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Sport is a business. This I reluctantly know. It’s there in every stadium changing its name every few years when a new sponsor comes along. It’s there in the endless talk of certain sporting events or formats as “entertainment products” vying for attention in a competitive marketplace. Or when sporting codes land multibillion-dollar TV rights deals off the back of huge amounts of revenue from gambling advertising – this week, the NRL.
It’s there when sporting codes plant new franchises – sorry, teams – in places few locals particularly want them, otherwise known as new markets. It’s there when you discover that your favourite team has an “Official home appliance partner” or an “Official snacking/chocolate partner”. I did not make those up.
But before all this, sport is culture. It works best when it emerges from the soil. It’s overwhelmingly inherited. It has meaning because it is anchored in history and place. Sporting love can be acquired and cultivated, but even then it becomes rich when it is connected to a tradition.
Sporting achievement has meaning only because of a sense of continuity, that the victor has a history and a future. To win a premiership or a World Cup is to stake a claim to become history, to be recognised in the future. It’s a cultural monument.
All this is crucial to understanding the public anger surrounding two biting frustrations of the moment. One is the political impasse over the Albanese government’s gambling ad reforms, which both the Greens and the Coalition are holding up on the grounds they are too weak. The other was this week’s bizarre Trump-Infantino-World-Cup-red-card saga. The former is graver than the latter in several ways. But both, I think, enliven the same kind of objection that has everything to do with this intersection of culture, business and sport, and the contradictions between them.
Let’s start with the World Cup. To recap, US striker Folarin Balogun was banned for one match when he received a red card last week for a dangerous tackle. Accordingly, he was to miss America’s next match against Belgium. Then came a fateful phone call between the world’s two most powerful presidents: Donald Trump of the US and FIFA’s Gianni Infantino. Trump asked Infantino to overturn the ban. FIFA, in a fashion, obliged, suspending the one-match sentence for 12 months, allowing Balogun to play. It mattered not. Belgium ran riot in what looked like a fit of righteous anger and won 4-1. “Overturn this” posted the Belgian team on social media.
Something restored, but also something broken. This is, in the grand scheme, a trivial matter. But it leaves behind a unique kind of impotence and despondency. It’s not serious stuff, but it feels very much so. Why is that?
Corruption? Yes, but that’s not a new FIFA story. It’s the subplot of almost any decision over who gets to host the World Cup. Money? Yes, sure. FIFA rents an office in Trump Tower, effectively making it one of the president’s clients. Meanwhile, FIFA’s ruthlessness in wringing every dollar out of this tournament from unconscionable ticket pricing has long been clear.
The introduction of two mandatory “hydration breaks” during every game irrespective of how hot the weather actually is fundamentally changes the way the sport works, but gives broadcasters an opportunity to play extra ads worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
No, I think it’s about monopoly. Not just in the commercial sense, but in the emotional sense. The great contradiction at the heart of treating sport like a business is that it’s ultimately not competing in the same way as any other product. Sport is not the consumer choice of some rational actor. The fan is overwhelmingly in a monogamous relationship of love, full of ups and downs but ultimately inseverable without considerable pain. The object of passion, whether a club or a national team, has a monopoly on your heart. You can’t substitute it for another. That’s the only reason sport finally works. And when you apply market logic to a monopoly, you get abuse of power and ultimately failure.
There’s no other World Cup. For that reason, we overlook enormous amounts of corruption. But when it turns up on the pitch because a player is allowed to play for no good sporting reason, or a team like Iran is forced to fly internationally for every game day unlike its opponents, the monopoly comes to the fore. It grates not because it is the worst thing in the world, but because it feels like such a brazen exploitation of unearned market power.
This, I think, adds a whole visceral layer to the politics of gambling ads. The starting point is obviously society’s growing awareness of gambling’s ravages. But the marriage with sport makes it especially galling. Because kids watch it, yes, but not only that. There is something here about the exploitation of the situation, that the monopoly of the heart renders the fan captive.
Any notion of choice here is a mirage: it’s unreasonable to expect fans to choose a different team, or different sport, or just stop watching. Only government can rein in the monopoly, which is why the Albanese government is now coming under such pressure.
Such tensions follow when tournaments and teams become commercial enterprises rather than cultural institutions. Our economic logic demands all sports grow all the time, extracting new money from new fans, and more money from existing ones. That search inevitably leads to scandal, and even at times to social erosion, but rarely to a change of course.
That’s an ironic result for something like sport that is one of the last shared, truly social arenas we have left in life. But it works because of the emotional monopoly it exploits. Abuse it and we rage. But beyond that, we’re helpless to resist. That’s the gamble those running these games are happy to make, because it’s frankly the surest bet there is.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.From our partners
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