this change lay outside sport: it was the police killing of African American George Floyd in May 2020. Already prominent, the BLM movement gained new impetus and this emboldened sports stars from the NBA’s LeBron James to Marcus Rashford, of England’s Premier League, to speak out on all manner of issues unrelated to sport (Buttler 2021). In earlier eras, their behaviour might have earned them reprimand but, instead they were hailed as heroes. Their sponsors also seemed to encourage their activism and we will explore the reasons and implications of this later.

Kaepernick and the volte face

A confluence of social factors has amplified the voice of athletes, reshaping them from straightforward competitors whose raison d‘être was to play and entertain, to drivers of social and political change. While she is far from the first athlete to use her fame for civic causes, Naomi Osaka has been an effective figure in the shifting culture (Leppard 2022). She aligned herself with BLM, openly criticized police brutality, publicly discussed her own mental health issues and refused to attend press conferences at the 2021 French Open (Allen and Brown 2021). This was an important refusal because it acknowledged traditional media were less potent than they had been in the twentieth century. Osaka surely realized that she did not need mainstream media to reach audiences: she could transmit her often critical messages via social media. The likes of Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp have provided eminent and sometimes not-so-eminent characters from communicating directly with fans (Dixon 2022).

Social media is a crucial piece of technology in facilitating the change in sport; a point, not surprisingly, recognized by a number of participants. By way of illustration was this response by a 51-year-old male fan from Glasgow: ‘In the 21st century, with technological changes and the prevalence of social media, opinions are more readily accessible & easily transmitted across the globe’.

Before its rise – Twitter launched in 2006 – people famed for their feats in entertainment, arts, or sport depended on the goodwill of newspapers and television. Social media rendered these types of media less relevant and, in some cases, inconsequential (Cashmore, Cleland, and Dixon 2018). The global growth of social media platforms like Twitter made it possible for motivated athletes, like Osaka et al. to issue bulletins to fans with the kind of immediacy undreamt of throughout the entire twentieth century (Loader and Mercea 2011). Indeed, the recognition of the power to influence change held by modern athletes was a feature of the data, as highlighted by this response by a 63-year-old male fan from Staffordshire: ‘There will be more social media campaigns against groups, organizations, teams and individuals that are seen by some to have transgressed in some way. Sponsors especially will be fearful of upsetting powerful groups, such as BLM’.

The Floyd case would have made headlines without social media, but would it have precipitated arguably the most forceful social movement since Civil Rights? Probably not. BLM is one of the two most substantial international social campaigns in recent times, the other being, of course, MeToo, a social movement that opposes sexual abuse, sexual harassment and embolden victims to share their experiences (the movement began on social media after a call to action by actor Alyssa Milano in 2017: millions of women – and some men – used Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to disclose the harassment and abuse they have faced in their own lives. The movement continues to thrive).

The rapidity and scale of these internet-borne movements has had many consequences, especially in the corporate world: commercial organizations that have, for decades, supported events and sponsored individuals have had to reconsider how to react to the changes. We will return to this later. But another consequence is that athletes who have been reluctant to air their views for one reason or another have been stirred into action. We have in mind the intransigently apolitical Michael Jordan, who, like Ali (though for somewhat different reasons) was an icon of the twentieth century. Jordan pledged a staggering $100 million to ‘organizations dedicated to ensuring racial equality, social justice and greater access to education’ (Boren 2020). It was a surprising volte face for an athlete who, in the 1990s and beyond, was the face of the sportswear company Nike and stayed studiously apolitical. Asked in 1990 to pledge his support for a black Democrat seeking to win a seat in the US Senate, Jordan famously responded: ‘Republicans buy sneakers, too’ (Bontemps 2020).

Prior to the delayed Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, in 2021, the IOC reframed its rules to allow for a degree of dissent, at press conferences and on social media – though, in truth, it could do little about either. Yet the IOC maintained its ban on protests either on the field of play or on medal podiums (Ingle 2021). Football’s world governing federation Fifa has been less explicit. England’s Premier League, like the US’s NBA has not only allowed, but encouraged the kneeling originated by Kaepernick (Dixon, Cashmore, and Cleland 2022). It withdrew its mandate in August 2022 after two years but specified high-profile games where the gesture could continue to take place (Hytner 2022).

The recent preparedness of athletes to make public their opinions on social causes has prompted a fundamental change in the way governing bodies view political statements from athletes. The National Football League (NFL) and, the National Basketball Association (NBA), and other leagues incorporated slogans in stadiums and on kits and England’s Premier League mandated a period before every game for taking the knee between 2020-22. Association football’s European federation, Uefa, in May 2022, introduced a package of sanctions against Russia’s national team and its football clubs, excluding them from competitions in response to the conflict in Ukraine. Wimbledon also reacted to the Ukraine crisis by unilaterally denying Russian and Belarusian players entry to its 2022 tournament, a decision that prompted the Women’s Tennis Association to penalize Wimbledon’s organizers, the All England Lawn Tennis Club and Lawn Tennis Association.

Our research was designed to discover whether or not fans welcomed or felt averse to the entry of politics into sport. (For our purposes, we define politics as activities associated with debate or conflict among groups or individuals, and in which there is an uneven distribution of power.)

Anything but politics

Artists, singers, actors, and other kinds of entertainers often use the status they have accrued to promote causes, challenge orthodoxy, or just draw attention to issues about which they have feelings. Occasionally, there is criticism and ridicule (such as when the singer Beyoncé seemed to take a black power posture at the 2016 Super Bowl half-time show). But rarely do their managers, promoters or record labels get agitated enough to try to stop them. Sport is different: for most of its modern history (by which we mean since the late nineteenth century) it has not been considered entertainment. It was not conceived as such, and any gratification audiences took from looking at competition was incidental. There were substantial changes in every decade of the twentieth century and cumulatively these transformed sport from an activity for participants to a spectacle designed for fans.

Integral to this transformation was professionalization: in the mid-twentieth century, most sports were still amateur, meaning the competitors engaged in sport because they loved it and accepted no remuneration (Holt 1990). The term is typically used in a technical sense to describe practicing an activity on an unpaid basis, but it is also a credo – a statement of beliefs, values and aims that guide actions. As such, sport’s prohibition on individuals, or teams who wished to promote social and political causes was predicated on amateurism (Vamplew 1988; Unlucan 2015).

At the start of the twentieth century, few sports were professional, boxing, and association football being the most obvious ones that were. The others retained the character or spirit of an era that valued competition as a virtuous and wholesome, perhaps even godly pursuit. Money would contaminate what many regarded as sport’s purity of mission. But, one-by-one all major sports became professional, at least nominally: cricket in 1962; tennis in 1968; athletics in 1986 (in reality before, but this was the year the Olympic Games allowed professionals to compete); rugby, in 1995, was the last of the major sports to professionalize.

As professionalism took hold, so sport lost its innocence. The rules of sport were slowly altered to suit major corporate sponsors, undermining the ethical basis of sport in the interest of a more dramatic and more sensational activity that would meet the requirements of the mass media audience (Dixon 2014; Horne 2006). Athletes had become part of the consumer media circus. They had become implicit in the circuits of promotion that linked sports and sports stars to commercial products (Whitson 1998). And, whilst mass popularity associated with superhuman athletic talent served to grab the attention of the audience, it was thought important that athletes (as commercial assets) did not alienate factions of the potential commercial audience with political views of their own. But, whilst vacant political dispositions were once thought to be good for business, it appears that times are changing.

In our sample, the majority (62 percent) supported an athletes’ right to use their status to promote social and political issues, though less (53 percent) thought they had carte blanche: slightly less than half believe there are subjects about which athletes should keep quiet. A response that captured the views and sentiments of many was:

While athlete’s may not be the best role models, they have a platform that has been granted to [them to] use to benefit themselves and their communities, however they see fit. It is up to the receiver of the message to decide whether they want to listen to that message or not. But someone shouldn’t be silenced because they are an athlete. Lots of politicians don’t know what they are talking about, we shouldn’t blindly listen to them either.’ (female fan, aged 27, Ottawa)

Surprisingly perhaps, the subject most fans did not wish athletes to approach was politics, with this 30-year-old man from Bristol offering a balanced appraisal:

Difficult subjects should be tackled but in a measured way which takes into consideration all groups. If you want to come out in support of a divisive issue then it’s important to show consideration to the other side because otherwise you could fuel further division. Controversy may sell more and raise peoples’ profiles more but the type of discussions it creates are usually more polarized which should be avoided.

Corporate sponsors and activism

The recent preparedness of athletes to make public their opinions on social causes has prompted a fundamental change in the way governing bodies view political statements from athletes. The NFL, the NBA and other leagues incorporated slogans in stadiums and on kits and England’s Premier League mandated a period before every game for taking the knee between 2020-22. How then do fans interpret the change in focus’s impact on sponsors? To find out, we asked the participants to reflect on the approach taken by sportswear giants like Nike and Adidas regarding their athletes now openly engaging in controversial social and political affairs.

Typifying the responses was this comment: ‘Sponsors are realizing that individual sports persons are bigger than the sport they represent, most have large social media followings, which, from a sponsors perspective means a larger audience for their brand’ (46-year-old man from Edinburgh). While he did not mention Osaka, she announced her partnership with Panasonic shortly before the Tokyo Olympics, 2021, using Twitter to make clear her sponsor was standing behind her principled stance on social issues.

This brief example demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between modern athletes (who are consumed in a variety of ways: connecting the sport consumer with dreams, aspirations, virtues, as well as societal obligations) and commercial organizations who situate athletes as prime target for endorsement contracts (Ohl and Taks 2007). The link between commercial organizations and professional sport is an obvious one. After all, athletes encapsulate the potential in all humans, and this is ripe for commodification. Athletes enjoy status, influence and lifestyles once associated with only Hollywood stars. They are youthful, virile, successful, well known to mass audiences, they are principled, and via social media they are accessible too (Cleland, Dixon, and Kilvington 2020; Hutchins 2019).

Social media is a tool for the self-expression of all people, including athletes. As athletes engage with this medium they are building on those established connections between professional sports organizations, athletes, and sponsors in the circuits of promotion, creating new and ever more intimate avenues to connect and interact with sports fans (Lawrence and Crawford 2019). Sports and commercial organizations are using this medium too, each of them embracing a social responsibility agenda to be ethical and accountable to the needs of their societies as well as their stakeholders – and athletes are part of that strategy (Bradish and Cronin 2009; Crane et al. 2008).

In this sense, athlete activism poses a challenge to the corporations that pay them handsomely to exhibit their wares and appear in adverts. What if potential consumers do not agree with the athlete? What if the moral and ethical position taken by the athlete is incongruent with that of the organization? Basically, they have to take a risk or lose out on their association with the world’s most influential athletes, a sentiment that was not lost on our participants: ‘Adidas and Nike are only interested in building their brand. I’m very cynical about their involvement in any cause, especially if you take into account their manufacturing methods etc. and using slave labour, and involvement with China who don’t have a particularly great record on human rights’, suggested a 52-year-old Bristol woman, her point being that the new activism presents an opportunity for corporations to bury some of the scandals that have dogged them in the past. This view was also supported by a 67-year-old from Provence, France: ‘Nike and the like realize it makes for good customer relations to be seen to be concerned about social or environmental issues’. We should add racial injustice, gender inequality, mental health and a great many other issues on which contemporary athletes have spoken out.

In the past, commercial companies that have profited from their associations with athletes and sport generally have stuck with sport’s overall resistance to political involvement. As sports themselves have been forced to change, so have global corporations. Their question now is to determine how far they can let politics enter existing marketing arrangements. ‘Social justice has become ‘fashionable’, it’s more beneficial for businesses to have their ambassadors talk about social justice’, argued a 17-year-old man from Birmingham.

The prevalent view is that corporate sponsors have little choice: athletes are no longer names on the sports pages, but celebrities, with a direct line frequently to millions of followers and a degree of influence undreamt of in the last century. As one participant explained, probably half-joking, but half-serious: ‘I would not be surprised if some athletes in the future are encouraged to take a stand by their sponsors’.

The politics of silence

Athletes, by virtue of their status and wealth, wield tremendous power over public opinion. Any silence on a topic or implicit statements they make do send a message, just as strong as making explicit statements to the press. Silence, or ‘keeping politics out of sports’ is not an apolitical act. In fact, it is an act reinforcing the status quo of their or cultural and political background. This in itself is a political act. Athletes who explicitly make political statements recognize this and are using their power and influence to actively enact social change (or maintenance of the status quo) rather than passively doing the same. That is why I support athletes who speak out, because they are human beings who are just as deserving of a political opinion as anyone else and are making a statement even if they don’t explicitly communicate a message.

This statement from a 32-year-old man, from Virginia, US, makes a powerful point: silence can be viewed as a political act. Sport’s establishment is facing a generation of sports stars with different attitudes, values, beliefs and understanding to the people who followed sport in the twentieth century. Activism inspired by social and political events far beyond sport has been either forbidden or disapproved of for decades. But, having grown up in an environment that we have called in another publication titled Screen Society, millennials and Generation Z are much more likely to expect or demand athletes’ right to stand up for what they think are just causes, and less willing to submit to the same strictures as older counterparts (Cashmore, Cleland, and Dixon 2018). More importantly, for our purposes, they expect both athletes and sport’s governing organizations to join them in reshaping sport into an instrument of social change. People like Osaka and Rashford are representative of a new zeitgeist in sport. Brundage’s dictum has been consigned to history.

Disclosure statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.