Good to see someone “Taking Sport Seriously”
Almost as if on cue, imagine my surprise (and delight) to find this month’s Prospect magazine (quickly becoming a must read for me, as a wonderful complement to my weekly Economist fix) feature an essay by David Goldblatt “Taking Sport Seriously” on its cover:
Sport has never been more important, but its meaning and appeal are still not taken seriously, at least in Britain. It is time for sport to enjoy the same cultural weight as the performing arts, and to be judged by the normal standards of public life.
The focus of the essay is on the lack of political and cultural respect accorded to sport in our - with particular focus on British - society and how this is incongruous with the role it actually plays in our culture, our economy and our society. The author spends some time explaining the historical context and does a good job of framing how this bias against sports (being accorded the legitimacy it is due) came to be; in politics, culture and - yes, finance - sport is trivialized and not seen as worthy of “serious” attention - after all, they are “just games”…
Yet serious organised play cannot be purely spontaneous. If we wish to watch the spectacular, to participate in its grand narratives, we need rules and rule-making institutions; we need facilities, stadiums and professional athletes. Spectaculars require backers; the circus must be paid for. Sport needs, attracts, and must deal with money and power, and the backers will always be looking to buy or take their share of glory. How are we to police the line between the realms of power and play, economic space and social space? The production and consumption of modern sport clearly is political, albeit with a small “p.”
The author goes on to propose his view of a more appropriate positioning of sport in our society:
What would a healthier sporting culture look like? It would start from two ideas. First, sport should be treated with the same seriousness that is accorded to the performing arts. Second, it should be judged by the same standards of transparency, sustainability and democracy that we expect elsewhere in public life.
While finding much to agree with in his framing of the current state of affairs and the broad lines of his call to acknowledge and even embrace the reality of the key role it plays in our culture and our economies, my opinions diverge quite strongly with respect to his take on the role of markets in buttressing or even leading this realignment. His logic breaks down when he states that private capital and market forces are inimical to the emotional and ethereal value that lies at the heart of sports cultural value:
In sport, as in so many other areas, we seem to have accepted the triumph of private capital and global markets as irreversible. The private ownership of British football clubs, often by foreign billionaires, may appear to be a fait accompli, but it remains a flawed model. After all, what is a club? Stadiums, players, coaches and directors can and do change, and yet Arsenal is still Arsenal. What gives Arsenal continuity is the accumulated social capital amassed by generations who have attached significance to the narratives generated by the team’s performances. This network of memories, meanings, identities and rituals constitute a precious form of value which cannot be owned by anyone and should not have its fortunes exclusively linked to the vagaries of private capital—just ask people in Brooklyn how they feel about the Dodgers’ flight to Los Angeles in 1958.
He goes onto demand that we “balance private capital’s opportunity to make profits from [sports] with its duties of care.” I don’t disagree but find nothing contradictory in the preservation of “this precious form of value” with ownership by private capital and market mechanisms generally. That is not to say that good regulation and governance is not needed - indeed regular readers will know that I consider that a sine qua non of robust and efficient markets - but it confuses the lack of these with private ownership. They are not linked. I would go further and say that market forces are the best guarantors of good stewardship in the medium term precisely because there is a direct (non-diffuse) interest in preserving the “magic” that drives so much of the value. Indeed, the greatest risk of amateurish, parochial and near-sighted governance is more often found in sports and countries where the sport is considered a “public good” and so risks being compromised by the corrupting and often opaque forces of undemocratic and politicize power that typically favors a privileged and incumbent elite.
(For example, if the IRB were “privatized”, the next rugby world cup would almost certainly have gone to Japan (and not New Zealand.) Furthermore, Argentina (and other emerging rugby nations) would have long ago been given the opportunity to regularly compete with rugby’s elite. Both these would be to the benefit of the game; creating more (and spreading more widely) the “precious value” that sport brings, and would make commercial sense. However the political appointees that run the IRB - and are not subject to the discipline of private capital, but answer to the powers of the incumbent (self-perpetuating) elite - are free to ignore this even at the risk of damaging the long-term value of the game.)
Market mechanisms - allowed to work - will indeed promote the cultivation of the grass roots and ensure a necessary level of competitive parity because it is in their self-interest (economically.) One only has to look at the professional leagues in the US to see that private capital understands this impeccably. The failure in the UK (and elsewhere) - and I am sympathetic to his view that there is a failure - comes from the muddying of the waters by according sport a “special” quasi-public status: it’s a variation of the tragedy of the commons - the capitalists only abdicate their responsibilities because they can. ie Someone else (the government, the community, etc.) pays for it. So (mainly correct) diagnosis, but wrong treatment.
In any event, I applaud Prospect for doing its part in engaging the debate and the author for framing the issues so eloquently and challenging our society to reassess our preconceptions on this subject.
