Sport is a distraction. It is a powerful tool for depoliticizing a population, and a means of deterring public engagement with real issues.
It serves to convince people that the only power they have to effect social change is through the electoral system—which is dominated by elite interests anyway. Spectator sport provides another important avenue for hijacking people’s energies and time.
The evidence is there. Most sporting events could simply not exist were it not for the level of financial support that they receive from some of the planet’s most powerful institutions. Corporations and governments pour inestimable sums of money into supporting spectator sports, but their reasons extend well beyond publicity: they are investing in public distraction. Selling off public assets, driving wages down, gutting healthcare and education, shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor, and destroying the environment is all easier when the victims of these policies are concentrating on something else.
2007’s Rugby World Cup is a case in point. If we had the level of public engagement with real issues that we had in response to the All Black loss at the World Cup, our country would look entirely different. But when John Key announced the largest cuts to education funding in the history of New Zealand, or legislation that represented the worst attack on working people since the arrival of neoliberalism, our avenues for popular debate and discussion—overwhelmed after the Rugby World Cup—were mostly silent.
Sport is also laden with destructive values. Chauvinism is actively encouraged, while the loyalties associated with it are irrational. If you ask someone why they support the Crusaders, they will usually answer by telling you why the Crusaders are the best. This is not a reason to support the Crusaders, and is no closer to a rational explanation for loyalty than the argument that if one lives in Canterbury, one should support the Crusaders.
People rarely question loyalties associated with sport, and this type of chauvinism neatly translates into other areas of life. When dominant institutions go to work whipping their populations into the jingoistic frenzy that enables war, people are already accustomed to supporting causes for the sake of it, hating others for the sake of it, and having loyalties that they themselves do not even understand. Much of the groundwork is already laid culturally.
While there are some not entirely untenable reasons to enjoy sport, there are none to justify its consistent prioritisation over people. A public so deeply distracted by sport allows for, and in turn ensures, the continued prioritisation of games over human development and progress. The wrongness of this is ubiquitous: it is everywhere you look.
It’s in Delhi, where a quarter of people live in fetid slums; where a small number of residents were paid starvation wages to build the multi-million-dollar Commonwealth Games stadium, where we sent our multi-million-dollar athletes. It’s in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, where the Brazilian military are shooting thieves and other desperate criminals from helicopters to increase security for the 2014 World Cup. It’s in New Zealand’s history, when we invited a sports team from the most openly racist country on earth to tour our sporting venues, then attacked the people courageous enough to protest against it.
It is in our media, where a full half of the nightly news is devoted to sport, as though half of what took place in the world that day was recreational. It is in the simple truisms, like the fact that boxers from the poorest sectors of society make the best fighters, and that we relish the notion that two men are beating each other senseless because the alternative is the gutter. And without a shadow of a doubt, it is in the fact that some of the biggest public investments our government will make will be in World Cup rugby stadiums, while one in five New Zealand children live in poverty.
In a society like ours, an attack on sport is tantamount to an attack on the national fabric; to say that you hate it is to invite contempt. For the reasons above, I for one, do not care.