Why Sharks Should Not Own Sport
As Tiger Woods returns to golf, not all his affairs are salacious headlines. In Dubai, the Tiger Woods Golf Course in Dubai is costing $100million to build. Dubai relies on cheap third world labor, as do certain consumer brands that have helped make Woods a billionaire. Nike workers in Thailand wrote to Woods, expressing their “utmost respect for your skill and perseverance as an athlete” but pointing out that they would need to work 72,000 years “to receive what you will earn from [your Nike] contract”.
The American sports writer, Dave Zirin, is one of the few to break media silence on the corporate distortion and corruption of sport. His forthcoming book Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love (Scribner) blows a long whistle on what money power has done to the people’s pleasure, its heroes like Woods and the communities it once served. He describes the impact of the Texan Tom Hicks’s half-ownership of Liverpool Football Club, which followed another rich and bored American Malcolm Glazer’s “leveraged takeover” of Manchester United in 2005. As a result, England’s most successful club (with Liverpool) is now 716.5 million pounds in debt.
How long has this been going on? In 1983, you could buy a ticket to a first division game for 75 pence. Today, the average at Old Trafford is around 34 pounds. Watch the latest crop of parents on morose queues to buy overpriced club strips and insignia, also made with cheap and often sweated labor, with the brand of a failed multinational emblazoned on it. Profiteering is now an incandescent presence across top-class sport. Sven-Goran Eriksson will trouser up to two million pounds for just three months’ work in Ivory Coast, where half the population has barely enough to survive. Australia’s finest, most boorish cricketers are collecting their bundles for a few months’ cavorting in the Indian franchises. The attitude is entitlement, the kind that less talented “celebrities” flaunt. It was in no way remarkable that in 2007-8 a number of the heirs to Don Bradman’s Invincibles achieved what was once nigh on impossible; they were disliked in their own country. Those high fives and air-punching fists have become salutes not to “everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards” (Bill Shankly), but to the voracious sponsor and the forensic camera.
Take for example FIFA, which has effectively taken charge of South Africa for the World Cup. Along with the International Olympic Committee, FIFA is sport’s Wall Street and Pentagon combined. They have this power because host politicians believe the “international prestige” of their visitation will bring economic and promotional benefits, especially to themselves. I was reminded of this watching a documentary by the South African director Craig Tanner, Fahrenheit 2010. His film is not opposed to the World Cup, but reveals how ordinary South Africans, whose game is football, have been shoved aside, dispossessed and further impoverished so that a giant TV façade can be erected in their country.
A new stadium near Nelspruit will host four World Cup matches over 10 days. Jimmy Mohlala, speaker of the local municipality, was gunned down in his home in January last year after whistle-blowing “irregularities” in the tenders. An entire school, which was in the way, has been removed into prefabricated, sweltering steel boxes on a desolate site with a road running through it. “When the World Cup is over,” said the writer Ashwin Desai, “it will become obvious that these stadiums are going to be empty shells, that our money has been used for what is really a pyramid scheme”.
A community of 20,000 people, the Joe Slovo Informal Settlement, is threatened with eviction from where they live near the main motorway between Cape Town and the city’s airport. They are deemed an “eyesore”. Street vendors will be arrested if they fail to comply with FIFA rules about trade and advertising and mention the words “World Cup”, even “2010”. FIFA will earn about two and quarter billion pounds from the TV rights, exceeding its income from the last two World Cups combined.
Incredibly, South Africa will get none of this. And this is country with up to 40 per cent unemployment, a male life expectancy of 49 and thousands of malnourished children. This truth about the “rainbow nation” is not what fans all over the world will see on their TV screens, although they may glimpse an unreported feature of modern South Africa, which is a vibrant, rolling resistance that has linked the World Cup to an economic apartheid that remains as divisive as ever. Indeed, another kind of World Cup for effective popular protest has long been won in the streets of South Africa’s townships.
In his chapter on Liverpool FC, Dave Zirin describes a similar resistance that also offers inspiration to those struggling to reclaim sport from the sharks. A fans’ organization, Share Liverpool FC, is aiming for 100,000 shareholders to buy back the club from Tom Hicks and his co-owner, George Gillett. Liverpool fans have also formed the Liverpool Supporters Union (LSU), which has had thousands in the streets calling for a boycott of the Bank of Scotland if it gives Hicks and Gillett any more credit. Remember how the boycott of Murdoch press succeeded in Liverpool following the Sun’s lies over the Hillsborough tragedy. “If we stand together and speak with one voice, regardless of language or accent,” says the LSU, “we can make a genuine difference to our football club, the city of Liverpool and indeed the wider footballing world.” On 17 April, Hicks and Gillett announced they were selling the club. Manchester United fans are mounting a similar, principled resistance in defense of the sport they love and which they believe rightly is theirs. We should support them.
www.johnpilger.com
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Another question
By notme, at Apr 23, 2010 21:26 PM
Of course, another question stems from the above. Who really owns the teams?
You'll hear two completely different and opposite statements on this issue, depending on the audience and the context in which the question is asked.
When trying to sell tickets, when trying to get people to watch so advertising can be sold, and especially when trying to get a community to pay to build a new stadium, you'll hear a steady stream of statements that the team belongs to the community. Support 'your' team is always the message. Come buy a ticket and support 'your' team.
Of course, when discussing ticket prices, its very much the owner's team. Its a business, and the owner is expected to run the business to his maximum profit.
The latter is of course the reality, at least in terms of legalities and contracts and the law and the like. The city does not own the team. The community does not own the team. There are a few rare cases wear this isn't true, like perhaps the Green Bay Packers. If the owner decides he can make more money by moving the team to another city, then he's free to do so. In fact, in our society, he's really expected to do so. If he's at least partly managing other people's investments in the team, then the owner is likely legally required to manage the team to make the most money for these other investors.
The key is to recognize the bs line when you hear about how the team is 'your' team.
Of course, as soon as you figure out it isn't really 'your' team, then the question becomes 'why should you support it?'
I suppose at some point as long as it brings pleasure and enjoyment, then why not. But is a baseball game really worth $75 worth of pleasure and enjoyment? $75 more than watching it on TV where you can see the closeups and the replays? Is it worth $25 to 'watch' a game from seats where you can barely tell what's going on? BTW, that's just the 'ticket' price and doesn't include parking or bevarages or snacks or any ot the many other ways you'll find yourself pushed to spend if you go to a game.
Or, as the games move increasingly to pay-per-view, can you deal with not watching the game at all? At such times, sports almost feels like an addiction. There's something within you saying you've just got to see this game. It can be hard some times to tell yourself 'no'. But when you do, you find that you can live perfectly well without watching that game.
But, even if you enjoy sports, never ever forget that it isn't your team. And there's nothing that says you have to give anything to support this team owned by some rich jerk who probably wastes more money in a day than you'll see in a year.. The team's will spend a lot of money and effort to convince you other wise. Just remember, it isn't 'your' team.
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Capitalist economics
By notme, at Apr 23, 2010 20:43 PM
What Mr. Pilger is seeing is capitalist economics.
I've seen the same trends. I grew up an American baseball fan, so I remember the days when I could go see the Braves play for $3 or $4 a ticket. Back in '91 when the Braves made their fabulous 'worst to first' pennant run, I probably saw 30 or 40 games from those cheap seats. The same outfield seats in their new(er) Olympic stadium now cost $25. (before taxes and ticketmaster fees, etc .... probably means $40 to actually buy one).
But, if the demand is there, then they've got the seats priced right. If they can sell all the good seats behind home plate for $75 or more a ticket, then the prices are about right ... at least from management's point of view.
However, what Mr. Pilger is seeing is important, because its a bigger issue than just sport tickets. What Mr. Pilger is seeing is the effect of ever growing divide of incomes in America and the world. We are creating a world with a group of people for whom paying $75 for a ticket to see a baseball game in person is small change. After all, when you get a six or seven figure bonus check from your job on Wall Street, then what's $75?
And this goes far beyond sports. There is a whole class of goods and services that are now only affordable to the very wealthy. The prices of sprots tickets is just one example. It goes through all recreation and entertainment. It also goes into other services like health care.
I have no love lost for rich jerks who buy sports teams. But to me, they are just charging what the market will bear. Which makes sense from their point of view. The problem is that we've created a society where there is an elite class who can afford these tickets, while the rest of us are lucky if we can still see the games on TV without paying some pay-per-view fee.
Fix the problems of income distribution and the gap between what an elite few grab for themselves and what the rest of us can earn, and you'll see this change. What Mr. Pilger remembers from the past is that we used to have a more equal society. And in that more equal society, it made sense to charge prices that let everyone be a fan. Today we have a very unequal society, so today it makes sense to serve that elite class that can afford these prices.
This is what Mr. Pilger is seeing. Not something related just to rich owners ruining sport. But instead the problem of economics in a very unfair society where a small group gets all the money. They then tend to bid up the prices of goods and services to the point where only they can afford them. Its as true in American health care as it is in an American baseball stadium.
What we need to fix is that discrepency in income distribution. Do that, and then it will make sense for these team owners to serve a broad fan base again.
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