Page 37 - Sport Culture and the Media

18 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

for loss of work through travel or injury, and the International Olympic
Committee to this day eschews the paying of prize money to athletes (since 1981
questions of eligibility to compete and remuneration have been left to the indi-
vidual international federations; Hill 1992: 240), the penetration of the logic of
capital accumulation into sport has been such that, as Cashmore (2000) has
noted, the term ‘amateur’ has increasingly become a term of abuse in sporting
culture.
‘Pure’ amateurism in sport, if it ever existed, quickly died and, in the case of
rugby union (the amateur side of the split), a long period of ‘shamateurism’
ended in 1995 with such suddenness that it now threatens to swamp in
commercial terms its long-time professional antagonist – rugby league –
while multi-millionaire tennis players like Andre Agassi, Serena Williams, Venus
Williams and Pete Sampras are now permitted to take part in Olympic com-
petition. A suggestion to introduce golf as an Olympic sport has been opposed
due to concerns that the best players would not compete because they would
earn much more money on the international golf circuit. Estimating the current
global value of the ‘sportsbiz’ is no mean task, given the range of economic
activities which it can claim to embrace, but in 1988 Neil Wilson (1988: 8)
noted that ‘Official figures in Britain estimate that more than [US]$4 billion is
spent on sport each year, more than on motor vehicles. In Britain, sport-related
activity employs 376,000 people, more than the chemical industry, or agri-
culture or the combined electricity and gas industries’. A decade later, a report
by the Confederation of Australian Sports valued sport’s economic activity in
that country (with a population less than one-third of Britain’s) at AUS$8
billion, with the sports sector directly employing ‘95,000 people in 1995–96 –
more than the rail, grain, electricity and clothing industries’ (Boreham and
Pegler 1998: 3). In the same year as this report was released in Australia, the
eight-year TV rights to the National Football League in the United States
alone were sold for US$17.6 billion (Attwood 1998: 39; see Chapter 3). In 2000,
La Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), soccer’s world
governing body, estimated that annual world expenditure on this sport alone
was US$250 billion (Miller et al. 2001: 13). It can easily be seen, then, that the
sports industry (without factoring in its contribution to ancillary industries like
clothing, food, beverages and transport) has grown enormously over recent
decades – and in global proportions.
How can such large sums of money be generated in and through sport?
In examining the flow of capital, the initial source lies in the willingness of
some people to pay for the privilege of sport spectating. This ability and desire
to be entertained by those who specialize in and excel at particular activities –
a phenomenon periodically present in pre-industrial societies in the shape of
travelling groups of troubadours and actors – grew as part of a more general