Is big sport a force for social cohesion or a tool of huge commercial interests?

OPINION: The idea that everybody should be interested in watching sport suits big business just fine

OPINION:The idea that everybody should be interested in watching sport suits big business just fine

WRITING ABOUT AD100, the Roman poet Juvenal decried the fact that all the people of Rome cared about was bread and circuses. If the Roman leaders supplied both, they could safely remain in office.

The leaders of 1st century Rome were not constrained by the possible poor performance of the Roma or Lazio soccer teams, as they could always guarantee a great show between the gladiators and African lions or locally sourced Christians.

I was reminded of Juvenal’s Satire 10 by the spectacle of Irish soccer fans returning from Poland dejected because 11 multi- millionaire professional entertainers failed to give them the entertainment they expected.

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While the fans returned to the struggles of their daily lives, the Euro 2012 multimillionaire players have returned to their mansions and their pneumatic wives and girlfriends. (Some Premier League players seem to require both at once).

The head of the Football Association of Ireland, John Delaney, has returned to his now €360,000 per year job, while his somewhat more successful Spanish and Italian counterparts both get by on €150,000.

The assumption that sport is important – that everybody should be interested in it – is driven by the huge commercial interests that make money from the delusions of sports fans. Some of the more naive fans decry its “commercialisation”, as if all major sports were not now businesses, some among the most profitable in the world.

Some proponents of sport argue that it is a force for social cohesion when, like all cultural activities, it is class-based. There is no working-class player on the Irish rugby team and most soccer players are working-class, as are most of their supporters.

The contrasting attitudes inculcated by soccer and rugby are evident in reactions of each game’s players to injuries. When a soccer player is injured, he lies groaning until carried off, while a rugby player with broken collar bone or severed ear plays on, as the boys of Rugby school would have done in the 19th century, in preparation for the slaughter and subjugation of the “lesser breeds without the Law”.

Rugby, it is argued, instils the values of “sportsmanship” and team spirit valued in the workplace. This argument is sometimes used in business to justify the hiring of doltish former teammates rather than more talented men who do not enjoy spending their Saturdays mauling other men in a muddy field.

When a soccer player scores a goal he leaps into the embrace of a teammate, yet soccer, like most team sports, is very homophobic.

In 1999, Graham Le Saux, then with Chelsea, was subjected to homosexual taunts by Liverpool player Robbie Fowler. Fowler had concluded that Le Saux must have been gay because he was a graduate, read the Guardian and did not engage in the typical footballer’s lifestyle of heavy drinking and “spit roasting”. (This term does nor refer to Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s favourite way of cooking a free range pig).

The idea that young people involved in sport are less likely to be involved in crime has been contested by French sociologist Sebastian Roche, who studied the young men who rioted in poorer areas of Paris in the past decade.

Roche found in interviews that, rather than being an alternative to street violence, sport often provided rioters with their first opportunity for a fight and helped them to develop the aggression and fitness needed for rioting.

Londoners will be reminded soon of how the Olympic Games “bring people together” when they see surface-to-air missiles placed on the roofs of apartment buildings without the owners’ consent, the navy’s biggest warship on alert in the Thames and warplanes set to protect all at the world’s most politicised and corrupted sporting event.

The fact that London is on a war footing for the Games calls to mind George Orwell’s comment: “Sport had nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.”

The major sponsor of these Olympics is that pioneer of healthy eating, McDonald’s, which will give free “activity toys” to children with “Happy Meals”.

And, in a gesture of breathtaking cynicism, BP, responsible for the world’s most environmentally destructive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, is the “sustainability partner” for the Games!


SÉAN BYRNEis a lecturer in economics at Dublin Institute of Technology