Pick-up | Winners and Losers: Sport in the New World Order

Old things appear with the masquerade of new patterns.

Bertolt Brecht, 1938

In 1996, Australian newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch told shareholders at a News Corp annual meeting in Adelaide that "sport can absolutely trump movies or any other entertainment", before adding that he planned to "use sport as the hammer and main product of the pay-TV business". Inadvertently, he acknowledged the importance of sports to media companies of all kinds of technologies since the 18th century.

Audience data from the global entertainment industry also supports his views. Eleven of the twenty most watched shows on American television in the 20th century were sporting events, ten of which were the Super Bowl. In 1982, the sixteenth Super Bowl was won by San Francisco, the fourth-most watched show in U.S. television history. Two of Britain's six-eyed TV shows are soccer matches, and England's 1966 Victory in the World Cup Final was first. In Germany, nine of the top ten shows watched are soccer matches.

In order to achieve the hammer strategy, Murdoch paid the British Football Association £304 million in 1992 to broadcast the newly created Premier League. The following year, his U.S. Fox television network spent $1.58 billion to acquire NFL rights. In 1995, he founded his own Premier League Rugby League in Australia and England. As a child, he reached a television contract with the International Football League, which eventually made the league decide to abandon amateurism and transform into professionalism. In baseball and european soccer, such large contracts have happened from time to time. In 2008, the Indian Cricket League founded the Indian Super Cricket League, which is a TV product based on the Premier League model. As exposure has increased, new sponsors have emerged in the sports world, eager to associate their brands with popular clubs and star athletes. Ironically, the IOC, once a bastion of amateurism, learned the sponsorship model and found in the 1980s that the fastest way to make money was to sell all the space and services imaginable to businesses and their brands. The exponential growth in the value of sports, planned to come entirely from television and, more specifically, from pay-per-view and cable television. The European television market began to be regulated in the late 1970s, with the development of cable and satellite television technology, followed by the emergence of digital broadcasting technology for television programs, which brought new sources of revenue and new players to the sports world.

In the latter decades of the 20th century, the popularity, scope and structure of sport improved, and Murdoch's emphasis on television sports is the most notable example of this. Like the sports revolutions of the late 1890s, 1820s and 1950s, this revolution was driven by market expansion and improvements in media technology. The sports industry also benefits from an ideological context in which the inherent competitiveness and nominalism of sport come in handy. At the dawn of the 21st century, the value of the sports industry has reached tens of billions of dollars, and the real global popularity has made sports once again an example of the hegemony of capitalist markets.

Such changes are inseparable from a larger range of social changes. Between the 1980s and the 1990s, the world changed profoundly. With the decline of the trade union movement, the abolition of the welfare system cup, the collapse of the social democratic movement, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalism and its ideology gained undisputed hegemony. Although called neoliberalism, there is nothing new about the free-market economy and free competition that Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and their supporters espoused. In fact, they were inspired by Adam Smith. Like the 18th century, sports, in this counter-reform at the end of the 20th century, was both a beneficiary and an ideological pillar. Sport has benefited from deregulation, which in turn has provided politicians and theorists with a steady stream of rhetoric. The "deep politics" of sport has now surfaced.

Like the latest popular concept of "free market", sports will be useless without competition and without distinction between winning and losing. The distinction between winners and losers is also the most important social distinction in the "New World Order." Sport also shows that in capitalist societies there are far more losers than winners. Vince Lombardi once summed up the trend of thought of the times with a notorious saying: "Winning is not the purpose of everything, but the only purpose." "Sport is increasingly being used as a metaphor for life, revealing the endless competition in life. Media giant ESPN even promoted in an American advertising campaign in 2002 that sports are not a comparison of life, but life itself. Businesses have also adopted the language of the world of sports. Teamwork, attitude, taking responsibility, competition, these words in the dressing room, became jokes in the conference room. Companies hire sports stars to teach business leaders the value of competitive technology to business. Ambitious, competitive, and intrigue entrepreneurs are called "players," like Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street bond trader in Tom Wolff's Bonfire of Vanity. Many astute sports marketers find that supporters' identification and loyalty to clubs or athletes is equivalent to the loyalty of a brand's sellers, especially the most committed and "authentic" sports fans.

This shift is global and has had an impact on sport in all regions. However, the "globalization" of sport is still only a media phenomenon. While sports can be watched on TV all over the world, and as long as you can afford to pay for a pay-TV channel subscription, you can see all kinds of sports events around the world, but only soccer is really popular around the world. Soccer's only opponent is the Olympic Games, which is an event rather than a sport. Sport itself remains mired in an international hierarchy established before the First World War. Only three Latin American countries and five European countries have ever won the Soccer World Cup. More than a third of the countries have never won a medal at the Olympics. Baseball and cricket were still largely confined to the heart of the region a century ago, while soccer outside of soccer was entirely a single country sport, such as American football, Australian football, Canadian football and Gaelic football. Two types of rugby other than rugby are mainly distributed in countries formerly belonging to the British Empire and In France. The creation of Cricket's LPL League, while dealing a heavy blow to the dominance of the English-speaking white nation in cricket, was only commercially developed in the traditional heart of cricket. The business giant NFL also failed to sustain the international expansion of American football, and the NFL created the World League, which was eventually reduced to the European NFL. Asia, Africa and Latin America's "player farms" further cemented the dominance of Elite Sports in North America and Europe, sending large numbers of junior soccer and baseball players to major teams, who were often rejected after testing. Sport has a global audience, yet its geographical distribution has not changed qualitatively and its traditional hierarchy has not been threatened.

In contrast, due to its global status, soccer, like the Olympic Games, has become an open arena for national confrontation and national chauvinism. In the 2009 Juventus vs Inter Milan, Juventus fans chanted "There are no black people in Italy" during the match. Since the 1930s, the entire European soccer stadium has been the scene of the most horrific public anti-Semitism. In the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries, the wave of emigration from impoverished countries to Europe and the United States due to the "free trade agreement" re-emerged, and western blocs such as Britain and the United States were also eager to use military means to safeguard their imperialist interests, so national and national hatred intensified. This change is also reflected in sports.

After the 1980s, there was a massive and rapid economic expansion in the sports world, but this was not the last major development in the past 250 years. In the 21st century, the sports industry is increasingly reviving its 18th-century economic model. Sports are among the entertainment industries and are aimed at profit, so they have become a popular decoration among the super-rich. Baseball, LPL, and clubs of all kinds of football became social status symbols for the wealthy, just as the Georgian aristocracy treated cricket clubs, horse racing, and boxers. In the 21st century, Chelsea Club's Romain Abramovich and Washington Redskins' Daniel Snyder are no different from 18th-century cricket Earls Of Doncaville and Winn chelsea, except that the current super-rich will not play with their high-priced signing stars.

As in the formative years of modern sports, gambling has once again become a major feature of sports culture. The development of satellite television and the Internet in the 1990s led to a renaissance in gambling. In fact, the gambling industry became a colony of skilled traders in the financial markets, the world's largest casino. Clubs and leagues wrestled with sponsorship contracts from the betting industry, and inter-match gambling became a feature of television sports programming. Spot gambling and other "exotic" gambling methods that emerged with the support of the Internet and digital technology were in fact a reproduction of the complex gambling market in cricket and boxing in the first decade of the 18th century. The alarming corruption now exposed, especially in the cricket worlds of South Africa, India and Pakistan, is nothing more than a echo of similar scandals that preceded the two worlds. Old news back to the establishment of the news.

The new economic system of sports has also taken down the last piece of amateurism that has long been obscured. Amateurism, as the moral code of sports, has lasted for nearly a century and a half. Even professional sports are subject to the so-called moral superiority of amateurist ideas. By the end of the 20th century, however, apart from American college football and basketball, there was no importance to sports that called themselves amateurism. Los Angeles was the last to take the fig leaf to the Olympics in 1984. The Rugby Federation once called amateurism "the first principle of the sport", but it has abandoned this principle in order to seize the huge wealth of the television industry. The hypocrisy of amateurism and piety has no place in this world. The principle of this world, in the words of Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis, is: "Just win, baby." ”

The naked capitalism of sports is the same as in the 18th century. But sport managers continue to control the desires of athletes, based on the 19th-century Victorian model of sport. Amateurism is dead, but its discipline structure survives. In fact, the mutation of sport and the harshness of managers do not conflict, the two go hand in hand. As Clive Woodward, the sport director of the British Olympic Committee, told athletes in 2011: "When I was in Beijing (the 2008 Olympics), several people wore Nike shirts and walked proudly around the Olympic Village, which drove me crazy. Adidas is our sponsor and provides our jerseys. Suffice it to say that those athletes are far from the podium and I'm not surprised by that because they don't have discipline.

The NBA and NFL in North America introduced dress codes and "personal conduct" policies to regulate the lives of athletes (mostly blacks) outside the playing field.

After the importance of amateurism declined, the need for sports managers to embody the moral values of sports shifted from controlling remuneration to pursuing so-called performance-enhancing drugs. The "internal enemy" of the world of sport is no longer the "hidden professionalization" of working-class athletes or the "fake amateurs" of the Soviet camp, but of "drug cheating". Arbitrary bans on certain drugs, like the "war on drugs" that began in the Reagan administration in the 1980s, led to tougher drug testing and discipline requirements for athletes in the 21st century. At the IOC's 1999 initiative, the World Anti-Doping Agency was established in 2004, and the agency's "Declaration of Movements" rule turned elite athletes into prisoners on parole. The rule forces athletes to designate an hour a day for temporary drug testing, seven days a week, without exception. Being elsewhere, misrepresenting documents, or reporting incorrect training plan details can all be punishable. In 2008, the International Cycling Union further proposed a "biological passport". According to the regulations, cyclists are required to draw blood regularly for tests, but the purpose is not to check the banned drugs but to verify the changes in the blood composition, and to analyze whether there may be cheating such as the use of banned drugs and illegal blood increases. In other words, use circumstantial evidence to regulate athletes. The sports community also encourages cleaners and security guards to be "educated" and to inform the IOC "if inappropriate behaviour is discovered.". This unrepentant police state approach has, of course, also been identified as a necessary means of preventing "cheating".

19th-century concerns about gender issues reverberate in the 21st century. In the second half of the 20th century, gender equality improved, and in 1984 even the International Olympic Committee recognized that women were perfectly capable of completing marathons. But gender issues are more tightly regulated than before. In terms of soccer, in 2004 FIFA banned Mexican striker Mariber Domingos from playing for Celaya in the Mexican Men's Second Division on the grounds that "men's and women's football must have a clear line". The Castell-Simonia affair in 2009 brought "gender paranoia" to the forefront again. After Semenya, an 18-year-old black South African female mid-distance runner, dramatically improved her 800m and 1500m results, the IAAF suspected she was using banned drugs or a man and asked for an investigation. Subsequently, Semenya was forced to undergo a "examination", "her feet were put into the horse's pedals, the external genitals were photographed, and the internal organs were examined". Due to international protests, she was eventually allowed to continue competing.

The IAAF even empowers itself to determine the most intimate element of a person's identity— gender. Medical officers on IAAF matchday were granted this right. Article 113 of the IAAF Competition Regulations states: "If necessary, the medical representative shall have the right to arrange for the sex identification of the athlete. The IOC requires transgender athletes to compete as women after at least two years of gender reassignment surgery. While men and women are just as likely to face such medical conditions, male athletes are not required to undergo gender identification. The main consideration of this because of the athletes' discouragement was to draw an arbitrary line between men and women, as was the case during the Victorian amateurism period when the sports organization was formed. In tom's schooling, the foundation of sports, Tom Brown says to his classmates, "Don't talk about your family, or your mom and sisters." Modern sports today, as was the case then, are based on strict gender divisions, with women inferior to men and disobedient being condemned.

The inherent historical misogyny also explains why almost all sports have a deep-seated hostility towards gay athletes, both men and women. In 2011, out of thousands of professional footballers of all types of football worldwide, only one English footballer – Sweden's Anton Heyssen and one rugby player – Gareth Thomas of Wales – were openly gay. When it comes to women's soccer, the 2011 World Cup was dubbed the "lesbian scare" by one critic when Nigeria and Guinea tried to clear players suspected of being non-heterosexual. Such a state of affairs has made all kinds of football the most conservative organization on sexual orientation issues outside of religious organizations.

Restrictions and repression of athletes intensified because of the rise of social conservatism in the post-Reagan/Thatcher era and attempts to offset the gains of the political struggle for social degradation in the 1960s and 1970s. But sport does not merely reflect social realities, but actively participates in the transformation of the political climate. Since the 1980s, the need for "security" at sporting events has increasingly been used by governments to justify attacks on civil liberties. This has happened in the past. Ten days before the opening of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, police opened fire during a demonstration by 10,000 students, many of whom chanted "No Olympics, we want revolution!" "The death toll at the time has not been confirmed, with projections ranging from 44 to 1,000, compared to 325 deaths. The number of injuries is higher, and the number of people in prison is in the thousands. The Secret Security Force of the Mexican Government, the Olympic Army, which carried out the massacre, was established to preserve the smooth running of the Olympic Games.

Known as the "first freely run Olympics," the 1984 Granny Los Angeles Olympics set the model for authoritarian management for future supersport events. The organizers of the Los Angeles Olympics gave corporate sponsors maximum freedom while suppressing opponents who completely ignored democratic rights, banned demonstrations, carried out "social cleansing" of people such as homeless people and prostitutes, and hired thousands more police officers and soldiers. The Olympic zone was designated as a military restricted area. By the time of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the Olympic movement had become a move to totalitarianism, camping in a city every few years, imposing a police crackdown on the city's residents, especially the poor and oppressed races, and indulging sponsoring companies. In preparation for the 2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver City Council enacted laws prohibiting the distribution of leaflets, prohibiting unauthorized use of placards and loudspeakers, prohibiting demonstrations without police approval, allowing police to enter homes to remove protest signs hanging on the building's facades, and allowing the use of military equipment against demonstrators, such as a 152-decibel "sonar gun." Canadian intelligence agencies have identified "anti-globalization, anti-big corporations and Indigenous activists" as a particular threat to Olympic security. Soccer is no different. In the 1990s, football stadiums began to use CCTV heavily, which heralded the near saturation of CCTV in English towns today. At the 2008 European Championships in Switzerland, a special "fan zone" was set up, and all those who entered the fan zone were subject to scrutiny by private security companies. The police implemented a "preventive arrest" program to arrest people they thought might commit a crime and set up a database of "rogues" based on suspicion rather than the facts of the crime. These measures were subsequently incorporated into Swiss civil law. In preparation for the 2014 Soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, 150 million Brazilians are expected to move to make way for the construction of new sports venues. In these capitalist utopias, free enterprise controls the unfree people to celebrate the glory of competition, rather than sports organizations such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA. These events, like other sports, can only be profitable if they are subsidized by the government.

But that fact doesn't stop the government from competing for the right to host big sporting events. The huge number of contracts for construction, suppliers and consultants is in itself very attractive. What's more, since the 1950s, hosting major sporting events has increasingly become a conduit for governments to send signals that they are willing and eager to participate in the global economy. In 1955, Rome's bid to host the 1960 Olympic Games was due to Italy's attempt to return to the European mainstream after World War II. Just two years later, Europe signed the Treaty of Rome, under which the European Union was later established. The 1964 Olympics in Japan and the 1972 West German Munich Olympics had a similar effect. Seoul, Barcelona and Sydney's bids to host the Olympics also come at a time of economic liberalization and privatization. When China bid to host the 2008 Olympic Games in 2001, it was also in talks to apply for accession to the WTO.

As a result, large-scale global sports events became a celebration of the capitalist world order and a gesture of obedience. Sport, like capitalism, "has established itself everywhere in the world." It must settle down everywhere, take root everywhere, make connections everywhere." The link between sport and capitalism in the 18th century was incredibly strong and evident in the first decade of the 21st century.

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A complete excerpt from A Brief History of Sport, Chapter 15, Winners and Losers: Sport in the New World Order