Since the late nineteenth century, communication and information routes have connected every corner of the planet, allowing the constitution of a collective global memory composed of notable events, eminent figures, consumer products and cultural movements. Sport is another field of human endeavour that has left its mark on successive generations, as the print media, radio, television and, now, the Internet have turned exploits and records into legends. The successes and failures of sportsmen and, more recently, sportswomen have been analysed from every possible angle—technical, physical, psychological or sociological—by an ever-growing number of pundits, journalists and academics, while innumerable biographies and biopics dissect the lives and personalities of sporting champions.
On the other hand, the people who run international sport and control sport’s biggest events, such as the Olympic Games and world championships, are rarely in the public eye, unless they or their organisations become embroiled in scandals. Frequently polyglot, expatriate, educated abroad, married to partners of other nationalities and constantly on the move, sport’s top executives epitomise the globalisation of world affairs since the late nineteenth century. Sport has enabled many of them to reach career heights they could not have hoped for in other fields and allowed them to rub shoulders with monarchs, presidents, prime ministers, financiers, industrialists, media tycoons, artists and, of course, sporting champions. At the same time, ensconced within their own customs and social codes, they have become cut off from the hundreds of millions of people who participate in sport throughout the world. Because most international sport organisations are far from models of democracy, despite their “one country, one vote” voting systems, their leaders have been able to turn these bodies into closed elites. It is this transnational cast of sports executives that we focus on in this book.
Two Models of Globalised Sport
By leaders of institutionalised sport we mean the presidents of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and international sports federations (IFs). Assisted by their management staff, they promote their sport by organising international events, introducing new economic models, and implementing new organisational methods. This book provides a glimpse into the little-known world of these highly influential people by examining the careers of fifteen leaders who have marked the history of world sport. Each portrait shows how its subject’s personality, values, commitment and skills shaped his or her strategic vision, views on governance and approach to management. All but one of these leaders1 worked within and helped shape the European, pyramidal model of globalised sport, in which clubs are members of national federations, which, in turn, are members of an international federation. This model, which dates back to the 1890s, facilitates the organisation of competitions at all levels, from local to international, with a promotion/relegation system for the most successful/least successful teams/clubs/athletes at each level.
Sport in North America developed along very different principles to European sport, giving rise to a second model based more closely on private enterprise. The first international competitions in many sports took the form of challenges in which a cup is competed for every year. Such events include sailing’s America’s Cup, founded in 1857 by the New York Yacht Club, and golf’s Ryder Cup, created in 1927 by Samuel Ryder, a London-based pioneer of mail order selling. More recently, Fred Lebow, the president of the New York Road Runners Club, devised a very different type of sporting occasion when he launched the trend for mass-participation events by creating the New York Marathon in 1970. Since then, innumerable such events have been created throughout the world, often through the impulsion of sponsors and independently of the IFs and IOC. However, the American model of sports governance is most clearly typified by the professional leagues that run the elite echelons of sports such as baseball (Major League Baseball, created in 1876), basketball (National Basketball League, created in 1898), ice hockey (National Hockey League, created in 1917 in Montreal) and American football (National Football League, created in 1920). Membership of these leagues is restricted to a fixed number of teams, each of which pays a franchise fee and is required to impose a salary cap on players. The advent of subscription television channels in the 1980s greatly increased the worldwide audiences for these leagues, leading franchises/teams to play some of their matches in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Many IFs and the IOC are beginning to see the unstoppable rise of this American model as cause for concern.
The task we set our authors was to show how factors such as family background, training, career path, social context and technological advances impacted each leader’s approach to governing and developing their sport(s). Although our authors are of different nationalities and have different academic backgrounds, they are all experts in the institution concerned. Their portraits are based on interviews, the academic literature, sport organisation archives, newspaper articles and, in some cases, existing biographies. Some of the authors have worked within international sport organizations and were therefore able to draw upon direct observations of the leader they describe. We would like to extend our warmest thanks to all of them for meeting the difficult challenge they were set.
Each chapter starts by summarising a leader’s life story and career, highlighting his or her upbringing, education, professional background, and links with the worlds of politics and business. It then analyses the challenges that leader faced and the managerial doctrine he or she adopted. In most cases, these analyses are centred round a central issue, be it a leader’s autocratic management style, the intangible values of Olympism, commercialisation, professionalization and governance, marketing innovations, the development of a global spectacle, or the consolidation of a system. However, few of the chapters explore the issue of social responsibility, despite its potential to provide a new strategic framework for the development of sport organisations (Bayle et al. 2011). The final section of each chapter examines the leader’s legacy for his or her organisation(s), for his or her sport, and for international sport in general.
Management Science, Sport and History
Until now, specialists in sports management and in the history of sport have rarely combined their two perspectives. Historians have tended to focus on social history or on sport as an instrument of soft power, while management scientists have mostly examined the way sport organizations are run. Neither specialty has shown much interest in the history of international sport’s governing institutions, other than FIFA and the IOC. For example, very few papers in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Sport History, mention the notions of sports management and the few exceptions to this rule have all been studies of professional sport in the United States. Similarly, management science journals have given little space to the history of sport, despite being open to a wide range of transdisciplinary research. In this respect, the study of sports management has mirrored the evolution of management itself, which has gone from being a science of production mechanisms to become a science of organisations and then a science of human behaviour, most notably, the psychology of social groups.
Nevertheless, sport and management have become modern in very similar ways. For example, developments in both fields have been inspired by the desire to perfect individual performance and improve human organisations. One of the most important changes in sport was the transformation of traditional games into modern sports, a process that began in the Renaissance and accelerated during the nineteenth century thanks to the scientific measurement of records, the adoption of fixed rules for each game, and the creation of supervisory bodies.2 In fact, the first sets of rules for sports were drawn up for golf, cricket and boxing in the eighteenth century, followed by football, rugby, athletics and tennis in the mid-nineteenth century, and then by basketball and volleyball in the early 1890s. The forms taken by international business and management follow a similar trajectory, from the division of labour and specialisation of tasks described by Adam Smith, Charles Babbage and David Ricardo between 1776 and 1817, to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911).
Another modern aspect of both sport and management is their increasingly transnational nature. Challenges between athletes and clubs were quite common as early as the 1860s, long before most national and international federations were formed. Newspapers and magazines were keen to promote new sports from different countries and create transnational sporting heroes. Hence, even before the First World War, a lingua sportiva, mostly based on English, had spread around the globe. In the corporate world, large companies have become increasingly international in terms of their structures and management, as well as their operations. Once known as multinationals, they have now become transnational in that they exist and operate across the regulatory and fiscal regulations imposed by individual states. Performance, competition and records are the hallmark of both modern sport and entrepreneurial management. However, this does not mean that the leaders of world sport apply corporate management models within their organisations. Far from it.
Fifteen Portraits
It would, of course, be impossible for our fifteen portraits to cover every possible career path and every approach to governance. Nevertheless, the careers of our chosen leaders are sufficiently instructive and representative for the insights they reveal to be applied to other sports, other executives or other fields of management. Although our selection took into account the state of current research and our authors’ fields of expertise, it was primarily based on the extent of each leader’s legacy. Because all fifteen leaders occupied highly influential positions within sport for at least ten years, they were able to leave their mark on their era, their sport and their organisation. In all cases, our authors were careful to approach their subjects with proper academic impartiality and have avoided any temptation to glorify or vilify individuals or their organisations. This was particularly important in the case of contemporary leaders, many of whose reputations have been damaged by the stream of corruption accusations that have tarnished international sport from the Salt Lake City scandal in 1999 to the on-going FIFAgate and IAAFgate affairs.
The fifteen leaders portrayed here cover a wide range of sports, from Olympic sports to motorsport, and from team sports such as football and cricket to more individual sports such as tennis, cycling and athletics. Our focus on the European model of globalised sport, means that the majority of the leaders are from western Europe, the birthplace of most international sport organisations: Pierre de Coubertin (IOC), Alice Milliat (International Women’s Sports Federation), Jules Rimet (FIFA) and Philippe Chatrier (International Tennis Federation—ITF) from France, Henri de Baillet-Latour and Jacques Rogge (IOC) from Belgium, Juan Antonio Samaranch (IOC) from Spain, Bernie Ecclestone (Formula 1) from England, Hein Verbruggen (Union Cycliste Internationale—UCI) from the Netherlands and Sepp Blatter (FIFA) from Switzerland. Nevertheless, five chapters focus on leaders who were born outside Europe.
The absence of North-American executives at the top of major IFs and the IOC (apart from Avery Brundage, who presided the IOC from 1952 to 1972) is due to the separation between the European and American models of sport outlined above. Canada’s Dick Pound attempted to win the IOC’s presidency on two occasions but was defeated each time, even though he was the architect of the IOC’s TOP sponsorship programme and had negotiated lucrative contracts with American television networks. Pound’s appointment as president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) could be viewed as a sort of compensation for the IOC’s refusal to make him its president. Brazil’s João Havelange, who became FIFA president in 1974, is another exception to Europe’s hegemony over the top positions in world sport. Havelange obtained his position due to the sporting and organisational strength of Latin American football and the fact that non-European footballing nations had become disaffected with Europe’s attempts to monopolise power within the sport. In contrast, the elections of India’s Jagmohan Dalmiya as president of the International Cricket Council (ICC) in 1997 and of Senegal’s Lamine Diack as president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) in 1999 may augur greater representation for the Global South and the BRICS within sport’s governing bodies. The final chapter charts the rise of sports executives from the oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Although these countries are becoming increasingly influential within international sport, and despite attempts to win the presidencies of FIFA and the IOC, none of their sporting leaders has yet presided a major IF.
The fifteen chapters are grouped together into four sections covering four generations of sports management: the founders of the international sports system around the dawn of the twentieth century, the architects of the “Dassler revolution” during the 1970s and 1980s, the manager-executives of the 1990s and 2000s, and the first wave of non-European leaders. Because sport is an extraordinary “mirror on society”, the changes brought about by these four generations reflect major changes within society as a whole, in rules, morals, economic structures, social interactions, the media, and technology. However, the mirror analogy oversimplifies reality, as sport can anticipate change as well as react to it. In fact, sport can be both a conservatory of traditions and an accelerator of modernity. As the actions of sport’s leaders frequently show, sport sometimes lags behind the pace of economic and political change, and sometimes it sprints ahead. The international sports community has long attempted to prevent sport being used as a political tool by governments and vigorously defends the principle of “autonomy for sport”, according to which sport must be protected from political interference. However, according such exceptional status to sport within the concert of nations automatically confers a degree of impunity on its leaders, whose transnational status has often allowed them to escape from national laws.
Age No Barrier
The fifteen portraits in this book clearly show that age is more an advantage than a barrier to becoming the head of a major international sport organisation. In this respect, sport executives are no different to the presidents of multinational companies, Catholic cardinals and dictators, who often continue carrying out their functions well into their seventies. Some people see such longevity as a source of stability within fragile and controversial institutions; others see it as a source of stagnation.
FIFA typifies the tendency for IFs to favour experience over youth. Football’s governing body has had eight presidents, either permanent or acting, since 1954, six of whom were over the age of 60 when appointed to the role. Rodolphe Seeldrayers, FIFA’s fourth elected president, still holds the record, as he was already 73 when he was appointed to the position in 1954. A similar picture can be seen at the IOC, which has had five presidents since 1952, all of whom were at least 58 years old when they took over. Avery Brundage was 65 when he was elected president in 1952, but he was still much younger than his predecessor, Sigfrid Edström, who was 82 when he stepped down. However, it is a misconception that these organisations have always been run by ageing men. FIFA’s first president, Robert Guérin, was only 27 when he accepted the office and the federation’s longest serving president, Jules Rimet, was elected at the age of 47. At the IOC, Pierre de Coubertin was 33 when he assumed the presidency in 1896, a position he held until 1925, when he was succeeded by Henri de Baillet-Latour, then aged 49.
What is more, the custom of renewing presidents’ terms of office by acclamation enabled some leaders to hold onto their positions until a very advanced age. Five of FIFA’s nine presidents (excluding acting presidents) remained in office until they were in their late seventies or eighties (Jules Rimet was 80 when he retired and João Havelange was 82 when he stepped down). Once again, it has been a similar story at the IOC: three of the organisation’s presidents remained in office into their eighth decade—Samaranch was a day short of his 81st birthday when he stepped down, Edström was 82 and Brundage, the record holder, was almost 85. The IOC’s current president, Thomas Bach, will be in his 70s at the end of his presidency, if he receives the support necessary to serve a final term.
Given the age at which these men attained their positions, it is not surprising that some of them died “in harness” (Rodolphe Seeldrayers and Arthur Drewry at FIFA, Henri Baillet-Latour at the IOC). In addition, the tendency to elect older presidents and these men’s long tenures meant that until the eve of the twenty-first century the world’s two largest sports institutions were led by people who were born before the foundation of the Soviet Union, in 1922. In fact, all FIFA’s presidents up to and including João Havelange were born before the end of the First World War. Even Havelange’s successor, Sepp Blatter, was born before World War II. Similarly, prior to 2001, when Jacques Rogge was elected president, all the IOC’s presidents had been born before 1922. In fact, Lord Killanin, who was elected president in 1972, was the first IOC leader to have been born in the twentieth century.
Of course, the preference for older leaders is not restricted to FIFA and the IOC, as is shown by the IAAF, whose five presidents prior to Lord Coe all served until they were in their 70s or 80s. Nevertheless, not all sports executives have had to wait until their sixth decade to reach the peak of their careers. Among the leaders portrayed in this book, Jagmohan Dalmiya was elected president of the ICC at the age of 57, the same age as Richard Pound when he became president of WADA. Younger still were Hein Verbruggen, elected president of the UCI when he was 50, and Philippe Chatrier, who became president of the ITF when he was 49. Both these men held onto their office for 14 years (Verbruggen: 1991–2005, Chatrier: 1977–1991), but many executives who obtained the top job later in life also kept their positions for many years. Bernie Ecclestone, for example, r...
