The Promises of Sport - unpublished paper

As part of my bumper Christmas giveaway, I've uploaded another unpublished article. I submitted this to Historical Materialism, shortly before the London Olympics, but it was rejected on the basis that, ahem, it didn't contain any historical materialism. Which seems fair enough, now I look back on it. If it wasn't so focused on the (then imminent) Olympics, I'd submit it elsewhere, but it's now too late.

The paper is called The Promises of Sport. It's an effort to locate and criticise sport within neoliberalism, in terms of the distinctive political logics that sport occasions and facilitates. As I explore, competition and competitiveness are critical political values under neoliberalism, which markets are only rarely able to exhibit, as corporate power increases. Hence sport comes to perform a key legitimating function, which markets as such (as opposed to market-like behaviour) are no longer able to.

Here is the abstract:

The neoliberal era saw rapid increase in the political and economic status of sport. Most empirical analysis of this phenomenon has sought to contain sport within prior theories of media, leisure or urban regeneration. But perhaps the relationship between neoliberalism and sport is more fundamental than this, and there are specific affinities between the two. The article identifies two ways in which sport and neoliberal politics have been mutually reinforcing. Firstly, sport acts as an icon for neoliberalism, highlighting the behaviours and moral visions that markets might once have exhibited, but no longer do. Secondly, sport acts as a potlatch for neoliberalism, providing a release for political sovereignty and executive decision, in an otherwise economised world. Now that neoliberalism has entered a state of existential ambivalence and with London’s Olympics approaching, we might also ask – what has become of sport and its fading promises?

 

Comments

[Ian C]

Fascinating - thanks.

Isn't sport now the leading edge of the crisis for neoliberalism? We can see all the signs of weakening competition and growing oligopoly. 'Sport' is now synonymous with 'football' - notice how BBC newsreaders announce that club x's manager has left, without needing to specify that they are talking about a football team. The Olympics was a brief reminder that other sports exist, but these are now sidelined again in coverage and funding. Football has become the Apple, Google and Amazon of sport. And within football, all the tendencies to concentration of power and limits on competition, long evident in Scotland, Spain etc, have been intensified by the Premiership and the new format of the European Cup, and by their integration with equally oligopolistic TV systems. In England, football has been outsourced to the rest of the world, and it is a concession to old-style localism that we still have games actually played here by global brand teams. I'd say the neoliberal elites of England badly need some unpredictable contests for the football Premiership. But unpredictability in this context means 'it'll be one of 3-4 mercenary assemblages of millionaires owned by extractive industry oligarchs'.

[Will Davies]

Yes, this is true. Football manages to straddle various dominant modes of competitiveness simultaneously - bodily fitness/wellness; finance; celebrity. As you say, the fact that the Premier League isn't actually very competitive as a league (this season being a very slight aberation) almost doesn't matter, so long as the game can serve as a lightning rod for various other forms of inequality-fetishism.