Do Global Sports Matter?

This post first appeared on WorldChanging, August 28th, 2006:

Since going to my first World Cup this summer, I've been deeply conflicted about the meaning of sports, as sports this summer seem to have taken on all of the best and worst parts of an increasingly fast-moving, technological, competitive, and globalized society. What I'd like to examine today is, do sports have any role to play in building a global society?

As during previous World Cups, for the better part of June, I spent most of my waking hours thinking and reading about football. Much of the journalism written about the World Cup every four years always seems to belabor the point that the football teams somehow represent the 'characters' of the countries themselves. It certainly is a good opportunity to comment on the countries themselves, since much of the world seems to be so focused on the teams. For example, every game for the national team seemed to be an occasion for huge numbers of Germans to stop what they were doing, to cheer, to gather in public spaces and streets, and to wave the German flag: there was something surprising and great about being underneath the Cologne Döm with 30,000 German fans, singing an incredibly dorky football anthem: "Zum finale in Berlin!". The event itself seems to reveal some unexpected truths: just as many German journalists as foreign journalists seemed surprised by the level of interest in the national team, and the ubiquity of the German flag, and took it as a sign that Germany had moved on from a explicit fear of nationalism to a more benign national pride.

However, this time, the experience of going was actually quite different. Reading about the World Cup in previous years hadn't captured for me the experience of mixing that occurs between fans, and instead, what I found was that football, as a global sport, really does seem to transcend national boundaries. On any given day, in any given German city, you could see fans from around the world rooting for their own teams, for other countries' teams, and mingling pleasantly. In a first-round match between Togo and France, there was something incredibly bland and yet momentous about being in a stadium with 15,000 French fans singing "La Marseillaise" in Germany; but I got an even bigger thrill by watching the far-fewer Togolese fans, and most of the Germans in the stadium, good-naturedly root for Togo as the underdog in the match.

Before I get carried away with sports as a metaphor for global citizenship, however, it is also worth noticing, that since my trip earlier this summer, it has also been a rather disgraceful summer for sports. Even for those who like to read about sports, like myself, it has been difficult to keep track of the various scandals this summer.

Here's a brief summary of 2006's summer of sporting scandals. Some of the crucial later matches in the World Cup were marred by diving and brutish play. In the final match, the French hero Zinedine Zidane was sent off for 'head-butting' (really, assaulting) an Italian player, and the day after Italy's triumph, many of the leading Italian teams were indicted in a corruption scandal. As for other sports, they haven't been much better. The winner of the Tour de France, and leading track & field sprinters, have tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. If you're a fan of an American sport like (American) football, summer has seen a steady stream of athletes arrested for toting guns; and if you're a fan of an Commonwealth sport like cricket, then in the last week you have been subjected to the controversy over an Australian umpire's suspension of a game between England and Pakistan, with accusations of cheating, racism, and the umpire offering to resign in exchange for a payoff.)

Some observers have begun to tie these widespread scandals together as affecting all of sport. James Lawton, sportswriter for The Independent of London (not free), wrote earlier this week, "one by one the games we play are falling into disrepute... one by one they are inviting the big question: how long can sport, in its present form and morality, survive?". Across the globe, another sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, John Crumpacker, wrote a column titled "Who in the world can be a fan of this?".

The interesting thing is that many of these criticisms of sport do reflect many of our other concerns about the contradictions and conflicts inherent in an increasingly technological, globalized, competitive, and fast-moving society. Many of the ethical criticisms of sport could be applied to other topics that are more typically WorldChanging, such as global competition, values, and environmentalism.

Since I'm the conflicted one -- (I'm not sure if you care about sports as passionately as I do) -- I'll just present to you what I think are the positives and negatives of global sports:

(PLUS): People really, really care about sports, which may be the most perplexing fact for non-sports fans. If we simply look at facts and figures, then the global appeal of sports is hard to deny. The 2006 World Cup was watched by 5.9 billion people total, with about 93 million people watching each match on average, and 284 million people watching the final match (Reuters). The 2004 Olympics was watched by 3.9 billion people (unduplicated) in 220 countries, with the average viewer watching over twelve hours of Olympic coverage, according to the International Olympic Committee.

(MINUS): Why do we care so much about sports, and, are they in any sense, "important"? This is one question that I can't answer. For those interested in particularly Marxist or capitalist explanations, sports might seem to be truly the opiate of the masses. If you conclude that sports are merely the dumbed-down content that global media corporations are using to push advertising, and given the vast sums of money being spent on television and cable rights for sporting events, you are probably partially right, too.

(PLUS, mitigating): Sports do seem to be intrinsically popular. I am skeptical of the power of the media to push the popularity of sports, when the popularity of sports seems to be manifested at so many different levels, scales, and varieties. For example, the 1998 FIFA World Cup was broadcast free-to-air -- rather than on cable or paid broadcast -- and the 2006 FIFA World Cup was broadcast to a significant number of free-to-air partners. If anything, the mix of free-to-air and paid broadcasting indicates to me a wide variety of audiences and constituencies for sport. Even Al Jazeera has recently started sports coverage! On a less Marxist and more emotional level, in a 2000 profile on Salon.com, Roger Angell, the venerable New Yorker writer and famous baseball fan, has a wonderful and emotional explanation for why grown men and women care about sports.

(PLUS): Sports as global citizenship: Richard Giulianotti, a sociologist, argues in the edited book Sports and Human Rights in Global Society that "sport provides a potentially felicitous arena for sentimental education, as we encourage our fellow and future citizens to view other peoples as our fellow-players, team-mates and supporters." What I fiercely dislike about the typical American network coverage of the Olympics is their relentless effort to portray athletes from other countries as representatives of other countries in a kind of Disneyfied "It's a Small World After All" pageant. However, what I do like about the Olympics is that there are more countries and opportunities to see people who are from other countries. By putting people on the same playing field, they do provide a lens and a face for many to learn about other societies and cultures.

(MINUS): Global sporting events and human rights: The same authors find participation in global sporting events as enhanced opportunities for governments to surpress human rights, such as the rights of athletes in Soviet-era East Germany; athletes in Communist China; and the suppression of civil liberties and human rights of protesters at global sporting events.

(MINUS): Sports as intimately related to our conceptions of our bodies. 'Body criticism', particularly in academic critical theory in the 1990's, sought to identify the body as a fundamental point of resistance to global capitalism or technology -- in short, because we fundamentally care about what what we eat and whether we are healthy, this was thought to be a realm that could not be co-opted by the logic of capitalism or technology. Now, with all of the scandals that I have mentioned above -- particularly involved dizzying amounts of performance-enhancing drugs -- it is certainly difficult to subscribe to the romantic ideal of most athletes as just like you and me. Many modern athletes, through either systematic programs of talent evaluation or training regimens, technology, or diet, probably bear little resemblance to the amateur athlete.

(PLUS): Conflicting opinions about technology in the pursuit of performance. What is interesting to me is that we are profoundly conflicted in our pursuit of athletic excellence. On one hand, you could view the level of outrage over the use of drugs by athletes as profoundly hypocritical, because athletes have been driven to use enhancements by a winner-take-all mentality. On the other hand, I think one could view the criticism as an expression that people are unable to identify with athletes that they see as drug-enhanced machines. In short, I'm certainly worried by the revelations of drugs in sport, but what I'll be more worried about some day, is when there is no criticism.

(PLUS): The spirit of play. There is really no saying which team -- the most efficient (Germany), the most stylish (Brazil), the most athletic (perhaps, the U.S.) -- is going to win. It's why people watch the games, and then we try to draw meaning and conclusions from the result.

So, Readers, what do you think about sports? Are they great? Are they stupid? And why are they so important to so many people?