Sporting Boundaries, Sporting Events

and Commodification

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Series Editors

Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard

Dr Ken Monteith

Advisory Board

Karl Spracklen Simon Bacon

Katarzyna Bronk Stephen Morris

Jo Chipperfield John Parry

Ann-Marie Cook Ana Borlescu

Peter Mario Kreuter Peter Twohig

S Ram Vemuri John Hochheimer

A Probing the Boundaries research and publications project.

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/

The Persons Hub

‘Sports’

2015

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Sporting Boundaries, Sporting Events and Commodification

Edited by

Dikaia Chatziefstathiou and Andrea Kathryn Talentino

Inter-Disciplinary Press

Oxford, United Kingdom

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© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2015 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087 ISBN: 978-1-84888-388-8 First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2015. First Edition.

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Table of Contents

Introduction vii Dikaia Chatziefstathiou and Andrea Kathryn Talentino Part I Sporting Communities and Boundaries

Sport’s Positive Potential: Professional and Youth Sport 3 through the Lens of Positive Psychology

Skye G. Arthur-Banning and Mary Sara Wells

Performing Identity in the English Premier League Football 17 Fandom in Eldoret, Kenya

Solomon Waliaula

Creating a Nostalgic Revolution: The Double Narrative of 35 the First Fan-Owned Football Club in Israel and Its Symbolic Boundaries

Ori Katz Part II The Global Commodification of Sport Sociological Justification for Non-Taxation of Sports Heroes 59 Karolina Tetlak Nutritional Supplement Commodification and Consequence 75

to Sport Gary Gabriels Part III The Impacts of Global Sports and Sports Events

Against All Odds: Surmounting the Challenges of the 103 FIFA 2022 World Cup in Qatar

Susan Dun

Pathways to International Status: Image Manipulation and 125 the Olympic Games

Andrea Kathryn Talentino

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Introduction

Dikaia Chatziefstathiou and Andrea Kathryn Talentino

Sport intersects with nearly everyone’s life in some manner, as participant, observer, fan, critic, parent or consumer. Though once a pursuit for only the leisure class, sport’s influence now seeps into many aspects of modern life with both positive and negative effects. Sport offers a means of shaping belonging and identity, it can spur social and economic development, and yet it is also a source of commodification, corruption, and questionable ethical decisions. Beyond its personal impact, sport also cuts across political, economic, and social boundaries and influences a wide array of issues.

The British and French long believed that sports prepared their soldiers for war, leading both countries to encourage sports contests among the soldiers waiting to go to the front in World War I.1 Similarly, the English often say that ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won on the fields of Eton’.2 More recently, in 1972 US President Richard Nixon used ‘Ping-Pong diplomacy’, to pave the way for the restoration of diplomatic relations between the US and China.

These cross-cutting aspects of sport lead to important foundational questions. One is the issue of who benefits from sport. The question in the modern world is complex and demands inter-disciplinary approaches to finding an answer. The answer likely has many layers, as sport encompasses far more than the elite and professional levels that generate mass passions and large bank accounts. Recreational programs, games for children, and programs that use sport activity to build self-esteem and confidence among specific populations are equally part of the study of sport, though they are often forgotten among the focus on the elite level.

Another foundational question is how commodification drives sport development and meanings. The modern Olympics, for example, were envisioned as a vehicle to build specific values of international collaboration, unity, and social good, yet their current incarnation is often considered defined by glitz, glamor, and excess. How the commercial elements of sport coexist with the more philosophical elements are frequent sources of debate, and relate to central questions of what we want sport to be and the roles we expect it to play. The study of sport thus requires a broad approach that connects scholars from a wide range of disciplines to consider how sport affects our personal lives as well as the broader social and political contexts in which we live.

The selections in this book emerged from the second global conference on sport, presented by Inter-Disciplinary.Net, which aims to bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines – sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, history, political studies, urban studies, management and marketing, geography, and psychology and sport science – who are interested in exploring sport’s social, political and economic influences and roles. The contributors are interested in

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Introduction

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sport’s histories, meanings, forms, and futures. The Interdiscplinary.net project is for cheerleaders of sport, critics of sport, and all those in-between who would like to make a contribution to this inter-disciplinary approach to understanding sport.

The title of this volume, Sporting Boundaries, Sports Events and Commodification, captures both the wide range of topics addressed through this project as well as the connections between those topics. Several themes emerged during the conference relating to the meaning and value of fandom, the impact of globalization and commodification, and the political relevance of hosting large, elite-level events. The chapters included here were selected from among the presentations at the conference and authors were invited to expand and develop their work to engage these issues more directly, as well as open a dialogue with the other contributions in the book.

The boundaries referred to in the title are thus not the typical, geospatial boundaries that define our world but the limits and possibilities that are attached to and derive from sport. The events that comprise sport and the commodification that attends to it shape those limits and possibilities, as is discussed in several of the chapters, and create the understandings that define both what sport is and what we want it to be.

In examining ‘Sporting Communities and Boundaries’, Skye G. Arthur-Banning and Mary Sara Wells open by asking why the sport news is dominated by the negative, with fascination seeming to linger on the scandals and problems rather than the positive effects of sport. The power of sport to provide benefit is immense. Studies show that sport can enhance personal, group, and community development, and provide economic benefits. Athletes also often use their status to promote positive social initiatives and give back to their communities in ways that could not be leveraged without their celebrity position and recognition value. Yet that is often not the dominant story we hear.

Arthur-Banning and Wells challenge the fascination with the negative stories of sports in an effort to highlight sport’s positive psychological value and argue for transforming how it is viewed and reported. Although they recognize that scandal sells, they also argue that the sports industry as a whole, at every level, would benefit from a focus on its positive effects rather than encouraging fascination with its negative effects.

Solomon Waliaula builds on that concept of sport as a positive social building block to demonstrate how African fans of English Premier League (EPL) football use the sport to shape, strengthen, and define communities. His focus is on the observant value of sport rather than the participant, and he shows how being a fan in this context creates a common language and understanding that is inspirational, definitional, and perhaps strangely, both inclusive and exclusive. Fandom in this case is inclusive in the sense that anyone can watch the games and become ‘expert’ on the players, events, and games. But it is exclusive in the sense that

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Dikaia Chatziefstathiou and Andrea Kathryn Talentino

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those who do not become expert cannot speak the common language and thus must either decide to be outside the fan community or become part of it.

While Waliaula describes a clear community and boundary, with clear sides, Ori Katz shows how the two can be blurred, and raises questions about the very meaning of fandom and its practices. What makes a fan? This is a central question in his chapter, which shows two clear approaches—those who define fandom by commitment to the sport, which means the quality and success of the team, and those who define fandom by the communal and ideological qualities of the team, which means commitment to principle potentially at the expense of quality of play.

Katz’s chapter shows how the neat boundaries of Waliaula’s analysis blur and shift through constant negotiation and renegotiation among the members of the particular fan group. New members introduce new expectations, which put pressure on the most diehard fans’ understanding of how and why they support a particular football club. The alternate perspectives create competitive identities that lead to what Katz describes as ‘dynamic boundaries’ that both include and exclude. But unlike above, where fandom of the EPL created clear ins and outs, the boundaries that Katz observes can alternately include or exclude the same group, depending on the prevailing dialectic and the focus of identity at any given time.

The section on ‘The Global Commodification of Sport’ engages the concept of boundaries in the context of economic gain. Two different perspectives are presented here on how money drives both how athletes behave and the benefits they expect to reap. The two chapters complement each other nicely, as Karolina Teŧlak’s contribution on tax leniency for sports heroes informs in part why athletes might engage in the sort of doping behaviours that Gary Gabriels investigates. Both chapters also engage the moral questions raised by Katz regarding what we want sports heroes to be. Should elite athletes be judged by their ability to perform at astonishing and, for most, unimaginable levels, or should they be judged by their ethical and moral principles regardless of the impact on performance?

Teŧlak concludes that responsibility is a central part of heroism, and that athletes’ commitment to supporting and serving their states is part of the measure by which they should be judged. Gabriels focuses more directly on the irresponsibility of the supplement industry as a whole, but suggests, like Teŧlak, that political bodies essentially make deals with the devil in the interest of advancing athletes and sport events. The state’s disinterest in responsible regulatory behaviour is mirrored by athletes’ pursuit of tax havens, creating a sense that sport is defined by rapacious attitudes that shape our expectations of right and wrong.

The final section, ‘The Impacts of Global Sports and Sports Events’, engages these questions on an international scale. Susan Dun examines the domestic and political impact of Qatar winning the rights to host the 2022 World Cup, describing several boundaries of importance between religious views, domestic politics, local views on sport, and basic infrastructure and development capabilities. The very

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Introduction

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fact of hosting the World Cup will ensure that these boundaries are not static, but are, as elsewhere, negotiations between the local community and the international community, with important ramifications for both. Andrea Kathryn Talentino also focuses on the impact of international mega-events, analysing how serving as Olympic host allows states to shape or launder their international image.

Although the evidence is murky, there is some indication that even critical attention in the years preceding an Olympic Games can provide overall benefits for the host country, a trend that Qatar likely gambled on with the World Cup as well. These events as commodity, stripped of their value-based ideas, thus drive both how states view them and the benefits they provide. Hosting a mega-event allows states a branding opportunity that few other international activities provide, a point that emerges from both the Dun and Talentino chapters.

The issues raised by these chapters show that this volume raises perhaps as many questions as it answers. The complexity of the questions surrounding sport reinforces the richness of this area of research and the value of bringing interdisciplinary perspectives together to engage on it. The political, economic and social dimensions of sport are present in many parts of modern life and yet are not easy to characterize or categorize. Nor is the dynamic of positive or negative always easy to understand. Though Wells and Arthur-Banning show how positive psychology could be engaged, most of the other contributions showcase more blurred boundaries between the two and reveal outcomes that could be seen in both lights, either at different times or even simultaneously.

There is much yet to be plumbed and learned about sport, both in our personal lives and in the broader contexts in which we live. We hope this volume will be enjoyed and appreciated for the questions it does engage, but also serve as a call to researchers from all types of disciplines to engage on these topics and join the project to examine the meanings and values of sport. The conferences are continuing annually, and Interdisciplinary.net will also soon launch a journal on the topic of sport. We present here many areas for further research and discussion, and invite readers to engage in the project in the future.

Notes

1 Thierry Terret and J.A. Mangan eds., Sport, Militarism and the Great War: Martial Manliness and Armageddon (London / New York: Routledge, 2013). 2 Oxford Academic, Viewed on 5 August 2014. http://oupacademic.tumblr.com/post/57740288322/misquotation-the-battle-of-waterloo-was-won-on.

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Bibliography

Oxford Academic. Viewed on 5 August 2014. http://oupacademic.tumblr.com/post/57740299322/misquotation-the-battle-of-waterloo-was-won-on. Terret, Thierry and J. A. Mangan, eds. Sport, Militarism and the Great War: Martial Manliness and Armageddon. London / New York: Routledge, 2013.

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