Page 41 - Sport Culture and the Media

22 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

resource in its own right that can be readily harnessed by external economic
interests. For this reason, the economy of sport in the twentieth century has
developed in such a way that it is no longer reliant on a direct, monetary
exchange between spectator and ‘exhibitor’. These important economic aspects
of sport, however, should not obscure the political and cultural dimensions that
illuminate the appeal of sport in making it marketable in the first place.

Political football

National governments, on behalf of the nation-state, have invested heavily in
sport and sports television (including through sports institutes and national,
public broadcasters) because of the highly effective way in which sport can
contribute to nation building. In countries divided by class, gender, ethnic,
religious, regional and other means of identification, there are few opportun-
ities for the citizens of a nation to develop a strong sense of ‘collective con-
sciousness’, of being one people. One significant exception is war, for which
sport is often claimed to be a substitute, so that ‘in the course of the twentieth
century, the competitive bodily exertions of people in the highly regulated form
that we call “sport” have come to serve as symbolic representations of a non-
violent, non-military form of competition between states’ (Elias 1986c: 23). The
idea of sport as a ‘symbolic representation’ of war has sometimes been taken
further, to the extent that it is seen as a functional substitute for it, discharging
military aggression between countries in a relatively harmless way. This ‘war
minus the shooting’ proposition is most famously associated with George
Orwell, but he saw sport as anything but a benign diversion, instead judging
international competitions to be malign manifestations of militaristic
nationalism:
I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates good-
will between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the
world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no
inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from con-
crete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games [the so-called Nazi Olympics],
for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred,
one could deduce it from general principles.
(Orwell 1992: 37–8)
The English, according to Orwell, were leading ‘young countries’ like India and
Burma (at least in 1945 when his article was published) astray by exporting their
‘obsession’ and arousing ‘even fiercer passions’. In the ensuing half century and
into a new millennium, there have been many more examples of what Orwell