Ethics, Money and Sport

This Sporting Mammon

Adrian Walsh, Richard Giulianotti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415333382
• eBook ISBN: 9781134317271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Written from the contrasting yet complementary perspectives of sociology and philosophy, this book explores the far-reaching ethical consequences of the runaway commodification of sport, focusing on those instances where commodification gives rise to morally undesirable consequences. The authors consider three main areas of concern for participators and observers alike: the corrosion of the core meanings and values of sport, the increasing elitism of access to sporting commodities, and the undermining of social conditions that support sporting communities.

Unique in its focus on the ethical dimension of the powerful economics of today's sport, this book will be of interest, not only to those in the fields of sports studies and ethics of sport, but also to academics, researchers and students in philosophy of morality, sociology, and the ethics of globalization as viewed through the ultimate globalized phenomenon of modern sport.

1 This sporting Mammon?

Sport as commodity

Elite sport is now, more clearly than ever before, a commodity – a commercial enterprise governed by the laws of supply and demand. Its aims, ethos, institutional organisation and very ludic structures are increasingly determined by market forces. One need only consider various commercial phenomena to see the radical transformation that has occurred over the past thirty years all over the world. We might begin by walking into any major sporting arena and counting the number of sponsor signs. But that is minimal compared to the advertising that occurs on our television screens. Televised coverage of American football’s Superbowl features approximately 60 advertisements during each 15-minute quarter; advertisers paid on average $2.3 million for each 30-second advertisement at the 2004 fixture.¹

The revenues generated by the major sports are staggering. The annual turnover of world soccer was reckoned at some £250 billion, a figure equivalent to the gross national income of the Netherlands.² In American football, the 32 teams that made up the NFL in 2003 were estimated to be worth a total of over US$20 billion. In baseball and basketball, the MLB and the NBA each had total annual revenues of US$3–3.5 billion in the early 2000s. At college level, American football generates around US$5 billion annually.

Consider too the increasing professionalisation of athletes, many of whom are industries unto themselves. The commercial ‘bankability’ of elite sportspeople is such that many generate seemingly unfathomable sums from their sporting identities. In its annual assessment of athlete wealth, Fortune magazine found that for 2004, the top five sport stars in terms of earnings were Tiger Woods ($80.3 million), Michael Schumacher ($80 million), Peyton Manning ($42 million), Michael Jordan ($35 million) and Shaquille O’Neal ($31.9 million). In the United States, by mid-1998, Michael Jordan was reported to have had a $10 billion impact on the national economy in terms of generating revenues from his stature as a leading basketball player and endorser of products (notably Nike merchandise).³ In English soccer, it was recently estimated that David Beckham was worth £65 million, heading a list of major players such as Dennis Bergkamp (£37 million) and Michael Owen (£30 million), although the report noted he was only 41st overall in the list of soccer’s money men.⁴ Such money-making is facilitated by the rise of markets in players that also permits sports people to move regularly and routinely between clubs whenever it is deemed suitable to their financial interest. The old sporting language of club loyalty, camaraderie and ‘playing for the jersey’ appears antediluvian amidst the free flow of player movements between teams, notwithstanding these athletes’ penchant for ‘kissing the badge’ when celebrating after victorious performances.

The commodification of sport appears to bring with it a radical overthrow of prior social, economic, political and cultural arrangements, in the service of maximizing profit. Here one is reminded of Marx’s prophetic comment that under capitalism ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’.⁵ We have seen radical changes in the very structure of sports. United States sporting competitions are peppered with artificial advertisement breaks that change the rhythm of games. The injection of vast new volumes of capital by media corporations has led to the wholesale reinvention of particular sports as ‘entertainment’. Consider, for example, the ‘World Series Cricket’ circus that was bankrolled by Australian mogul Kerry Packer in the late 1970s, or the Packer–Murdoch media combination that effectively bought control over rugby league in Australia and England.

We have also seen radical changes associated with the very names of sporting competitions and sporting venues. The hundred-year-old Sheffield Shield cricket competition in Australia becomes the Pura Milk Cup. Sporting theatres forsake their identities to acquire the names of commercial sponsors. In Melbourne, Prince’s Park is now the Optus Oval and sits alongside the Telstra Dome, the Vodaphone Arena and the Teac Oval. Here we have a revolutionary attitude towards nomenclature almost as radical as the Bolshevik renaming of the ancient city of St Petersburg, or the Khmer Rouge’s re-titling of city streets in Cambodia.

Perhaps the most shocking of these naming rights involves individual persons. The occasional practice of parents in naming children after teams or athletes – sometimes with curious results – has long been a humorous part of sport’s fanatical culture.⁶ However, a categorically different form of naming arose in the case of Gary Hocking, an Australian Rules football player. With the aim of raising funds for his heavily indebted Geelong side, Hocking changed his name temporarily by deed-pole to that of a cat-food brand as part of a sponsorship deal. The name ‘Whiskas’ looked exceedingly odd on the team sheet. Similarly, the snooker player Jimmy White engaged in a similar name-changing exercise for commercial ends. White agreed to a request from HP Sauce to change his name by deed-poll to Jimmy Brown, after the company announced that it would sponsor the brown ball at one snooker tournament in February 2005.

Concomitant with all of these changes has been a shift in the self-understanding of players and administrators. When Michael Jordan said after the first loss by his new team, the Washington Wizards, that he was going to ‘teach this franchise how to win’, his language betrayed the established US thinking that sport is primarily commercial in nature. It is a form of language that Margaret Jane Radin labels ‘market rhetoric’, in which all human interactions are understood fundamentally as forms of commerce.⁷

We have thus far only considered the legal influence of money. To make matters worse there is also a great deal of dirty dealing. The enormous sums of money involved in sport provide players in particular with tremendous temptations for individual corruption. Take, for example, the enormous sums bet on cricket in India and the opportunities for vice that follow. While cricket is seen as a game solely of the old Commonwealth, and thus of less global relevance, its popularity in the Indian sub-continent, particularly at one-day level, means that it generates considerable betting revenues. The Times of India estimates that punters in India bet nearly one thousand crore rupees (approx. US$227 million) on each one-day game.⁸ Little wonder then that more money-oriented individuals are tempted. The most stunning case of such corruption in recent years involved the late Hansie Cronje, the captain of South Africa’s cricket team from 1994 to 2000. As a practicing Christian and intensely proud South African, Cronje had been lauded by his compatriots as the personification of moral fortitude and national loyalty. Yet, after investigations into corruption, he was found to have accepted at least £82,000 to rig matches and, following his death in June 2002, further allegations emerged that he had held over 70 illegal bank accounts to stash his illicit gains.

Moreover, sport is replete with opportunities for institutional corruption. The growing commercialism of sport has generated new kinds of entrepreneurs – notably athlete agents and political lobbyists – who will strike deals for their paymasters, often in highly unscrupulous or illegal circumstances. The Olympic movement has been struck by strong evidence of vote buying in the battles between cities to win support from IOC members, and thereby secure the rights to host tournaments. The Toronto bid for the 1996 Olympic games involved the alleged expenditure of at least CA$800,000 to buy votes.⁹ Two officials representing Salt Lake City paid more than $1 million to 24 IOC members in a successful bid to win the rights to host the 2002 Winter Olympics. Moreover, the IOC and the civic authorities that bid to host the games have effectively bought off many journalists by providing endless personal perks and benefits in return for uncritical media reports.¹⁰

If we concentrate on the legal aspects of sport’s structural transformation, then the sheer volume of these changes is sufficient to generate considerable disquiet among fans, athletes and commentators. In the early 1990s, the reinvigoration of English professional soccer was driven by an initial £304 million in television money, to produce the ‘Barclays Premiership’, soon dubbed the ‘Greed is Good League’ by the leading soccer journalist Brian Glanville. Television money too was behind the reorganisation of Rugby League and ‘Australian Rules’ football in Australia as old clubs were forced to close or merge to make way for the founding of new franchises in large ‘target markets’ where these sports were barely known. In North America, sports club owners constantly employ political blackmail by threatening to move from their ‘home’ city to a new location.¹¹ The local authorities must build new stadiums and provide lucrative tax concessions to prevent exits. In its pursuit of the largest markets, the IOC has also placed profits and political influence ahead of the integrity and excellence of sporting competition.

Certainly, the incursion of business-thinking within sports is reflected in myriad ‘sport management’ degree programmes at universities, and in the proliferation of supporting texts that allude to the triumph of money over play, with titles such as Football INC, The Name of the Game: The Business of Sport, or The Sport Business. Yet, on the other hand, consider too the rage of investigative journalists and other sports analysts in regard to the corruption of sport. For example, Andrew Jennings writes in The New Lords of the Rings in a chapter headed ‘Roll Up, Roll Up, Ideals for Sale’:

Tune in, slump back and welcome to the Olympic Global Bazaar! Candy bars blessed by Coubertin! Junk food with a moral message! Roll up, roll up, whatever you need, the Olympic bazaar has got it! And you can buy it all! Wander through the virtual reality aisles, pick up some five-ringed plastic at the money-lenders and fill those wire baskets. … Try and get away – you can’t. Tune into American TV? They’re screening Olympic Wheel of Fortune and Olympic Jeopardy. Want to blot it all out? You can do with a five-ringed product. Slip on the sanctified sunglasses, sip a preferred beer, swallow the approved painkiller.¹²

We also get a sense of this when people talk about the ‘subversion’ of sport, such as through the entry of corporate backing to the extent that athletes become advertisement sandwich boards or competitive fixtures are staged according to the dictates of television broadcasters.

What is going on here? On its own, the commentary provided above does not amount to moral critique. It is not enough, for our purposes at least, merely to satirise modern sports. Rather, we need to tell a story about what exactly is the ethical case against such commodification.

Cursory examination of these criticisms shows considerable revulsion at the very idea of Sports-as-Business. In one sense such criticisms might be thought naïve for sport clearly is a business – at least under one level of description. Elite sport generates too much wealth for anyone to refute realistically the idea of it as a business. Moreover, in the minds of many pivotal figures – players, administrators and promoters – sport is nothing but a business. Yet there is another significant and truthful level of description of sport as it presents itself to the enthusiast and spectator. This involves viewing sport as an arena distinct from the everyday mundane world in which athletes pursue non-commercial goals, whether they be the good of their side (such as club or national team), individual excellence and so on. This is what we might call the ‘Manifest Image’ of sport – that is how sport presents itself to the fan. This is a crucial aspect of sport which fans find compelling.¹³ For the dedicated fan, sport raises the kinds of passion that as Tim Park notes ‘once attached themselves more readily to religious fundamentalism and political idealism’.¹⁴

What is especially clear is that the idea of Sports-as-Business is at odds with this Manifest Image.¹⁵ Indeed, it is this conflict which motivates the juxtaposition of Sport and Business that we see in such book titles as Sport Inc. Such titles are intended to be provocative, but they can only be so if one has a vision of sport as something other than business. If, and only if, one thinks of the Olympics as being primarily about, for instance, the pursuit of individual excellence along relevant dimensions of athletic achievement, or of Premiership soccer being genuine battles between sporting rivals who represent distinct constituencies, could one find such juxtapositions striking, let alone disturbing.

Further, in many ways, part of the allure of sport, at least for its fans, is that it is a refuge from the world of economic imperatives and business that must be dealt with outside the sporting arena.¹⁶ At the same time, this is not to deny that sport is also a sphere in which social conflicts and identities might be symbolically played out or ritualised by the various participants.

In partial support of the Manifest Image, it must also be said that as a business sport is decidedly odd. Historically, compared to other domains of potential ‘investment’, modern sport has tended to offer more attractions in terms of status-promotion rather than large and quick financial gain for those owning and controlling institutions.¹⁷ As Mike Marqusee notes of soccer and cricket:

Conventional economic models rarely apply to commercial sport. Even soccer club owners are frequently guided by considerations (vanity, politics, loyalty) other than the maximisation of profit which is the ruling principle in their other activities. If this is true in soccer, how much more so in cricket, with its pre-industrial baggage? Despite cricket’s recent embrace of the market, what might be called its political economy continues to function in a kind of parallel universe, not quite conforming to the norms that govern other commercial ventures.¹⁸

Sports are also exempted from some crucial legislation regarding the regulation of business affairs. For example, ‘antitrust’ or ‘competition’ legislation in North America and Europe functions to ensure that monopolies or oligopolies are not established in any commercial sphere to the market detriment of competing businesses or consumers. However, the ‘special case’ status of sport allows team owners exemption from this legislation, by enabling them to establish league systems that involve ‘restraints on trade’ (such as preventing new clubs from being established and competing) which would be prohibited in other realms of ‘business’. In effect, the AFL, the English Premiership, MLB, NCAA and NHL are examples of sporting monopolies since each of these league systems does not have to compete against similar groups of clubs in the same nation in the same sport.

At club level in the United States local teams often have monopoly supply positions since they are the only club in the neighbourhood that competes in a specific league.¹⁹ Yet we might consider the paradox of competitive monopoly peculiar to sport, in that it is counter-productive to defeat and eliminate all of one’s rivals. Whereas Microsoft or News Corp would benefit immensely from the demise of IT or media competitors, Manchester United and Chelsea would enjoy truly Pyrrhic victories if their domination of soccer were to force all other clubs into bankruptcy.

Evidently, the relationship of sport to commodification is a complex and, in our view, highly unusual one. In this book, we attempt to answer specific ethical questions on this issue. What exactly is wrong with the commodification of sport? How could money make a moral difference to sport? If we think about both structural changes to sport and individual corruption in sport, why might they be morally significant?

Equally, we need to acknowledge that the commodification of sport has brought many benefits to spectators and players. One need only think of the countless athletes who have died in penury after a lifetime of service to a club or to a sport to see the contrast. Some of the most tragic cases involved world champion boxers from the past who were reduced to destitution by varying combinations of criminal exploitation and disastrous financial guidance. Joe Louis retired penniless and was reduced to taking a ‘meet and greet’ job at Las Vegas casinos. Sonny Liston died at the age of 38 from a highly suspicious drug overdose, following a career that was manipulated by organised crime. Elite players in the pre-eminent sports now receive considerable recompense – indeed some might say over-compensation – for their efforts and, profligacy notwithstanding, they should have l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 This sporting Mammon?
• 2 Moral philosophy, sport and commodification critique
• 3 Financial motives, venality and the ideals of sport
• 4 Commodification and objectification: treating athletes and sport itself as mere means
• 5 Sport, commodification and distributive justice
• 6 Scoring an own goal: when markets undermine what they sell
• 7 Moral philosophy out on the track: what might be done?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index