Modern sport is often supposed to be a physical activity which is fairâfair meaning honest in that the contest is structured for all contestants to have a reasonable chance to win; it is also expected to be competitive, non-deviant, and guided by rules, organisations and traditions. The latter are rooted in a kind of secular sport ethics associated with the ancient gentry and some universal moral valuesâfor instance, winning is not as important as playing by the rules and obeying referee decisions.
However, when sport in the form of regular sports shows and events had become a marketable product some additional features emerged in the then growing sports industry. One refers here to management rules in tune with the functioning of a market economy, fixing how it is fair to make money from sport while sticking to the rule of lawâin particular to business and criminal laws. Since then sport is much more than a game, a sporting event is more than an exhibition, an elite sport championship is more than a simple sport contest because it involves business and economic competition, and all those sport activities requiring finance are more than small businesses, i.e. they structure an entire sports industry in a domestic economy. Later, with economic globalisation, the sports industry itself became globalised (Andreff 2008, 2012).
Those simple maxims telling, in a Coubertinâs spirit, that in sport âwinning is not allâ turned out to be increasingly old-fashioned and difficult to stick to since economic stakes everywhere grew bigger and bigger in a winner-take-all society, as coined by Frank and Cook (1995). Though making money by any means through sport should have been less important than aligning on to the rule of law, it often appeared that spectator sports were used to make money at any rate and by any means, sometimes turning the economic rationale upside down. The worst happened to spectacle sport with the advent then crisis of a greed-led economy in the past decades (Andreff 2013, 2019). Both the transformation of sport into a tradable commodity and economic globalisationâwith increasing money streams flowing into sportsâexacerbated contradictions with the supposedly initial pure sport ethics and nurtured transgressions of sport rules up to, in certain cases, naked violations of the common law.
This evolution triggered manipulations, dysfunctions, distortions and corrupt practices over the past four decades or so, and expanded a so-called dark side of sportâif one refers to the title of a European Sport Management Quarterly special issue 9(4), December 2009. âWhether we like it or not, our society carries the responsibility for the dark side of sport. Corruption, cheating, and drug abuse coincide with performance excellenceâ (Petroczi 2009, 349). Nowadays, such malpractices spread over an increasing set of sport disciplines worldwide. First, they simply breach some sport rule, then they infringe the sport ethics, jeopardise sport integrity and at the end of day fall outlaw.
Unexpected consequences of intended human actions and organisations prevail in competitive sport: every sport participant wishes or expects to win but only a few reach the intended outcome. This is exactly why sport attracts so much stadium attendance, so many TV viewers, and a great deal of sponsors, patrons and financiers and, finally, so big inflowing money streams. Many unexpected sporting results are extremely positive from an economic standpoint; they attract attendances and revenues as best proofs of game outcome uncertainty, contention in a championship or a league, lasting suspense over all the duration of a match, competitive intensity of a sport contest (Andreff and Scelles 2015; Scelles et al. 2013), or the odds offered by a sport bookmaker or a broker. Uncertainty and unpredictability make sport contests an exciting opportunity for businesses around the world to take advantage of. But what would happen if uncertainty and unpredictability were taken away? The problem is that most sport manipulations definitely kill outcome uncertainty and unpredictability and, in the long run, they are likely to reduce or even phase out sports attractiveness to fans.
From a different standpoint, cheating, sabotage, playing with the sport rules or breaching them, refereeing biases and hooliganism are unexpectedâand unwantedâresults of intended wrong actions. They may be detrimental to the sport image, reputation and development, and eventually violate the sport ethics. Sabotage which is not entirely unexpectedâsuch as goading or divingâis only border line to the dark side of sport. A sport clubâs fake accounting, embezzlement, bribery, doping and match-fixing are also unexpected, and unwanted, deeds in normal functioning of the sports industry, but when they happen to last, they definitely form a sustainableâand sustainedâeconomic dimension of the dark side of sport.
Now, economic components of the dark side of sport are ...