Paul Rouse: History won't look kindly on moral bankruptcy of too many sporting administrators
Russia's President Vladimir Putin (R) greets FIFA's President Gianni Infantino on the second day of the G20 Leaders' Summit in Buenos Aires, on December 01, 2018. - The leaders of countries representing four-fifths of the global economy opened a two-day meeting in Argentina facing the deepest fractures since the first G20 summit convened 10 years ago in the throes of financial crisis. (Photo by Mikhail KLIMENTYEV / SPUTNIK / AFP) (Photo credit should read MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP via Getty Images)
There is no end to the array of statistics that set out the importance of sport to modern society. These statistics – compiled by states and sporting organisations and research institutes and businesses – document virtually every aspect of the modern sporting world. From the percentage of the global population who play and watch sport to the centrality of sporting events and sports merchandising to the economy, the evidence of how our world is soaked in sport is undeniable.
Every society for which we have meaningful evidence holds evidence of people playing games. The history of millennia of people playing games is, in part, the story of people finding new ways of doing the same thing: playing games competitively.
It is in this passion for play that the foundation of an understanding of the origins and development of our modern sporting world.
The great change of the past 150 years of human history when it comes to playing games is the creation of organisations at a national and international level to codify, regulate, organise and ultimately control the playing of sport on a global scale.
In the course of little more than a century, sport has been transformed into big business and the organisations that control sport – by virtue of the wealth and prestige accumulated across the decades – also hold a political function.
Through their history, international sporting organisations have sought to maintain the pretence that sport is just sport, or if it does have a wider function it is to bring peoples together, to smooth over differences, to help with modernization and other such rhetorical claims of the ‘mom and apple pie’ variety.
The manner in which sporting organisations have disgraced themselves with their identification with Putin is just the latest example of how this is insulting rubbish.
It has happened across the history of these organisations. It happened, for example, most notoriously with Hitler and Berlin Games of 1936. But it has also happened in countries great and small – from the Olympian cavorting with the Chinese in recent decades to the Argentinian junta’s World Cup of 1978.
The moral bankruptcy of too many sporting administrators has been revealed time and again. They have had their snout in the trough and have demonstrated a capacity to facilitate political regimes that act in inexcusable ways.
When I teach this aspect of modern sports history to my students in UCD, I use the work of the brilliant French sociologist and philosopher, Jean-Marie Brohm, who taught for many decades at the University of Montpellier. Since the late 1960s, Brohm repeatedly set out the manifold failures in the world of sport, most brilliantly doing so in his recent book,
Brohm argues that the modern spectacle of sport “treats the masses as morons”, “that any hope of 'cleaning up sport' financially speaking is an illusion”, that it “enslaves women and perpetuates the patriarchal system”, that sport serves the function of inducing people to “to acclaim the established social-political system”.
Almost invariably, students agree with Brohm’s analysis of the ills of sport. They cannot argue against the weight of evidence that demonstrates the sordid aspect of the modern sporting world.
Where they almost always disagree with Brohm, though, is in respect of the action he calls for. Brohm has called, time and again, for the boycotting of Olympic Games, World Cups and all of those vast modern sporting events that dominate huge swathes of modern media. He argues, simply, that modern “sport must be smashed”.
But the students – representative of wider society – really enjoy sporting festivals and particularly enjoy them when there is Irish participation, notably when that participation includes at least some success.
And this is the great conundrum: On the one hand, modern sport is run by organisations whose basic capacity for ethical behaviour has repeatedly been shown to be appalling. But, on the other hand, major sporting occasions lend drama and colour and joy to hundreds of millions of people from every section of society all across the world.
Such is the hold that modern international sport has on the media, on states, and on wider society as a whole, it is tempting to believe that as things stand its future prosperity is a given.
But, again, this is wrong.
In sport, history shows that the only certainty is change. No sport can stand still and imagine that its present status is enough to guarantee its future. And the world of sport itself is all the time subject to the shifts in the organisation of wider society.
For example, the modern sporting world that was created in the nineteenth century would have been impossible without the invention of trains (which allowed teams travel long distances to compete against each other in national competitions) and the invention of, say, technologies that allowed the mass-production of standardized balls.
Goodyear’s vulcanised rubber – and the bladders which were inflated beneath the leather panels of footballs – were an essential step in the development of modern sport. They allowed for change.
In the modern world, the ubiquity of sports – and the power of the organisations that run sport – is manifest most potently in the sports grounds that proliferate. There is something deeply impressive about a well-made sports stadium, one that is unique and fitted into its environment in a way that augments itself and everything around it.
While it stands, there are few better places to understand the life of a city. The illusion is that – because it is built of bricks and mortar – it will last forever, but of course, it is built unto the moment and its time will pass, just as surely as did that of the Colosseum in Rome.
This is true, also, for modern sporting organisations. The days of FIFA and the IOC will pass. If you doubt that, remember that it once seemed impossible to imagine a world in which the Ancient Olympics would disappear. But disappear they did.
The power of the organisations who run modern sport is transient. It may be that, ultimately, it is the looming environmental crisis that will undo their power and prestige. As the temperature rises and resources of, for example, food and water become more pressurized, how will sporting bodies and events organisers meet the challenges of sustainability? It is not clear how this will be managed. The context of wider environmental change will ultimately define much of how people play sport.
But play they will: sport, itself, will not somehow disappear. The love of play that drives sport sits at the heart of the human experience for many people – just as it has across millennia. This love of play is something that is reinvented, again and again, to fit different societies in different places at different times. It is something that seizes the mind as well as the body.
People will keep on running, jumping, kicking balls, hitting them with sticks, hitting each other, chasing animals, racing animals against each other and so on.
The question is: how should all of this be organized and to what end? And why should people bend the knee to men whose decisions have proven to be so wrong on so many different levels?
