Corruption in sport - Money has ruined many great sports

It’s probably as naive to hope that the Corinthian ideals expressed through energy, competitiveness, and integrity that once shaped top-level sport might ever again prevail as it is to imagine that the Tour de France, or any other multimillion euro sport, could be corruption-free.

Nevertheless, yesterday’s allegation that a Qatar football executive paid €3.6m to buy support for that country’s campaign to host the 2022 World Cup is just another deflating confirmation of how tawdry, how unromantic and grindingly commercial top-level sport is.

It has become an exclusively commercial or political exercise expressed through a medium — the game in question — that not so very long ago had a plausible integrity, or at least a redeeming degree of plausible integrity. Sadly, not even the most enthusiastic fan can say that remains the case — most professional sport is like professional wrestling but with lower-level histrionics.

This is confirmed by the fact that though Qatar is an entirely unsuitable venue for a summer championship, it has been endorsed as such by Fifa, football’s governing body. And, if this has not become a secondary, inconvenient issue, more than 1,000 workers have died building World Cup facilities there in recent years.

Escalating street protests in Brazil over the huge cost and absence of any real social dividend in this month’s World Cup are another symptom of how sport is dominated by commercialism.

Soccer is not by any means alone in this abandonment of any kind of ideal worthy of being defined as a principle or expressed as social responsibility. This year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi cost a staggering €37.5bn and were characterised more by corruption that sporting excellence. The obnoxious homophobia expressed by officials in the host country, President Vladimir Putin’s neo-feudal Russia, should have been enough to provoke a boycott, but economic ambitions prevailed.

How could it be otherwise? In the year to June 2013 golfer Tiger Woods earned — if that definition does not offend ordinary or not-so-ordinary workers — just under €115m to become the world’s highest paid sportsman. Rory McIlroy trailed in with €42.5m and was named in a must-do-better 21st position.

An idea of how these figures are driven comes from the fact that sports gear manufacturer Nike has sponsorship deals with at least 51 athletes in the top 100 and has signed €2.8bn in endorsement obligations.

To be fair to Woods and McIlroy, it must be acknowledged that hedge fund manager David Tepper, president of Appaloosa Management, earned — with that “earned” health warning again — €2.6bn in the same period. Mr Tepper’s income confirms that the rewards available in the financial services sector long ago passed from the merely excessive to the utterly immoral.

Sport is still at the excessive point but a simple truth remains — sport, especially amateur sport, animates and excites in a way few other human activities can. Passionate commitment and long, hard preparation, as well as almost unsurpassable character building, still define participation in “ordinary” sport; an argument supported by the probability that most Irish people would far prefer to score the winning point in Croke Park in September than score the winning goal in Rio de Janeiro’s Estádio do Maracanã on July 13. This suggests, too, that even if the Corinthian ideals are in retreat they have a core value that will endure — despite all of the Qatars and Lance Armstrongs of this world.