Questions of Culture in the World of Sports

Sports and Global Issues

The global economic powers of Great Britiain and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries paved the way for a proliferation of their traditional sports in promoting national expertise throughout the world. Until the 1960s however, these sports largely retained their amateur spectatorship and professional business organisational backgrounds.

The restructuring of capitalism in the late 1960s gave rise to an acceleration in globalisation processes at both economic and political levels of global accumulation. New technologies in telecommunication and computer industries have aided this globalising trend, leading to extreme disparities in the concentration of wealth worldwide.

Globalisation in sports mirrors these political and economic patterns. Sports are increasingly used as a marketing device by global telecommunications companies. Disney's ownership of mass sports related subsidiaries, including ABC Sports, Eurosport and Canal+, provides a vivid illustration of such globalising tendendencies in sports.

The production of sports clothing and eqipment can also be seen to exploit international divisions of labour. This shift of operations by large US-owned companies is not new. For many years now most leisure apparel and sports shoes manufacturers have relocated their child-labour "sweatshops" to countries like China, Thailand and Malaysia, a point emphasised by the "made in" label in Nike shoes.

The globalisation of advertising through the mass media is influential in trends towards the international promotion of sports team and league merchandise, the worldwide televising of competitive events, the increased appearance of foreign athletes in professional teams and the professionalisation of amateur sports. In short, it appears that changes in sports are related to changes in the world economy, in terms of the sports industry both profiting from and contributing to processes of globalisation.

Report on the Globalisation of Sports: Globalisation in sports ignites passionate controversies between fans and the media. This report suggests that sports associations and governing bodies have structures that are ill-equipped to deal with the dramatic changes resulting from the involvement in sport of media companies such as those owned and controlled by Murdoch.


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