• Sport between Development and Business

Sport between Development and Business

Nowadays sport is increasingly taking up an enormous portion of the interest and time of people of various tastes, cultures and age groups in many parts of the world. International, regional and local sporting competitions, including football, basketball, track and field, horsemanship, fencing, etc., are regularly held.

This reflects international interest in sport and highlights a fruit of human endeavor in the form of fair competition between the peoples of the world in skills, physical fitness, fun and the achievement of social objectives related to human development and society in turn.

However, in the light of globalization, sport has become some sort of business as daily seen in the many news stories about deals tens of millions of dollars worth for the transfer of footballers between teams, or the millions of dollars spent in Europe and the USA on bets on horse races, football, rugby, basketball, tennis and other matches. This is also seen in reports on sports satellite channels about deals involving the buying of certain players to rescue a club from collapse and similar stories which make us feel that these are purely business deals, having nothing to do with sport. Moreover, international sport is now an effective tool in world tourism and the developed countries are involved in fierce competition between sporting and recreational tourism. Football, e.g., has changed from a team sport with a huge number of fans who enjoy the game to one of the world’s most lucrative business opportunities.

From fun to sheer strength

There are many signs of the shift in the concept and essence of this popular game which is designed for fun and the show of skills to a rigid system based on great physical strength and speed, with no room for pleasure, imagination or art. As a result of this shift, businessmen s attitudes to the players has also changed: from modest young players to powerless commodities sold, bought or hired subject to market rules.

As is well known, sport is a normal physical effort or skill practised in accordance with agreed rules and regulations designed to bring about fun, competition, excellence or skill development. Sports differ according to differing social objectives, and players or teams influence. As the literature on the history of sport shows, man has known sport from time immemorial and used his body in search of food chasing preys and hunting animals. There is ample evidence that the ancient civilizations showed interest in sport, as seen in the many Olympic sports grounds in ancient Greece, and temple inscriptions in ancient Egypt as well as in the Chinese civilization, which all indicate that many sports were practised in prehistoric times. Many sports were inspired by the many activities of primitive man. Running and shooting were inspired by prey chasing; jumping, by leaping to escape natural disasters; swimming, by swimming in the sea and fishing; horsemanship, by travelling on horseback.

As new capitalism has promoted the marketing of sport in the USA since the end of the 1930s, the television expanded the scope of sport marketing in the 1950s and 1960s. With the professionalization of tennis and rugby in the USA and Europe, their marketing has become more globalized since the mid-1970s with the start of promotion campaigns for the Olympics which investors used as publicity for their products through advertisements or sponsorship of a specific sport or team.

As far as football is concerned, the first international match was played in Uruguay in South America in 1889 between English sailors in Montevideo and Buenos Aires under the nominal patronage of Queen Victoria. Formerly, football was prohibited in Britain under royal decrees describing it as an instrument of many evils which God does not allow as read the order of Edward II of 1314. In 1349, Edward III confirmed the prohibition and descried it as useless folly. Many similar decrees were issued in the period 1410-1547.

Sport and power

However, years later, and with the development of the rules of the game and its players skills and its concomitant increasing popularity, kings and rulers found it an effective channel for people to vent their feelings of suppression through. They also used it to approach people and influence their moods and direct their anger away from the failure of the authorities to serve the public interest.

But things have taken on a different form in the globalization age. Instead of being a social gathering where sport is played for recreation, physical fitness and fun, sports clubs have become purely commercial companies where deals are clinched and globalized-not necessarily local-capital is used, as seen in the deals to take over European clubs by American and Russian businessmen or even with Arab capital from the Gulf and elsewhere. Moreover, big deals are made to renovate the buildings and facilities of major English clubs from Arab investments in return for publicity contracts for years. There have also been reports about the acquisition by Arab investors of half the shares of Liverpool (UK), and other reports in the press and on sport TV channels from time to time. In addition, there are large surpluses in millions in the organizations which stage internationals sporting competitions, mainly FIFA, one of a few organizations in the world not affected by the global financial crisis, as reported by FIFA President Blatter during the World Champions tournament last year, due to the large surpluses and investments amounting to millions of dollars at the end of last year. Despite the crisis this income earned FIFA a $ 182m profit, which could have been much higher had football had the same popularity in the USA and Canada.

The clearest signs of globalized money in sport are the big deals over the transfer of footballers between European clubs. Manchester United (UK), e.g, accepted a $132m (approx. £ 80m) deal offered by Real Madrid (Spain) to buy the Portugeuse football star Cristiano Ronaldo, 24, the son of a poor Portugeuse family, which became the most expensive deal in the history of football, exceeding the French Zinédine Zidane, holder of the previous record figure (75m euros), who was transferred from Juventus (Italy) to Real Madrid in 2001. The best footballer in the world in 2008, Ronaldo was transferred from Manchester Untied to Sporting Lisbon (Portugal) for about £ 12.2m, and was sold seven years later for about seven times this figure. Similarly, Real Madrid bought the Brazilian football star Ricardo Kak? in a reportedly $ 90 m (65m euro) deal.

Human trafficking

In this way, globalized sport has become the object of lucrative deals, nurturing in the ambitions of investors and brokers between players and clubs, reminding us of human trafficking in ancient times. Sport today has become many African countries hope of selling their human resources to major clubs as professional footballers. It also recalls the use of sport by the Romans as a form of recreation by wrestlers and other talented players at the expense of many values on which sport is essentially based. This point of view is based on many facts recently reported in the foreign press about the Mafia s bets on sporting activities and the acquisition by members of the Russian Mafia of a number of clubs in Europe, specifically Denmark.

These deals are only to be expected in this lucrative business which produces a large amount of money. Moreover, the Mafia is not new to football, as sport has been embroiled in big scandals, including the so-called Mafia scandals in the Italian league in the late 1980s, when the match fixing scandal was revealed at the end of the 1980 season. AC Milan President Felice Colombo and players from Lazio, Avellino, Perugia, Genoa and Leccee were involved in the scandal and were arrested for illegal bets as well. Accordingly, AC Milan President was prevented from practicing any football activity for life, and some players in the Italian team, such as the team and AC Milan goalkeeper Alberto Enrico, and the 1982 World Cup Champion and striker in Italy Paulo Rossi were sentenced to a number of years in prison. Surprisingly, the Mafia played a key role in getting Rossi out of prison to share in the World Cup finals in1982, which contributed significantly to Italy s winning the World Cup.

These and other facts make us wonder about the feasibility of globalized sport and whether this makes it play a more positive role in human development and raising the standard of physical and mental health as well as promoting the concepts of fair competition, skill improvement and recreation, or, on the contrary, it will be a curse which negatively affects the economy and international relations and promotes negative concepts rather than the positive values which sport is supposed to encourage.

This issue is one of the key tests of sport at world level. Aspects of this issue are seen in fanaticism worldwide. Football hooligans behave in an extremely noisy and violent way and cause riot among fans, ignoring sportsmanship; which requires players to accept defeat and make every effort, show their skills and serve their team, applying the principle of altruism: giving priority to the common over the personal interest, as one of the key values which sport encourages.

Negative aspects

The relation between clubs and players has many negative aspects due to the financial benefits of sport at the expense of the values it had in the past. This is likely to promote selfishness and an individualistic culture which diminish the value of group work which sport is generally based on. These aspects pose another question about the scale of corruption which can result from the huge surpluses generated by the enormous popularity of sport worldwide, and whether these surpluses are actually used to double investors profit to the detriment of many values, as well as whether capital is likely to undermine all sporting regulations and established practices in favour of profiteering and exploiting players skills and popularity.

Globalization has brought about many changes, including the results of the rising influence and wider scope of globalized capital in many areas, such as culture, the media, education and sport. We Arabs should be aware of these dangers and should guide sporting organizations, foster a real sporting culture and promote the values on which it is based as a means of fir competition, mutual respect and exchange of skills. Since its inception, sport has been based on such values which must be sustained in our sports grounds and among the new generations as they watch these deals, which has a negative impact on Arab societies value system.

All kinds of sport, especially football and the other most popular games have become an essential component of human communities everywhere. As we consider the development of our societies in the areas of education, health, industry and agriculture, we have to attach equal importance to the sporting sector and not leave it to fall in the hands of speculators and profiteers. We should also pay close attention to this sector from the legal point of view and promote it from a social perspective to be embedded in society s cultural awareness and take advantage of its massive popularity to develop society in terms of physical and mental health and recreation.

Sulaiman Al-Askary

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