An own goal: how the politics of sport has changed

This article is part of our series where we take a look at bad ideas motivating recent political decisions and explain what lies behind them – and what the Government should be doing instead.

There has always been something Political about sports.

There has to be.

It is hard to imagine large numbers of people turning up for a shared organised activity without there being political implications.

Obviously there’s the logistics of how they get there and how they are provided for and cleaned up after and how all of that that is organised and or regulated if at all. Given that we’re dealing with activities which get emotionally charged it is also likely that some degree of crowd control will be needed at least some times. There’s then related questions of how the competition is organised, under what rules and under what governance. And that’s before you get in to all the names, songs, traditions and symbolism associated with teams and competitions.

The political structures associated with the governance of sport are a whole sub-genre of Politics and the perfect illustration of the banal evil, the corruption, the self-righteousness and incompetence and the sheer brazen wrongness which is the inevitable future of unaccountable organisations who can mark their own homework. And in FIFA’s case to brazenly award one of the world’s biggest tournament to a country with almost no history or interest in the sport and which was manifestly incapable of keeping its promises – and the fans’ views be damned.

There’s also at least some politics about territorial or geographical restrictions on competition – who’s in and who’s out of scope? These questions are even more magnified when it comes to international sport.

People talk about the potential of sport to unite us – but of course it can only do so once there is an “us” to unite – and a clearly defined “them” against whom we are united.

All of this is before you get in to pricing, broadcast rights, ownership, sponsorship, contracts and the myriad of other financial and legal arrangements which will ultimately depend on a political underpinning.

Sport has also been quite openly used for political purposes at least since the Roman Republic and almost certainly before. Politicians would arrange and sponsor chariot races and gladiatorial contests and teams– and use these to build up tribalistic political support.

In the modern world it is not just tyrannical regimes – such as the NAZIS with the 1936 Olympics, the Soviet Union with the 1980 Olympics or Russia and China with various recent iterations who have used major sporting events to send a political message. There were fairly ill-disguised political elements to the London 2012 Olympics, the 2010 Football World Cup and many other major tournaments.

Anything which attracts and excites that many people will find all sorts of political interests seeking to attach themselves to it – you can’t stop them.

Politics has a place in sport – it always has done and it always will do.

But sport by its very nature is a form of escapism. It is meant to give us something to enjoy which will distract us from daily concerns and miseries and to elevate our interests beyond them. If sport becomes too heavily defined by politics and the grinding political debates and concerns of the day then it ceases to fulfil its purpose, or at least does so rather less well.

And this does seem to have been happening increasingly over recent years.

There are the gestures which have received explicit or tacit official approval – the adoption of rainbow paraphernalia, athletes bending their knees to support a particular campaign group and the near universal appearance of minutes of silence or black armbands to mark relatively minor events in what were once gestures reserved for hugely significant and unifying moments.

It is of course by appeal to the precedent of these pre-existing unifying political gestures such as the minute’s silence for Armistice Day or the singing of the national anthem that a swathe of different interest groups have been able to attach themselves to sport.

This slippery slope argument has never really been pushed back on properly by those who should – so now we have the bizarre situation of a thoroughly rotten and hypocritical international sport authority seeking to make a narrow point on this issue, which even though right in isolation, only serves to confuse public understanding of the issues further.

The truth is that the reason national anthems and minutes’ silence were observed and didn’t impinge on the game, why Welsh football teams were allowed to compete in English football competitions without much complaint and why even highly tribal and divided sporting towns and cities could function well throughout the rest of the week was because the politics in sport used to be about our shared values and institutions – country, tradition, decency, fairness etc.

What has happened though is that as in our society, our shared cultural values and institutions have been undermined, attacked and eroded, we have seen a vacuum opening up where once there used to be solid foundations to appeal to. With self-serving campaign groups and special interests seeking to question these unifying values and to pain them as divisive, they have made a flimsy intellectual case for other fringe interests and priorities being given equal or superior status.

And thus week after week in sport after sport one interest group’s preferred symbol after another is paraded in front of uninterested or outright sceptical fans and veneration is demanded. When the fans object to such treatment or voice their own views it is this which is taken as the political act.

This is less about politics than about the form of politics – or to put it another way, about politicisation.

There has always been politics in sport – but sport has not always been politicised. The fact that it has is symptomatic of the way every aspect of our society has undergone the same process – and it is because of the hollowing out of the previously robust, shared and yes political values we use to hold in common.

Sport will no longer serve as the joyful, elevating escape it always was so long as it is torn between a corrupt, unaccountable and incompetent set of governors on the one hand and an ultra-politicised set of activists who recognise no legitimate boundaries to their own dominance on the other.