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Northeastern University Political Review

Politics and Sports: A Long and Complicated Relationship

In recent years, as the American political sphere has become more polarized, news pundits, online commentators, and politicians have repeatedly declared that professional athletes are “out-of-touch-millionaires” who should “ shut up and dribble .” Players such as Colin Kaepernick , LeBron James , Stephen Curry , and Richard Sherman have pushed back against the ‘whitelash’ to become more politicized. But are these assumptions that athletes have only recently grown more political accurate? This question has a long and complicated answer, often overshadowed by personal political beliefs and the debate over the rights of athletes to use their platform to share their opinions.

To understand the relationship between sports and politics, one needs to first understand the relationship between sports and society. Going back millennia, pastimes and sports have symbolized societies’ values and provided a glimpse into how people spent their free time. The Mayans used sports to determine who to use for ritual sacrifices . Medieval kings held competitions to show their wealth, allowing the knights to prove their battle prowess and chivalry. Gladiators were often defeated enemies of Rome forced into slavery for entertainment.

Sports, like movies and music, have also been an aspect of imperialism, both historically and culturally. For example, the popularity of cricket in India , brought to the country by British sailors during the British Empire, which has continued to be the most popular sport in India, long after independence from Great Britain. Today, NBA tours of China , plus NFL and MLB visits to London, are cultural exports that create intercultural connections but also establish soft power.

Leaders, autocrats, and powerful individuals have frequently used sports to assert their political dominance. In 1936, Hitler attempted to use the Olympics to show off his regime and its ideologies to the rest of the world, but was undermined by Jesse Owens. Owens, an African-American track and field athlete, made a political statement when he won four gold medals, beating the athletes representing Hitler’s Germany on their home turf . Owens’ motivation for victory was never explicitly political, but due to the climate surrounding the Games, he had made a statement nonetheless.

The Olympics, both ancient and modern, have always been political. In ancient Greece, independent city-states came together to discuss politics, form political and military alliances, and celebrate military victories, all while their representatives competed in races and games of strength. Modern Olympics have also seen increased political activity, especially in the past half-century. From the 1968 Mexico City Olympics—where U.S. Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in solidarity with the black power movement—to the 1972 Munich Olympics—where 11 Israeli athletes were kidnapped and killed by a Palestinian terrorist group—politics have shone through the veil of non-political competition that is often touted by the International Olympic Committee.

At the national level, American athletes also have a history of taking political stances. One of the most notable examples is Muhammad Ali, who stood against the Vietnam War very early on, and refused to serve in the army. He was banned from boxing by U.S. authorities because of his stance, and soon became a figure of black power and the Civil Rights Movement. More recently, basketball’s biggest star, Lebron James, said that NFL team owners have a “ slave mentality. ” While James’ comments received backlash, a closer look reveals that his comments are not unfounded. The NFL’s racial demographics are unevenly represented in the ownership. Every NFL CEO or owner is white , while white players make up less than 30% of NFL athletes. Considering the danger of the sport and the lack of a fallback for players in case of injury, players are often seen as exploited by billionaire owners.

Recently, more and more professional players are using their platforms to exercise their political views and support wider conversations about civil rights. This has prompted a violent reaction by fans who see their protests as disrespectful. In response to the silent protests, some team owners have also implemented rules restricting player protests on game days, with many interpreting this as suppression of speech and an infringement on players’ rights. Originally, to address the growing controversy, the NFL passed an anthem policy in May 2018, in tandem with the NFL owners. This policy stated that any player on the field was required to stand , but alternatively players could remain in the locker room during the anthem. Under this policy, teams could be fined if players knelt on the field, rather than staying in the locker room as their form of protest. By July, the NFL Players’ Association and NFL announced that the policy would be repealed and left it up to individual teams to create their own national anthem policy .

The controversy surrounding player protests continues today. Colin Kaepernick, the NFL player who started the silent protests and who by all measures still has the skills to play in the NFL , brought a lawsuit against NFL ownership, claiming they conspired to keep him from playing because of his protests. In February 2019, the parties reached a confidential settlement .

Vice President Mike Pence also used the protests to make a political statement when he walked out of a Colts–49ers game in 2017, which many criticized as an expensive political maneuver. The accusations of wasting taxpayer money come from Pence’s schedule to fly from Las Vegas to Indianapolis—where the Colts were playing the 49ers, a team that was leading the protests—when Pence had another event in Los Angeles the next day. Trump later tweeted “I asked @VP Pence to leave stadium if any players kneeled, disrespecting our country.” Given the teams that were playing and the ongoing barbs from both sides of the debate, it is not hard to assume that Pence went to the game to make his own anthem protest, even if he thought protests related to the national anthem were “disrespectful.”

Political controversy in sports is not just limited to the professional level. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) makes billions every year but refuses to pay its players, claiming that they are paid with “free” education . Almost no NCAA football or basketball players take full advantage of their NCAA scholarships. Some student athletes are relegated to useless or even fake degrees, such as the fake African-American studies classes discovered at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 2014. This keeps the athletes academically eligible, even if they never see the inside of a classroom. Many top-tier players don’t even finish their university degree, disproving NCAA claims of a free education. This is especially so if they leave school early, whether by their own volition, by entering the draft, or through the loss of scholarships due to a career-ending injury .

Throughout history, sports have usually been seen as leisure for the majority of the population, separate from serious matters of politics and influence. But sports have always played some role in the distribution and use of power, particularly as a show of national strength on an international stage. Today’s athletes are taking more of the political power that comes with their platform and using it to explore and amplify their agendas. This reflects the populist movements of recent years and cannot be discounted. Players are no longer going to “shut up and dribble.”

This article is the first installment of a column that examines the relationship between sports and politics. Future articles will discuss the responsibilities, methods, and motives of politically-engaged athletes and other sports figures, the benefits and consequences of using their influence, and how the organizers of sport (leagues, owners, and other organizations) and political figures have reacted.

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Should We Keep Politics Out of Sports?

In 1964, New York’s NBC radio affiliate introduced a “talk back” format. The “newest sound” in the city would be “your own voice and your neighbor’s,” the advertisements promised. That March, a broadcaster named Bill Mazer began hosting an afternoon call-in show devoted to sports. Born in Ukraine and reared in Brooklyn, Mazer was famous for his easygoing demeanor and encyclopedic grasp of trivia. Years later, he remembered that the first caller to his show was a “kid” with one pressing question: “Who’s better—Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle?”

Radio hosts had invited audience questions and comments in the past, but there was something novel about the freewheeling nature of the talk-back format, and Mazer’s show quickly caught on. To judge by some snippets that survive on YouTube, talking about sports on the radio has hardly changed since then, aside from the fact that “Mr.” once constituted the prevailing form of address. The innovations that followed largely involved tone—at some point, in the seventies, it became acceptable to belittle, rather than humor, an out-of-control caller. In 1987, New York’s WFAN became the nation’s first twenty-four-hour sports-radio station. It seemed a wild gamble. But, within a few years, such stations dominated the coveted twenty- and thirtysomething male demographic, and beginning in the nineties WFAN became one of the top-billing stations in the country. Today, the United States averages roughly a dozen sports-radio stations per state.

I often wonder why I’ve spent so many hours, sometimes in cars that have long since reached their destination, listening to strangers argue about Carmelo Anthony’s defensive effort, or the size of Barry Bonds’s head. Sports talk remains one of America’s last folk traditions, rigid in its regional devotions and hyper-local mythologies. As I’ve grown older, the bro-centric world view has become off-putting, and yet I still listen. I delight in how pedantic and technical these conversations can be, the conviction and force driving a wacky, pie-in-the-sky trade proposal, the way a host surgically pokes and prods at a caller’s logical fallacy. I love how two people try to outfox each other, rephrasing the interlocutor’s positions to make them sound ridiculous. Ultimately, no amount of reason or passion has any effect on the games we watch. The arguments are almost always infinitely regressive, and anyone’s opinion on Mantle vs. Mays is legitimate. What separates the professional talker from the amateur is a kind of ruthlessness, bringing to a conversation the win-at-all-costs ethic of actual sports.

In July, I was listening to “Outkick the Show,” a daily show that Clay Travis broadcasts on Facebook and Periscope from his home, in Nashville. Travis, who is thirty-nine, represents the latest evolution of the sports pundit, a multi-platform star who has flourished both on social media and in traditional media, like books, radio, and television. For “Outkick,” which is a bit coarser than the daily show that he hosts on Fox Sports Radio, it was a slow week, because football and basketball were on hiatus. Travis pontificated about his personal wealth and litigated some recent pop-culture dramas—the World Cup, Mitch McConnell being stalked by “fat losers in Louisville,” a W.N.B.A. player complaining that her salary should be comparable to that of LeBron James .

There’s a gravelly, solemn quality to Travis’s voice which makes his self-deprecating asides all the more effective. At times, it can be hard to tell whether Travis is a sports pundit who knows a bit about politics, or a political adept who knows a bit about sports. Rumors about nominations to fill the latest Supreme Court vacancy were swirling that week, and he talked about them as though forecasting the N.F.L. Draft. He tabbed Brett Kavanaugh, then seen as an underdog, “my guy,” despite the fact that oddsmakers had him at 6–5. He didn’t discount Amy Barrett: “She throws the identity politics on its head.” (Despite his grasp of judicial politics, he continually, somewhat playfully, mispronounced Neil Gorsuch ’s name as “Gor-sack.”)

The rise of satellite and cable technology in the nineties created new possibilities for nationally syndicated programs built around feisty, voice-driven pundits. The Internet and podcasting continued to blur the lines between professionals and aspirants, since expertise, in this realm, is only relative. A breakthrough came in the early two-thousands, when the writer Bill Simmons parlayed his conversational, fan-first perspective into a job at ESPN , and then founded his own, Simmons-centric media empire. (It included the Web site Grantland, for which I briefly freelanced.) That he couldn’t possibly be objective about his beloved Red Sox or Celtics was part of his appeal. Suddenly, building a career by simply being a hard-core sports fan no longer seemed far-fetched.

A man on a log flume ride makes a phone call to a friend he's supposed to meet at the lazy river.

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In 2004, Travis was working as a lawyer in the Virgin Islands when he realized that DirecTV did not offer the N.F.L.’s Sunday Ticket package there. He went on a “pudding strike,” eating, he says, nothing but pudding cups for fifty days, in the hope that the stunt would spark a policy change. A blog he maintained during the strike took off. Finding an audience was intoxicating. He eventually moved back to his native Tennessee, writing, guesting on local radio, and building a readership for his Web site.

Like Simmons, Travis pitches himself as both Everyman and outsider. Alongside his riffs on the World Cup and LeBron James’s salary, he spent much of the rest of the afternoon admiring the “big brass balls” of the divers who were rescuing a team of young soccer players trapped in a cave in Thailand (“The masses wish that country was called Thigh-land”). They were “the definition of ‘Don’t be a pussy’ ”—one of his catchphrases. There was a dash of gruff humility, an admission that “fearlessness” impressed him more as he approached middle age. All the other stuff in the show was a table setting for this actual life-and-death incident, where no amount of posturing could help. When the stakes are truly high, Travis said, “bravery is the calling card, as opposed to what race you are, or what religion you are, or what ethnicity you are, or what sexual orientation you are.”

Last September, Travis appeared on CNN to discuss ESPN’s suspension of the “SportsCenter” anchor Jemele Hill, who had tweeted that President Trump was a “white supremacist.” Travis, who describes himself as a “radical moderate,” explained that he believed “in only two things completely: the First Amendment and boobs.” Although Travis had used this line before, it caught Brooke Baldwin, the show’s host, off guard. A new controversy branched from the original one, and Travis says he was banned from CNN.

This moment opens Travis’s new book, “ Republicans Buy Sneakers, Too: How the Left Is Ruining Sports with Politics ” (Broadside), an exploration of how he, a longtime Democrat, began to reject what he perceived to be the sports media’s liberal bias. The book is made up of a series of interconnected takes on, among other things, ESPN (“MSESPN”), diversity and political correctness, and the outspoken politics of athletes like LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick . What Travis describes as his “red pill” moment happened during a 2015 protest at the University of Missouri. The football team threatened a boycott, joining student activists who were concerned about a string of racist incidents on campus. But Travis was troubled that few in the media had scrutinized the students’ stories. He felt that the students were exaggerating, maybe even making stuff up. Even if these things actually happened, were “a poop swastika” and “an alleged racial slur, with no witnesses, happening off campus” really in the purview of a university president? “This wasn’t about right or wrong,” he writes. “It was about white men being afraid of being publicly branded as racists.”

These “fake racism allegations,” and the media’s defense of the campus’s “little terrorists,” inspired Travis to become a sort of radicalized bro. He began blogging about the “sham nature” of the protests. Some people found his responses glib, if not racist. This initially disturbed him. But, as often happens nowadays, he read these reactions as attempts to “silence” or “scare” him and so as proof that his skepticism was merited. He came to see the First Amendment as representing “a marketplace of ideas” hospitable to all inquiries, no matter how uncomfortable they might make some people feel. In his book, he speaks his mind with a confrontational verve. He wonders why nobody questioned whether a well-publicized incident involving racist graffiti scrawled outside LeBron James’s home actually happened. He suggests that black athletes are a protected class, insulated from media criticism. He also theorizes that the predominantly white sports media vilifies Ryan Lochte and Grayson Allen because they are white and, therefore, safe targets.

None of Travis’s grievances in the book have to do with the games themselves. Rather, he’s incensed by the stories we tell about those games. He’s particularly relentless when it comes to ESPN, and the “far-left-wing liberal” leadership of its former president, John Skipper, who stepped down last December, amid substance-abuse concerns. In the past few years, ESPN has come to be seen as a cautionary tale of what happens when traditional media companies, accustomed to domination, grow complacent. In 2016, with cable subscriptions on a seemingly irreversible decline, the company spent an estimated $7.3 billion on content. While other outlets spent comparable sums to build libraries of on-demand content that could theoretically live forever, much of ESPN’s spending went toward live sporting events, which rarely make for repeat viewing.

Travis’s chapter on broadcast economics offers a cogent gloss on the challenges that changing viewing habits pose for traditional media entities like ESPN. (A belief that the well of cable-subscription dollars would never run dry in turn affected the professional leagues themselves, whose fortunes depend on lucrative broadcast deals.) One of the ways that ESPN has tried to modernize quickly—and adapt to changing demographics—is by building programs around hosts who are often young, charismatic, and nonwhite. There’s a conspiratorial edge to Travis’s criticism of what he sees as the network’s cosmetic makeover, as well as the increasingly politicized outlooks of its on-air talent. It’s open to argument whether ESPN’s occasionally clumsy on-air strategy has slowed or accelerated the network’s over-all decline in viewership. ESPN has always pursued celebrity, whether it was Tim Tebow or the network’s own anchors. But there’s a viral stickiness to Travis’s charge that it was the politics that drove people away, not the larger reality of cord-cutting. In today’s conversational arena, the burden of proving otherwise always rests on the powerful institution, which is held to a different standard than smaller, nimbler, more openly partisan outlets.

The title of Travis’s book comes from a widely circulated anecdote about the basketball superstar Michael Jordan. In 1990, Jordan allegedly refused to endorse a black challenger to the North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, because “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Whether Jordan actually said this is beside the point. (The quote has been revised over time by the reporter who claims to have heard it, and Jordan, despite his behind-the-scenes support of liberal politicians and causes, is famously taciturn about his politics.) But it has been repeated enough times to be part of Jordan’s off-court legacy as a superstar who understood his place and his limitations, and whose innovations as a kind of human brand were in the name of bringing different people together.

Travis contrasts Jordan with James, who quarrels directly with the President on Twitter. Muhammad Ali , whose refusal to serve in the Army during the war in Vietnam once inspired government prosecution, is remembered fondly as someone whose grievances were clear, detailed, and issue-focussed, unlike those of Kaepernick, whom Travis regards as a cliché-spouting social-justice opportunist. Plus, times have changed. “If anything,” he writes, referring to affirmative action, “the United States government’s laws discriminate in favor of black people based on their skin color .”

That Travis could work an aside about affirmative action into a book about sports speaks to the strange paradox of his career. He writes that sports once constituted our “national connective tissue, the place we all went to escape the serious things in life. It didn’t matter if you were a neurosurgeon or a janitor; everyone’s opinion on sports was equal. Even better, sports was the one place where we could all go to escape the partisan rancor afflicting our country elsewhere.” Yet while he wants athletes to keep their politics to themselves, and networks to stop treating those views as newsworthy, his career has flourished by doing the opposite. Travis’s vision of the past helps explain why sports, full of hallowed traditions and strict hierarchies, pairs well with politically conservative outlooks. When he laments the present-day media’s role in our “national balkanization,” he’s simply describing a world that is open to a wider, more unpredictable array of voices. Of course, this is a world in which he’s a star, weaving riffs about overpaid point guards and noble linemen, whiny celebrities and showmen politicians, into a story about his America.

As far as unanswerable sports questions go, few make for such good fodder as the what-if: the trade that fell through at the last moment, the fluke error that set off a chain reaction of multigenerational futility. At a different time, critics of Fidel Castro’s Cuba wondered what might have been if the revolutionary leader had followed through on his purported (and perhaps dubious) promise as a baseball player. Nowadays, a similar question applies to Donald Trump. What if he had been welcomed, rather than repeatedly shunned, by the N.F.L.’s snobby ownership clique? He bought a franchise in the competing U.S.F.L. in 1983. When he spearheaded an antitrust lawsuit against the N.F.L., in 1984, it seemed a gaudy, if inventive, way to force a merger with the older, more established league. The U.S.F.L. won the suit but was awarded just three dollars in damages, and the league soon folded. In 1988, he was floated as a possible buyer of the New England Patriots before quietly backing out. His purchase would have required approval from three-quarters of the N.F.L.’s owners—the same group he had sued a few years earlier. He tried hard to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014. He was ultimately outbid, and he took the loss in characteristic stride, firing off a series of tweets poking fun at the team’s new owner, Terry Pegula, and his losing ways, before dismissing the modern-day N.F.L. as “boring” and “soft.”

A couple breaks up outside and apartment building.

In 2014, the Times political reporter Mark Leibovich was on his way to interview the Patriots’ superstar quarterback, Tom Brady , when he recalled feeling something unprecedented: he was nervous. The year before, he had published “ This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital ,” a closeup look at Washington’s hubristic excess, and the kind of book that makes you wonder why anyone ever talks to journalists. His professional life requires him to be unfazed by politicians and policymakers, people with true power over our everyday realities. Yet he retained a bit of awe for Brady: “Sports pedestals are funny that way. Athletes often constitute our earliest objects of allegiance. Staying starstruck is an indulgence of our arrested developments, even for jaded middle-aged reporters—sweaty ones, in this case.” Leibovich hoped that he and Brady would hit it off.

Much to Leibovich’s chagrin, they did not become “best friends.” But they got along well enough for Leibovich to profile Brady for the Times Magazine. Despite a long-standing desire to keep football as a “walled-off object of my mental energy—toys to play with on the side of all the serious,” Leibovich found this behind-the-scenes glimpse into the N.F.L. exhilarating. The Brady piece eventually grew into “ Big Game: The N.F.L. in Dangerous Times ” (Penguin), an exploration of Leibovich’s unease about being a hard-core football fan—someone who knows he should not feel so emotionally beholden to whether the New England Patriots win or lose.

One of the reasons that sports networks invest so much in talking heads—like Stephen A. Smith, of ESPN; Skip Bayless, of Fox Sports 1; or, indeed, Clay Travis—is that they no longer have a monopoly on access. Social media and athlete-driven Web sites have given players more direct and dynamic ways to interact with fans. Often, the players themselves are only incidental to the ancillary dramas of gaming, gambling, or fantasy sports. It’s much easier for networks to hook viewers with voices that are brash and entertaining, perpetual-motion machines of conversation, prognostications, and hot takes. There’s also the partnership between leagues and broadcast networks. ESPN’s president, Jimmy Pitaro, recently acknowledged the “false narrative” that his network had a political agenda. He promised to steer ESPN clear of politics, as well as improve relations with the N.F.L. The aims appeared to be interrelated.

Leibovich seems largely immune to the challenges around access and appeasement that many sports journalists face; he pursues his leads with the freedom of someone who’s embedding in the N.F.L. only temporarily. He writes with a brusque charm, training his eye toward features of the league that many longtime observers might take for granted or condition themselves to ignore: the glad-handing between joyless, high-profile reporters and secretive team intermediaries; the personal assistants who chase after the superstars’ toddlers; the powerful league officials whose names no fans know. At the same time, Leibovich is a fan like the rest of us, given to generic, often specious, and occasionally paranoid defenses of his cherished Patriots. As his book unfolds, though, his onetime ability to compartmentalize football and protect it from the nastiness of real life begins to melt away.

In the end, Travis and Leibovich aren’t all that different, even though Travis would probably regard Leibovich as a “far-left-wing liberal.” Travis shares Leibovich’s view that football is a “clean meritocracy,” and they both lament the shadow that politics casts on their childhood enthusiasms. While all this seems to have pushed Travis toward a reactionary stance, trolling the liberal establishment, Leibovich’s response is more wistful. Returning to his day job and covering the 2016 Presidential campaign, he begins to recognize the resonances between Trump and the N.F.L.’s insulated ownership. Trump exploited Kaepernick’s protest as a campaign issue, mobilizing resentment against the social-justice movement that the quarterback was trying to promote. Eventually, Leibovich’s nostalgia for a more innocent kind of fandom is upended, and football becomes another battleground in the culture wars.

Leibovich just wanted to bond with Tom Brady. But he stuck around long enough to catch a glimpse into the league’s power structure, and it left him a bit queasy. He has a gift for sniffing out where true power lies, and his doggedness brings him to bathroom meetings among N.F.L. owners and sideline chats with the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, whose primary duty, it often seems, is to shield the N.F.L. from an endless string of controversies surrounding the sport’s violence, on and off the field. (In one scene, Goodell, unflappable when it comes to league controversies involving concussions, anthem protests, sexual harassment, and domestic violence, grows annoyed when he can’t get the N.F.L. mobile app to work.) Leibovich ends up reporting on a closed-door meeting in which owners debate whether Kaepernick’s kneeling protest during the national anthem is simply a “media problem” in need of new imaging. They speak “in elevated terms” about their responsibility as owners, invoking Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s march on Selma. As a powerful group of billionaires, well versed in the ins and outs of municipal bonds or antitrust litigation, they readily grasp that sports and politics don’t exist in neatly bounded spheres. They simply want to be able to choose which political legacy they will become a part of. One of them suggests a March on Washington-style show of solidarity, featuring owners and players taking to the streets together.

“Players are like cattle and the owners are ranchers,” the Dallas Cowboys president Tex Schramm is reported to have said in 1987, and the ranchers “can always get more cattle.” Schramm was cynically pointing out one of the most durable realities of sports. The players are often interchangeable, an assembly line of heroes and villains, symbols of overachievement or wasted talent. Our fandom is deeply irrational, a conduit for all the loose, tribal energies inside us, and where those energies take us can’t possibly map neatly onto party affiliation and ideological preference. Allegiance to a team often runs deeper than its current cast of characters, stretching back across generations and forward to next season, and the one after that. But, at a time when players have never been so free to work where they choose, fans increasingly pledge allegiance to individuals, like LeBron James, or the soccer icon Cristiano Ronaldo, following them wherever they go. The scandals and controversies come and go with the news cycle. But there’s one constant that lies just underneath the games we watch, a dynamic that remains fixed no matter who is cheering from the sidelines or complaining on the airwaves. If there is a clear relationship between sports and politics, it might come down to whether you find yourself siding with labor or management: whether you think that a player should remain forever loyal to the first jersey he puts on; whether you view athletes as workers or just as people who should feel lucky to play a child’s game for a living.

Here’s a question. Last December, Commissioner Goodell signed a five-year contract extension worth roughly two hundred million dollars. A couple of months ago, LeBron James joined the Los Angeles Lakers on a four-year contract worth around a hundred and fifty million dollars. Who’s better? ♦

Books & Fiction

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How Politics Has Changed Modern-Day Sports

Sportswriter Dave Zirin counts the ways that political issues have infiltrated sports at every level

Joseph Stromberg

President Barack Obama and Green Bay Packers

What do civil rights have to do with pro football players? What does the economic recession have to do with the Olympics? Everything, says Dave Zirin, author of the new book Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down . The first sports editor in the history of The Nation, Zirin has spent over a decade writing about the intersection of sports and politics. He argues that political and social issues have permeated sports at all levels, from youth leagues to the big leagues—and that it’s time for sports to be recognized as both a driver and reflection of social change.

The subtitle of your book is “How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.” How have politics changed sports, and has it been for the better or worse?

It’s very different than it was just five years ago. A lot of the sports writing community has missed this, and missed it wildly. The sports world we’re looking at in 2013 is just different than the sports world of 2008. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case, but there are three that I think have been most transformative—and there are positives and negatives that we can pull out of all three.

The first is the 2008 economic crisis, the biggest recession in 80 years in this country. It turned the economics of sports on its head—there have been four lockouts in different years [including the NFL referees], as owners in different sports have tried to restore profitability. There have been fewer public subsidies for stadiums, which were one of the pillars of sports profits for the last generation. There have been crises in every country where the Olympic or World Cup decided to land.

The second one is the growth the LGBT movement in this country. We’ve gone from 2008—where every candidate running for president talked about marriage equality as if it was a plague—to 2013, when you have Barack Obama mentioning “Stonewall” in his inauguration speech. And this has been reflected in the world of sports. This has a particularly potent impact because sports—particularly men’s sports—have been a way in which masculinity has been defined, and more specifically a kind of masculinity that doesn’t show vulnerability, doesn’t show pain, and equates any kind of sensitivity with weakness and with being gay. This goes back to Teddy Roosevelt, who popularized the term ‘sissy’ for people who didn’t play violent sports.

So now, to see people like Steve Nash , Michael Strahan , Brendan Ayanbadejo , Scott Fujita , actually speaking out for LGBT rights, it has a very powerful cultural effect. The Vancouver Canucks just did a public service announcement about transgender awareness, and in the NCAA, a man named Kye Allums played for the women’s basketball team of George Washington—the first openly transgender player in the NCAA. These are huge changes in how we understand that we are diverse, both racially and in terms of our sexuality and gender.

The third thing that’s exploded in the last five years is the issue of the NFL and concussions and the recognition that playing the most popular sport in the country is a legitimate health hazard. You have [former] NFL players killing themselves—there have been four suicides in the last year—and this is something that’s become too much for the NFL to ignore. On media day at the Super Bowl, all the players were being asked—and I ask this when I speak to NFL players, too—“Would you want your son playing football?” Some say yes, some say no, but they all think about it. These are huge changes in how we look at sports and violence.

The other day, Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard said he doesn’t think the NFL will exist in 30 years due to these sorts of problems. What do you see happening?

I disagree with Bernard Pollard—I don’t think the game will be appreciably different than it is now. But I think it will be less popular, the same way that boxing is much less popular today. Fifty years ago, if you were the heavyweight champ, you were the most famous athlete in the United States. Now, I bet the overwhelming majority of sports fans couldn’t name who the champion is. It’s just not as popular.

So I think it’ll be less popular, and I also think that the talent pool is going to shrink as more parents keep their kids out of playing. You’ll see the NFL invest millions of dollars in urban infrastructure and youth football leagues, and it’s going to be the poorest kids playing football as a ticket out of poverty. This year, the four best young quarterbacks—Andrew Luck, RGIII, Russell Wilson, and Colin Kaepernick—all four of them excelled at multiple sports and came from stable, middle-class homes. Those are exactly the kind of players who won’t be playing football in 30 years.

You write that issues like this—the darker side of sports—often get overlooked in sports coverage. Why is this?

It goes back to the fact that many of the best reporters out there now work for outlets like the NFL Network, NBA.com—they actually work for the league. With ESPN, you have a hegemonic broadcast partner with the leagues. In any other industry, this would be seen as a conflict of interest, but in sports, it’s not, because sports are seen as fun and games. But the problem is that for a lot of people, sports are the way they understand the world—they’re the closest thing we have to a common language in this country. When you couple that with the fact that the people who are supposed to be the “watchmen” of sports, the media, are in bed with the people they’re supposed to be covering, that’s how you get scandals like Lance Armstrong and Manti Te’O . With these scandals that you see, so much time is spent doing what Bob Lipsyte calls “ godding up ” athletes—turning them into gods. And then when the gods fail, reporters tear them down, piece-by-piece, as a way to make them look like outliers, or bad apples, and keep the sensibility and profitability of the sport afloat.

One of the trends you mention is that recently, athletes seem more willing to use their platform to advocate for their political beliefs. Why has this been happening?

Well, in the 1960s, athletes were at the forefront of the fight for social justice. And not just athletes, but the best athletes: Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Lew Alcindor, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Arthur Ashe. But in the ’90s, as corporate control really solidified over sports, it was a desert of any sort of courage in sports. What you’re seeing today is that, because of broader crises in society, and because of social media, you’re seeing a turn away from what’s called the “ Jordan era. ” People are finding their voice.

You actually write about how, in the age of Twitter, this could actually be an asset for athletes, in terms of cultivating their “brand.”

It’s true. All the players’ public relations (PR) people, business managers, even team PR people, they want the players out in the community, they want them out there, they want people to root for the players as individuals. It gets tickets sales up and increases watchability. But when you do that, you also run the risk that you’ll unearth that somebody has certain ideas about the world that they’re going to share—and sometimes those ideas are, to many people, disgusting. Like when then-Baltimore Orioles outfielder Luke Scott talked about his “birther” theories about President Obama, or when Denard Span, an outfielder now with the Nationals, tweets that he’d been watching those Newtown conspiracy videos. To me personally, these are disgusting beliefs, but they’re important too. Athletes are entering the public debate about certain issues, so now let’s debate them.

For you personally—someone who seems to be constantly criticizing and pointing out the distressing aspects of modern sports—why did you get into sports writing in the first place?

Before I had any interest in politics, I loved sports, and I still have that love. I grew up in New York City in the 1980s, and my room was a shrine to the stars of that time—Daryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Lawrence Taylor, Keith Hernandez. I played basketball, I played baseball, I memorized the backs of baseball cards, I read sports books all the time, and I absolutely loved it all. I was at Game 6 of the 1986 World Series when the ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs , and I still have the ticket stub. So I’m a big believer that sports is like a fire—you can use it to cook a meal or burn down a house.

The reason why I write about it critically is that I consider myself a traditionalist when it comes to sports. I want to save it from its hideous excesses, and the way it’s used by people in power for their political means. So when people say to me, “You’re trying to politicize sports,” I say, “Don’t you see that sports is already politicized?” I want sports to be apart from politics, but as long as it isn’t, we need to point that out.

Do you find it difficult to root for athletes or owners whose political beliefs you disagree with? And do you root more for a player if you agree with them?

When I meet players, and I really respect their politics, and I think they’re courageous people—yes, I do root for them a little harder. Partly because I’ve gotten to know them, but also because I know how sports media works, that the more successful they are, the more people will hear what they want to say, and the more they can leverage this platform. So of course, I want people who are courageous and will use that platform to do more than sell sports drinks, I want them to have the brightest spotlight possible.

As far as athletes whose politics I don’t like, is it hard to root for them? I guess I’m grateful just to know what their politics are, and that they have spoken out. I’ve never actively rooted against somebody because of his or her politics. Even someone like Tim Tebow, I actually like him. I just happen to think he can’t do that really important thing that quarterbacks need to do—which is to throw a football.

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Joseph Stromberg was previously a digital reporter for Smithsonian .

Politics and Sports: Strange, Secret Bedfellows

So, are you more Super Bowl or Super Tuesday? No matter how you answer, if you are like most Americans, you probably think the two—sports and politics—are unrelated. You might even object to the suggestion of a tie on principle alone. We’re not so bold as to suggest there aren’t some good reasons for the separation of sport and politics, but this orientation is, in certain ways, unfortunate. It can blind us to the ways in which the two contested fields are intimately bound together in contemporary American culture.

Sport scholars and cultural critics have actually spent a good deal of time thinking about and researching these relationships over the years. Academics like us have looked at politics in sports and sports in politics. In this piece, we will take a look at the latter; that is, the ways in which sports are part of and implicated in the political process. It is an exploration that not only shows the power of sport in politics but also challenges and expands some of our basic conceptions of politics itself.

Sports and Political Leadership

Barack Obama was proclaimed the “Sports President” even before he set foot in the White House. Sport pundits wrote glowingly of the potential for positive change that Obama’s election would bring: the power of players’ unions would be increased, Title IX would be enforced, the Olympics would come to Chicago and the World Cup to American soil, and the long-criticized college football bowl system would finally be repaired. While many of the loftier expectations have not been met, Obama has maintained the label by regularly attending sporting events of all types, inviting his favorite teams to the White House, showing off his jump shot during frequent games of pick-up basketball, and sharing his annual video explanation of his March Madness picks (a video that occupies a prime spot on ESPN’s homepage every year).

The celebration of Obama seems to be a case of collective amnesia. Only a few years prior, George W. Bush was hailed as the “Sports President” due to his own sporting pedigree—the one-time owner of the Texas Rangers, he took outspoken pride in throwing out the first pitch at the World Series in post-9/11 New York and had a passion for running, biking, and working out. And before Bush, Bill Clinton was frequently spotted cheering on his Arkansas Razorbacks or out on the golf green, and he was lauded for his involvement in Major League baseball negotiations. And before Clinton, much was made of the first President Bush’s baseball career at Yale. In fact, if we peruse the historical archives, it seems almost every president was hailed with the same title. Other “Sports Presidents” included Gerald Ford, the All-American center from Michigan; Richard Nixon, a former college football player who loved to spend time at the bowling alley and even drew up a play for the Washington Redskins; JFK, who was famous for his swimming ability and fitness; and Teddy Roosevelt, who, wellknown for his rugged lifestyle, boxed and wrestled in the White House and introduced rules to increase the safety of college football. Obama wasn’t our first “Sports President,” nor do we suspect he’ll be the last.

Social scientists haven’t spent as much time researching these connections as you might expect. Perhaps it is because the appearance of political leaders at local sporting events is so deeply normalized that we don’t even notice it. However, as any good sociologist will tell you, sometimes that which seems the most ordinary is the most revealing. In this case, a critical examination reveals sport serving at least three key functions.

First, sport provides a stage for public visibility, attention, and awareness. For a politician, virtually all publicity is good. Appearing at an event, whether throwing out the first pitch of a big game or simply sitting in the stands is bound to attract cameras and a mention in the local newspaper. At the very minimum, sport provides a safe stage for a politician to remind the public of her existence.

Secondly and more significantly, sport can help solidify a politician’s reputation, identity, and social status. It can demonstrate that a politician is, at least on some level, just one of the guys (or gals)—or even better: a certain kind of guy (or gal). Sociologists, in particular French theorist Pierre Bourdieu, have argued that taste plays a key role in dividing up social groups. When a politician appears at, say, a college basketball game, it shows they share a common passion with the wider public. In the same way a political candidate drinking a beer at the local watering hole has become an obligatory photo-op, appearing at a sporting event proves he or she isn’t an elitist snob.

And much like it is important that the candidate knows how to hold the pint glass in the photo-op at the bar, it is important the politician simply acts like an ordinary sports fan at the game. Both their emotions and favorite team’s colors should be worn for all to see. When Obama makes a joke at the expense of the Packers, the rival of his hometown Bears, it doesn’t alienate Green Bay fans (in fact, it endears them) because he is acting in the appropriate manner—he’s acting like a real sports fan. This creates the all-important space for an emotional connection to be made.

Of course, sport, like the bar, has a long tradition as masculine space; sometimes it’s even characterized as a “refuge of masculinity.” This provides yet another barrier to women seeking success in the political realm, which itself can be seen as another of the “last refuges.”

In any case, the manner in which sport provides the chance to connect with communities that bridge political and ideological divides makes it particularly appealing to those seeking public approval. This speaks to the third way in which sport is crucial to political leadership. Whether it is sitting courtside or receiving athletic champions at the White House, politicians love to be associated with the fun, positive energy associated with modern sports, not to mention the aura of excellence, excitement, and success. These appearances work toward the creation of legitimacy, likeability, and credibility through the transference of the positive feelings associated with sports, especially those that are popular and successful.

There isn’t much research on the mechanisms through which this transfer works, but there is little doubt that smart politicians and their advisors are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to create good feelings by associating their campaigns and agendas with athletes and athletic events. (Albeit cautiously—political types can never be too overt about any of this, lest they violate the ideals and values that both domains hold dear). The same tactics, of course, are used by many: for years, researchers have documented the massive capital corporations have invested to build associations with popular teams or athletes. For example, sport researchers Stephen Jackson and Jay Scherer have written on the relationship between Adidas and New Zealand’s dominant rugby squad, the All Blacks, and the scholar Walter LaFeber documented the global reach of the Nike–Michael Jordan alliance. Just as athletes and athletic associations sell products, politicians try to associate with sport to help sell themselves and their agendas to a sport-loving public.

The Politics of Sport and Culture

Usually when Americans talk about politics they are referring to campaigns and elections, legislative debates, and the making of law and public policy. Surely the emphasis on electoral processes organizes how much of academic political science is oriented. But there is another, broader aspect of political life that is easy to overlook or leave out. This is what we might call cultural politics. The politics of culture involve how political communities and interests are created, consolidated, and maintained; it involves the construction of cultural frames and social problems—what are seen as problems in need of attention or correction, what is considered core to the public interest, and what’s not even worthy of political consideration.

Some of the most famous scholars of sport have spent their time theorizing from this perspective, examining how sport is central to creating and reinforcing social solidarities and collective identities, what is seen as natural or acceptable (and thus not open to political action or contestation), and which social problems are most pressing.

The ever-elusive notion of “community” provides a prime illustration. In recent years, politicians and academics have bemoaned the decline in community pride and civic attachment. And perhaps it is true that more people are now bowling alone, as Robert Putnam’s book claims; however, the number of people tailgating before the big game, united by their love of their team has only grown. The founders of the sociological discipline were driven by the question of what would bring people together and serve as a unifying force in a society that was rapidly becoming more complicated, diverse, and fragmented. In many places, for better or worse, sport has been the answer. Sport provides a public activity that is often as much about the audience as the participants. In doing so, a basis for some sort of common, unified, and collective identity is provided.

The community fervor that can surround sport is wellcaptured in H.G. Bissinger’s popular book Friday Night Lights (on high school football in a small Texas town) and is the subject of insightful analysis in Richard Gruneau and David Whitson’s Hockey Night in Canada . Arguments for the public funding of professional sport stadiums rely heavily on the belief that sport can forge community. Plus, building such monuments to sports is one of the few endeavors a local politician can undertake to define her agenda and leave her mark on a city.

Sport and culture studies of the cultural dimensions of the politics surrounding sport, though, have tended to focus on sport’s conservative or reproductive social nature. From this perspective, sport is an institution that tends to reproduce the existing social status quo, and, in that way, it can work on behalf of those politicians or political parties currently in office. More than this, it reproduces current class divisions as well as understandings of race, gender, and sexuality by making current social standings seem both organic and set.

In the most extreme reading, sport serves as what a Marxist might call the “opiate of the masses”—something mindless to occupy the working class’s time and energy, which might otherwise be invested in creating drastic political change. Studies in this tradition have become more nuanced through engagement with the work of classic social theorist Antonio Gramsci, a move that has led to sport being conceived of as a site of contestation and potential resistance. However, even with the added complexity, the political significance of sport remains rooted in its role in the reproduction of social class.

Race scholars have questioned the role sport plays in maintaining racial stereotypes, in particular the athletic prowess and intellectual deficiency of black men. Ben Carrington, in his recent book Race, Sport, and Politics, adds to this literature through a specific focus on how sport has been a central site for both establishing and resisting understandings of race and biological difference. In his work, Carrington illustrates that sport is able to play such a significant role in the construction of racial images and identities because of the common (but misplaced) perception that it is located in an apolitical realm.

Feminist theorists take much the same view, conceptualizing sport as a key site for the reproduction of understandings of gender. Drawing heavily on French cultural theorist Michel Foucault, gender scholars have examined how the body itself becomes a political site upon which power operates. Debates over the value of Title IX and the effectiveness of the sex testing performed by athletic commissions demonstrates how sporting institutions both rely on, and help establish, a binary understanding of gender. Similarly, many of the most important of the masculinity scholars, including Raewyn Connell, Michael Messner, and Michael Kimmel, have highlighted sport as a central site where boys learn how to perform a dominant, physical brand of manhood.

Because of its cultural prominence and the ways in which it is bound up with so many of the differences and inequalities of contemporary society, activists (both in and around sport) have often seen sport as a potential arena for contestation and change. Whether considering the 1968 African American Olympic protests or Title IX gender equity activism, sport scholars (including ourselves) have devoted a tremendous amount of energy and attention to these potentials and possibilities. This is, in fact, the single most familiar use and meaning of the term politics and sports in the field: protests, activism, social movements using sport to call attention to existing inequalities and work on behalf of broader social change.

But for all of this, the fact of the matter is that sport’s political effects would seem to be far more powerful as a means of social reproduction, in maintaining the social order as it is. Sport tends to be associated with political anti-change, the maintenance of the status quo. And perhaps the most obvious and yet least appreciated example of that involves the display of anthems, flags, and even military personnel (or fighter jets) at sporting events large and small, local and international—and without a doubt at this weekend’s Super Bowl.

Sport has long been a means of establishing national pride and a belief in a population’s genetic or at least cultural superiority. When boxer Joe Louis avenged his earlier loss to Max Schmeling with a first-round knockout it was considered a victory for American democracy over a perverted German nationalism, not just one boxer over another. The importance placed on American Olympic athletes’ success during the Cold War provide yet another example. Significantly, they were under pressure not only to win medals, but also to unite the population in celebration of both athletic and moral superiority.

Spotting Sport in Political Discourse

A third area in which sports and politics are deeply implicated, perhaps even inextricably woven together, is within political discourse, so much of which is informed by and indeed expressed through sports metaphors and images.

Sport historians and theorists have debated which political regimes in the history of the modern world have been best positioned and able to make political use of sport. What stands out about sport in American politics (if not in other liberal democracies as well) is the way in which sport’s idealized culture of competitive fair play mirrors, matches, and models American conceptions of justice, fairness, and the good society.

Unlike the ability to down a local brew, sport is also associated with moral worth. Within the popular media and the community of fans, the sporting world is cherished as meritocracy at its finest. The playing field is said to be even, and the players who reach the highest levels do so through talent, drive, and hard work. As a fan, it is nearly impossible to avoid subscribing to these omnipresent ideals. Tales of players “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps” and escaping abject poverty to achieve incredible wealth based on being the hardest worker on the team dominate ESPN’s “color commentary” and the pages of Sports Illustrated . And on the field, cooperation, cohesion, reciprocity, and self-sacrifice are celebrated as essential to bringing team success. When it works, all of this individualism and hard work and team play fits together so seamlessly and smoothly that it seems like it couldn’t be any other way—and that any failing is just one’s own, personal shortcoming.

This can be positive and problematic. On the positive side, the idea that sport is somehow a model or metaphor for social life makes it a frequent reference point, either in terms of abstract ideas, ideals, and values or in terms of athletes, competitions, and events in the sporting world being believed to embody and used to express political and ideological views. To be seen as possessing those upstanding qualities through association can provide a powerful vehicle for sending those messages (not to mention an all so important boost in the public opinion polls). On the negative side, the infusion of sports language and metaphors in politics can be seen to undermine politics itself—making it less serious about real issues, more cutthroat and competitive, more about process than about outcomes and people.

In his book on sports, race, and the Olympics, Douglas Hartmann looked at how Ronald Reagan talked about the Olympic torch relay in the context of his reelection campaign of 1984. On the one hand, Reagan waxed poetic about the torch relay in an attempt to capitalize on the patriotic enthusiasm and exuberance that surrounded the spectacular American performance in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (albeit a Games that was boycotted by the USSR and its Eastern Bloc allies).

But a closer read of the speech revealed that Reagan’s emphasis on the Olympic torch relay was about much more than building public support for his presidency and his reelection campaign. The president also used the event to craft and convey his unique, post-1960s vision of social justice and racial harmony. It was a vision that was based upon individual opportunity and a community in which individuals (not groups) were united around a common cause, had equal access to opportunity, and drew heavily if implicitly on the ideals about fair play, competition, hard work, and individual effort that circulate widely within the world of sport itself. It was a moving portrait, a stirring vision made all the more powerful by the fact that many who heard it thought of it as nothing more than a story about an all-American event and a set of ideals that any and every American could agree upon.

Seeing through a Sacred Divide

It does not take a great imagination, only a sociological one, to see that sport is indeed a powerful political platform. Sport is actively sought as a stage on which to be seen and solidify one’s public identity, political legitimacy, and leadership qualities. It is important in reproduction of social categories. Sports language and imagery is pervasive in our political rhetoric. There is no denying it, from paying for new stadiums through public tax dollars to standing for the national anthem to considering a mandate that women boxers must wear skirts, politics and sport are tightly intertwined.

Some might take these observations as the impetus to, once and for all, get sport out of politics (and politics out of sports)—either because sport is believed to be above all the political scrum (a sacred realm of sorts) or simply better understood as a realm of fun and entertainment that is only compromised by the complexity and conflict of real-world politics. This isn’t necessarily our goal. Instead, we simply seek to call attention to the fact that in the real world sport and politics are not nearly as separate as we might think or would like to believe.

That said, we also realize our modest goal has some potentially far-reaching implications that might first be understood and imagined. We don’t want to sell it short.

Sport is a powerful and important political force. But it is most powerful when people are least aware of it—when people believe that nothing important or unusual is going on; in other words, when the politics are hidden or masked, seen as natural or organic. For politicians, this means that they must engage in a delicate dance because even as they use sport for a political purpose it is essential that sport retain its status as a somehow sacred or at least special space. For the rest of us, trying to be aware of what is going on in order that we might participate in both politics and sports with our eyes open, as equals rather than as dupes subject to the manipulation and exploitation of others.

The point, in short, is that it’s not necessary to take sport out of politics, but simply to realize that it is there and to engage it appropriately. Perhaps this realization is the first and most basic “political” act of all.

Comments 15

Hector j. vila, phd — february 12, 2012.

A very instructive discussion, informative, that I will certainly now pass on to my recent class, Media, Sports and Identity, because you've covered many of the subjects and themes of the course.

In a parallel attempt to discuss Blitt's work, I did my own work, here, should you care to take a look-see : http://hectorvila.com/2012/02/05/styleandsoul/

kyle green — February 26, 2012

Hi Hector, Thanks for the positive feedback. Great to here you are sharing it with your class. Going to check out your essay now. -kyle-

andrew m. lindner — March 8, 2012

A great paper! I posted a quick response to it here: http://thesocietypages.org/thickculture/2012/03/08/the-espn-president/

Yael Perets — March 26, 2012

"On the negative side, the infusion of sports language and metaphors in politics can be seen to undermine politics itself—making it less serious about real issues, more cutthroat and competitive, more about process than about outcomes and people": http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1723387

Pat — August 15, 2012

Hey Kyle, Just saw this news story. Seems pretty similar to the way you are talking about sports. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-installs-brewery-for-obama/2012/08/14/19a72546-e67d-11e1-936a-b801f1abab19_story.html

Kyle Green — August 20, 2012

Hi Pat, Thanks for the feedback and the link. I agree that you can definitely see some of the elements from our argument about how sport operates in the coverage of beer drinking. Like sport, the politician's performance has to seem natural and apolitical to be effective. And, like sport, the politician has to like the right one - football not horse dancing and budweiser not an expensive import. The article also speaks volumes on the growth of microbreweries. I would imagine that just ten years ago that could have separated a politician from 'the masses'.

Pat — September 3, 2012

Speaking once again of politics and sports: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/opinion/krugman-rosie-ruiz-republicans.html

Kyle Green — September 3, 2012

Hi Pat, Thanks for yet another example of a case where sports and politics come together. I have followed the coverage of 'marathon-gate' with great fascination. And I would argue that the reaction to the lie helps reveal some of the characteristics that make sport such an important cultural phenomena. His claim of running the 3 hour marathon was more than just a testament of his speed, it was also a claim to his athleticism, his interest in fitness, his ability to accomplish impressive feats through hard work, and most importantly, a sign of his strong character (think back to the humorous depictions of Bill Clinton's body, love of greasy food, and occasional jogs as a counter-example). Following this logic, Paul Ryan's rounding error suggests a character flaw greater than a poor memory or mathematical skill set. Even worse, the lie dirtied the sacred terrain that is athletic accomplishment. -kyle-

import beer. — February 26, 2013

Very good article! We will be linking to this great article on our site. Keep up the great writing.

Kyle Green — August 28, 2013

Hi Import Beer, Thanks for the positive feedback. What is your site? I'd be interested in seeing it.

Politics and Sports and Sports andPolitics? | God and Sports — November 5, 2014

[…] [1] http://thesocietypages.org/papers/politics-and-sport/ […]

Hoodies - Changing Lenses — July 26, 2015

[…] For our part, our conversations have taken us in two directions. First, informed by interests in sport, race, and politics, Doug Hartmann found himself ruminating on the photo of LeBron James and the Miami Heat posing, heads down as if in silent reflection, in hoodies. The moodily lit image prompted thoughts about social consciousness and the political voice of athletes in America (more on this recently), thoughts on Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s Olympic victory stand demonstration back in 1968. Both incidents share the fact that athletes’ may most effectively make political expressions through their bodies and actions—ironically, not a point Hartmann got into in his TSP White Paper with Kyle Green, “Sport and Politics: Strange, Secret Bedfellows.” […]

Pennsylvania Breathes Sigh of Relief As Crappy GOP Budget Becomes Law | gadflyonthewallblog — March 24, 2016

[…] so long as we pretend politics is a sporting event and you have to stand by your team, things will remain as they […]

Pennsylvania Breathes Sigh of Relief As Crappy GOP Budget Becomes Law — March 26, 2016

Get over it – magnitudes of dissonance — january 19, 2017.

[…] and sports have a long history in the United States. In the article “Politics and Sports: Strange, Secret Bedfellows”, Kyle Green and Doug Hartmann […]

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2024 Readers: Sport and politics in America are deeply intertwined, but in complicated and often invisible ways--these were among the main points of a TSP feature that Doug Hartmann and then-graduate student board member Kyle Green wrote during Superbowl week in 2012. After a decade of athlete activism and more conservative populist engagements with sport, it seems worth reviewing this piece and considering if anything has changed. Hartmann, for what it is worth, is currently working on a book project that extends these themes, tentatively titled "Take-a-Knee Nation: Athletic Activism and the Backlash Against It."So, are you more Super Bowl or Super Tuesday? No matter how you answer, if you are like most Americans, you probably think the two---sports and politics---are unrelated. You might even object to the suggestion of a tie on principle alone. We’re not so bold as to suggest there aren’t some good reasons for the separation of sport and politics, but this orientation is, in certain ways, unfortunate. It can blind us to the ways in which the two contested fields are intimately bound together in contemporary American culture.Sport scholars and cultural critics have actually spent a good deal of time thinking about and researching these relationships over the years. Academics like us have looked at politics in sports and sports in politics. In this piece, we will take a look at the latter; that is, the ways in which sports are part of and implicated in the political process. It is an exploration that not only shows the power of sport in politics but also challenges and expands some of our basic conceptions of politics itself. Sports and Political Leadership <dl id="attachment_876" class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 270px;" data-mce-style="width: 270px;"><dt class="wp-caption-dt"><img class="size-full wp-image-876 " title="New Yorker Cover by Barry Blitt" src="https://thesocietypages.org/files/2012/02/Screen_Shot_2012-01-30_at_11.23.56_AM_270x393.png" alt="New Yorker Cover by Barry Blitt" width="270" height="393" data-mce-src="https://thesocietypages.org/files/2012/02/Screen_Shot_2012-01-30_at_11.23.56_AM_270x393.png" /></dt><dd class="wp-caption-dd">New Yorker Cover by Barry Blitt</dd></dl>Barack Obama was proclaimed the “Sports President” even before he set foot in the White House. Sport pundits wrote glowingly of the potential for positive change that Obama’s election would bring: the power of players’ unions would be increased, Title IX would be enforced, the Olympics would come to Chicago and the World Cup to American soil, and the long-criticized college football bowl system would finally be repaired. While many of the loftier expectations have not been met, Obama has maintained the label by regularly attending sporting events of all types, inviting his favorite teams to the White House, showing off his jump shot during frequent games of pick-up basketball, and sharing his annual video explanation of his March Madness picks (a video that occupies a prime spot on ESPN’s homepage every year).The celebration of Obama seems to be a case of collective amnesia. Only a few years prior, George W. Bush was hailed as the “Sports President” due to his own sporting pedigree—the one-time owner of the Texas Rangers, he took outspoken pride in throwing out the first pitch at the World Series in post-9/11 New York and had a passion for running, biking, and working out. And before Bush, Bill Clinton was frequently spotted cheering on his Arkansas Razorbacks or out on the golf green, and he was lauded for his involvement in Major League baseball negotiations. And before Clinton, much was made of the first President Bush’s baseball career at Yale. In fact, if we peruse the historical archives, it seems almost every president was hailed with the same title. Other “Sports Presidents” included Gerald Ford, the All-American center from Michigan; Richard Nixon, a former college football player who loved to spend time at the bowling alley and even drew up a play for the Washington Redskins; JFK, who was famous for his swimming ability and fitness; and Teddy Roosevelt, who, wellknown for his rugged lifestyle, boxed and wrestled in the White House and introduced rules to increase the safety of college football. Obama wasn’t our first “Sports President,” nor do we suspect he’ll be the last.Social scientists haven’t spent as much time researching these connections as you might expect. Perhaps it is because the appearance of political leaders at local sporting events is so deeply normalized that we don’t even notice it. However, as any good sociologist will tell you, sometimes that which seems the most ordinary is the most revealing. In this case, a critical examination reveals sport serving at least three key functions.First, sport provides a stage for public visibility, attention, and awareness. For a politician, virtually all publicity is good. Appearing at an event, whether throwing out the first pitch of a big game or simply sitting in the stands is bound to attract cameras and a mention in the local newspaper. At the very minimum, sport provides a safe stage for a politician to remind the public of her existence.Secondly and more significantly, sport can help solidify a politician’s reputation, identity, and social status. It can demonstrate that a politician is, at least on some level, just one of the guys (or gals)—or even better: a certain kind of guy (or gal). Sociologists, in particular French theorist Pierre Bourdieu, have argued that taste plays a key role in dividing up social groups. When a politician appears at, say, a college basketball game, it shows they share a common passion with the wider public. In the same way a political candidate drinking a beer at the local watering hole has become an obligatory photo-op, appearing at a sporting event proves he or she isn’t an elitist snob.And much like it is important that the candidate knows how to hold the pint glass in the photo-op at the bar, it is important the politician simply acts like an ordinary sports fan at the game. Both their emotions and favorite team’s colors should be worn for all to see. When Obama makes a joke at the expense of the Packers, the rival of his hometown Bears, it doesn’t alienate Green Bay fans (in fact, it endears them) because he is acting in the appropriate manner—he’s acting like a real sports fan. This creates the all-important space for an emotional connection to be made.Of course, sport, like the bar, has a long tradition as masculine space; sometimes it’s even characterized as a “refuge of masculinity.” This provides yet another barrier to women seeking success in the political realm, which itself can be seen as another of the “last refuges.”In any case, the manner in which sport provides the chance to connect with communities that bridge political and ideological divides makes it particularly appealing to those seeking public approval. This speaks to the third way in which sport is crucial to political leadership. Whether it is sitting courtside or receiving athletic champions at the White House, politicians love to be associated with the fun, positive energy associated with modern sports, not to mention the aura of excellence, excitement, and success. These appearances work toward the creation of legitimacy, likeability, and credibility through the transference of the positive feelings associated with sports, especially those that are popular and successful.There isn’t much research on the mechanisms through which this transfer works, but there is little doubt that smart politicians and their advisors are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to create good feelings by associating their campaigns and agendas with athletes and athletic events. (Albeit cautiously—political types can never be too overt about any of this, lest they violate the ideals and values that both domains hold dear). The same tactics, of course, are used by many: for years, researchers have documented the massive capital corporations have invested to build associations with popular teams or athletes. For example, sport researchers Stephen Jackson and Jay Scherer have written on the relationship between Adidas and New Zealand’s dominant rugby squad, the All Blacks, and the scholar Walter LaFeber documented the global reach of the Nike–Michael Jordan alliance. Just as athletes and athletic associations sell products, politicians try to associate with sport to help sell themselves and their agendas to a sport-loving public.The Politics of Sport and CultureUsually when Americans talk about politics they are referring to campaigns and elections, legislative debates, and the making of law and public policy. Surely the emphasis on electoral processes organizes how much of academic political science is oriented. But there is another, broader aspect of political life that is easy to overlook or leave out. This is what we might call cultural politics. The politics of culture involve how political communities and interests are created, consolidated, and maintained; it involves the construction of cultural frames and social problems—what are seen as problems in need of attention or correction, what is considered core to the public interest, and what’s not even worthy of political consideration.Some of the most famous scholars of sport have spent their time theorizing from this perspective, examining how sport is central to creating and reinforcing social solidarities and collective identities, what is seen as natural or acceptable (and thus not open to political action or contestation), and which social problems are most pressing.The ever-elusive notion of “community” provides a prime illustration. In recent years, politicians and academics have bemoaned the decline in community pride and civic attachment. And perhaps it is true that more people are now bowling alone, as Robert Putnam’s book claims; however, the number of people tailgating before the big game, united by their love of their team has only grown. The founders of the sociological discipline were driven by the question of what would bring people together and serve as a unifying force in a society that was rapidly becoming more complicated, diverse, and fragmented. In many places, for better or worse, sport has been the answer. Sport provides a public activity that is often as much about the audience as the participants. In doing so, a basis for some sort of common, unified, and collective identity is provided.The community fervor that can surround sport is wellcaptured in H.G. Bissinger’s popular book Friday Night Lights (on high school football in a small Texas town) and is the subject of insightful analysis in Richard Gruneau and David Whitson’s Hockey Night in Canada. Arguments for the public funding of professional sport stadiums rely heavily on the belief that sport can forge community. Plus, building such monuments to sports is one of the few endeavors a local politician can undertake to define her agenda and leave her mark on a city.Sport and culture studies of the cultural dimensions of the politics surrounding sport, though, have tended to focus on sport’s conservative or reproductive social nature. From this perspective, sport is an institution that tends to reproduce the existing social status quo, and, in that way, it can work on behalf of those politicians or political parties currently in office. More than this, it reproduces current class divisions as well as understandings of race, gender, and sexuality by making current social standings seem both organic and set.In the most extreme reading, sport serves as what a Marxist might call the “opiate of the masses”—something mindless to occupy the working class’s time and energy, which might otherwise be invested in creating drastic political change. Studies in this tradition have become more nuanced through engagement with the work of classic social theorist Antonio Gramsci, a move that has led to sport being conceived of as a site of contestation and potential resistance. However, even with the added complexity, the political significance of sport remains rooted in its role in the reproduction of social class.Race scholars have questioned the role sport plays in maintaining racial stereotypes, in particular the athletic prowess and intellectual deficiency of black men. Ben Carrington, in his recent book Race, Sport, and Politics, adds to this literature through a specific focus on how sport has been a central site for both establishing and resisting understandings of race and biological difference. In his work, Carrington illustrates that sport is able to play such a significant role in the construction of racial images and identities because of the common (but misplaced) perception that it is located in an apolitical realm.Feminist theorists take much the same view, conceptualizing sport as a key site for the reproduction of understandings of gender. Drawing heavily on French cultural theorist Michel Foucault, gender scholars have examined how the body itself becomes a political site upon which power operates. Debates over the value of Title IX and the effectiveness of the sex testing performed by athletic commissions demonstrates how sporting institutions both rely on, and help establish, a binary understanding of gender. Similarly, many of the most important of the masculinity scholars, including Raewyn Connell, Michael Messner, and Michael Kimmel, have highlighted sport as a central site where boys learn how to perform a dominant, physical brand of manhood.Because of its cultural prominence and the ways in which it is bound up with so many of the differences and inequalities of contemporary society, activists (both in and around sport) have often seen sport as a potential arena for contestation and change. Whether considering the 1968 African American Olympic protests or Title IX gender equity activism, sport scholars (including ourselves) have devoted a tremendous amount of energy and attention to these potentials and possibilities. This is, in fact, the single most familiar use and meaning of the term politics and sports in the field: protests, activism, social movements using sport to call attention to existing inequalities and work on behalf of broader social change.But for all of this, the fact of the matter is that sport’s political effects would seem to be far more powerful as a means of social reproduction, in maintaining the social order as it is. Sport tends to be associated with political anti-change, the maintenance of the status quo. And perhaps the most obvious and yet least appreciated example of that involves the display of anthems, flags, and even military personnel (or fighter jets) at sporting events large and small, local and international—and without a doubt at this weekend’s Super Bowl.Sport has long been a means of establishing national pride and a belief in a population’s genetic or at least cultural superiority. When boxer Joe Louis avenged his earlier loss to Max Schmeling with a first-round knockout it was considered a victory for American democracy over a perverted German nationalism, not just one boxer over another. The importance placed on American Olympic athletes’ success during the Cold War provide yet another example. Significantly, they were under pressure not only to win medals, but also to unite the population in celebration of both athletic and moral superiority.Spotting Sport in Political DiscourseA third area in which sports and politics are deeply implicated, perhaps even inextricably woven together, is within political discourse, so much of which is informed by and indeed expressed through sports metaphors and images.Sport historians and theorists have debated which political regimes in the history of the modern world have been best positioned and able to make political use of sport. What stands out about sport in American politics (if not in other liberal democracies as well) is the way in which sport’s idealized culture of competitive fair play mirrors, matches, and models American conceptions of justice, fairness, and the good society.Unlike the ability to down a local brew, sport is also associated with moral worth. Within the popular media and the community of fans, the sporting world is cherished as meritocracy at its finest. The playing field is said to be even, and the players who reach the highest levels do so through talent, drive, and hard work. As a fan, it is nearly impossible to avoid subscribing to these omnipresent ideals. Tales of players “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps” and escaping abject poverty to achieve incredible wealth based on being the hardest worker on the team dominate ESPN’s “color commentary” and the pages of Sports Illustrated. And on the field, cooperation, cohesion, reciprocity, and self-sacrifice are celebrated as essential to bringing team success. When it works, all of this individualism and hard work and team play fits together so seamlessly and smoothly that it seems like it couldn’t be any other way—and that any failing is just one’s own, personal shortcoming.This can be positive and problematic. On the positive side, the idea that sport is somehow a model or metaphor for social life makes it a frequent reference point, either in terms of abstract ideas, ideals, and values or in terms of athletes, competitions, and events in the sporting world being believed to embody and used to express political and ideological views. To be seen as possessing those upstanding qualities through association can provide a powerful vehicle for sending those messages (not to mention an all so important boost in the public opinion polls). On the negative side, the infusion of sports language and metaphors in politics can be seen to undermine politics itself—making it less serious about real issues, more cutthroat and competitive, more about process than about outcomes and people.In his book on sports, race, and the Olympics, Douglas Hartmann looked at how Ronald Reagan talked about the Olympic torch relay in the context of his reelection campaign of 1984. On the one hand, Reagan waxed poetic about the torch relay in an attempt to capitalize on the patriotic enthusiasm and exuberance that surrounded the spectacular American performance in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (albeit a Games that was boycotted by the USSR and its Eastern Bloc allies).But a closer read of the speech revealed that Reagan’s emphasis on the Olympic torch relay was about much more than building public support for his presidency and his reelection campaign. The president also used the event to craft and convey his unique, post-1960s vision of social justice and racial harmony. It was a vision that was based upon individual opportunity and a community in which individuals (not groups) were united around a common cause, had equal access to opportunity, and drew heavily if implicitly on the ideals about fair play, competition, hard work, and individual effort that circulate widely within the world of sport itself. It was a moving portrait, a stirring vision made all the more powerful by the fact that many who heard it thought of it as nothing more than a story about an all-American event and a set of ideals that any and every American could agree upon.Seeing through a Sacred DivideIt does not take a great imagination, only a sociological one, to see that sport is indeed a powerful political platform. Sport is actively sought as a stage on which to be seen and solidify one’s public identity, political legitimacy, and leadership qualities. It is important in reproduction of social categories. Sports language and imagery is pervasive in our political rhetoric. There is no denying it, from paying for new stadiums through public tax dollars to standing for the national anthem to considering a mandate that women boxers must wear skirts, politics and sport are tightly intertwined.Some might take these observations as the impetus to, once and for all, get sport out of politics (and politics out of sports)—either because sport is believed to be above all the political scrum (a sacred realm of sorts) or simply better understood as a realm of fun and entertainment that is only compromised by the complexity and conflict of real-world politics. This isn’t necessarily our goal. Instead, we simply seek to call attention to the fact that in the real world sport and politics are not nearly as separate as we might think or would like to believe.That said, we also realize our modest goal has some potentially far-reaching implications that might first be understood and imagined. We don’t want to sell it short.Sport is a powerful and important political force. But it is most powerful when people are least aware of it—when people believe that nothing important or unusual is going on; in other words, when the politics are hidden or masked, seen as natural or organic. For politicians, this means that they must engage in a delicate dance because even as they use sport for a political purpose it is essential that sport retain its status as a somehow sacred or at least special space. For the rest of us, trying to be aware of what is going on in order that we might participate in both politics and sports with our eyes open, as equals rather than as dupes subject to the manipulation and exploitation of others.The point, in short, is that it’s not necessary to take sport out of politics, but simply to realize that it is there and to engage it appropriately. Perhaps this realization is the first and most basic “political” act of all.Recommended ReadingRichard Gruneau and David Whitson. 1994. <a href="http://www.utppublishing.com/Hockey-Night-in-Canada-Sports-Identities-and-Cultural-Politics.html" data-mce-href="http://www.utppublishing.com/Hockey-Night-in-Canada-Sports-Identities-and-Cultural-Politics.html">Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities, and Cultural Politics</a> (University of Toronto Press, Garamond). An exemplary, multifaceted study of the cultural politics of sport in Canada.Jennifer Hargreaves. 2000. <a href="http://www.psypress.com/heroines-of-sport-9780415228497" data-mce-href="http://www.psypress.com/heroines-of-sport-9780415228497">Heroines of Sport: The Politics of Difference and Identity (Psychology Press)</a>. The cultural politics of sport and gender, from a leading feminist in the field.John Hoberman. 1984. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sport-Political-Ideology-John-Hoberman/dp/0292775881" data-mce-href="http://www.amazon.com/Sport-Political-Ideology-John-Hoberman/dp/0292775881">Sport and Political Ideology </a>(University of Texas Press). A classic exploration on the affinities between sports and political orientations and regimes ranging from communist and socialist to fascist, authoritarianism, and liberal democracy.<a href="http://mapss.uchicago.edu/about_mapss/message_director.shtml" data-mce-href="http://mapss.uchicago.edu/about_mapss/message_director.shtml">John J. MacAloon</a>. 1987. “Missing Stories: American Politics and Olympic Discourse.” Gannett Center Journal, Columbia University, Fall: 111-142. A provocative commentary on the peculiar structure and function of the Olympics in American political discourse.John Sayle Watterson. 2006. <a href="http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDetailsHandler?iN=9780801892585&qty=1&source=2&viewMode=3&loggedIN=false&JavaScript=y" data-mce-href="http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDetailsHandler?iN=9780801892585&qty=1&source=2&viewMode=3&loggedIN=false&JavaScript=y">The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency</a> (The John Hopkins University Press). The most useful historical overview of the subject available.

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Should Athletes Speak Out On Social and Political Issues?

Do they have a responsibility to use their platform and influence to raise awareness? Or should they stick to sports?

By Jeremy Engle

Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.

Are you a sports fan? Do you follow tennis? What was your reaction to Naomi Osaka’s U.S. Open title win in September and her use of masks to honor Black victims of violence?

The New York Times reported at the time:

Osaka, still just 22, is undoubtedly a great player already, and there was much for her to savor on many levels over the last three weeks. Much to ponder, as well, as she took on not only some of the toughest tennis players in the world but some of the thorniest social issues, as well. She handled the pressure on both fronts and returned to the fore in women’s tennis with Saturday’s gritty 1-6, 6-3, 6-3 victory. She wore seven masks with different names for each of her matches to honor Black victims of violence. She said it motivated her — “I wanted more people to say more names” — and she walked on court Saturday with a mask bearing the name of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy shot and killed in Cleveland by a white police officer in 2014. “The point is to make people start talking,” Osaka said at the award ceremony.

If you watched the Open, what did you think of Osaka’s public display of activism? Did it make you more of a fan? Or did you feel it took away from your and other fans’ enjoyment of the game? Do you think the masks Osaka wore were an effective way to get people to start talking? (If you want to learn more about this moment, you can watch this short video profile on Osaka for Sports Illustrated’s 2020 Sportsperson of the Year.)

In “ Athletes, Speak Up ,” an essay for the Opinion section, Osaka writes about what inspired her:

“Shut up and dribble.” That’s what a news anchor suggested LeBron James do after he discussed racism, politics and the difficulties of being a Black public figure in America during an ESPN interview in 2018. LeBron, the activist, first caught my eye in 2012. He and his Miami Heat teammates posted photos of themselves in hoodies to protest the murder of Trayvon Martin , an unarmed Black teenager in Florida who was wearing a hoodie when he was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer. In 2014, Eric Garner , a Black man, died in Staten Island after police officers held him in a chokehold, a move banned by the police at the time and one that has since become illegal in New York State. Soon after, LeBron wore a T-shirt with the words “I can’t breathe” — Garner’s last words, which were captured on video as the officers strangled him — during a pregame warm-up. The rest of the league followed, but James was the focal point. Fast forward to this year and he is still in the cultural spotlight. LeBron has the loudest voice and the biggest platform, and he used them to protest systemic racism, inequality and police brutality, all while his game continued to flourish in the face of unprecedented protests, a world-changing pandemic and deeply personal hurts, including the tragic death of our mutual friend Kobe Bryant . LeBron is ferociously brave in his steadfast support of the Black community. He is unwavering, upfront and passionate. On the court or at the mic, he is simply unstoppable and an inspiration. He is dedicated to his craft, but equally dedicated to his community, even as he continues to fight against an established history of silencing athletes who speak out. Musicians sing and write about social movements, activism and equality all the time. Actors voice their opinions and often personally endorse political candidates, hosting fund-raisers and throwing parties. Business executives, authors and artists are almost expected both to have opinions about the latest news and to publicly defend their views. Yet when it comes to athletes, we are often met with criticism for expressing our opinions. Do people see us as no more than bodies — individuals who can achieve what’s physically impossible for nearly everyone else, and who entertain fans by pushing ourselves past our limits? Do they wonder if a collection of muscles, bones, blood and sweat might also be able to voice an opinion? Should sports just be sports, and politics just be politics?

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

Do you think athletes should speak out on social and political issues? Or do you think they should stick to their sport? Are there limits to where and when they should express their views? Do you find that the activism of athletes interferes with your and other fans’ enjoyment of the game on the court?

What is your reaction to Osaka’s personal and passionate essay? Which of her arguments do you find most affecting and persuasive? Does it change how you view her or other activist athletes, like LeBron James? How would you respond to people who tell athletes: “Hit the ball. Sink the shot. Shut up and dribble”?

Osaka asks: “Do people see us as no more than bodies — individuals who can achieve what’s physically impossible for nearly everyone else, and who entertain fans by pushing ourselves past our limits?” How do you view athletes? Are you interested only in their physical prowess? Or are you interested in their life, opinions and views off the court?

The essay concludes:

Today, given the television coverage we receive and our prominence on social media, athletes have platforms that are larger and more visible than ever before. The way I see it, that also means that we have a greater responsibility to speak up. I will not shut up and dribble.

Do you agree that athletes have a responsibility to speak up? Do you think more favorably about athletes who take political stands? Do you think less of those who don’t? Do you think the political activism of athletes can make a difference?

Osaka cites many athlete activists, past and present, from Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick to Megan Rapinoe. Which athletes and their activism are you most inspired by and why?

About Student Opinion

• Find all of our Student Opinion questions in this column . • Have an idea for a Student Opinion question? Tell us about it . • Learn more about how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning .

Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Jeremy Engle joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2018 after spending more than 20 years as a classroom humanities and documentary-making teacher, professional developer and curriculum designer working with students and teachers across the country. More about Jeremy Engle

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Expert Commentary

The complicated relationship between sports and politics

A new study suggests serious sports fans are likely to show strong support for the military. The finding may help explain why some Americans react negatively to athletes kneeling during the national anthem.

Football fans yell for their favorite players .

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Denise-Marie Ordway, The Journalist's Resource July 27, 2018

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/sports-fans-football-politics-military-research/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

A new study suggests serious sports fans are likely to show strong support for the U.S. military — a finding that could help explain why some Americans react negatively to athletes kneeling during the national anthem.

The study does not specifically address sports fans’ opinions about the national anthem or athletes kneeling during it as a form of political protest. However, for some fans, the military and “The Star-Spangled Banner” are closely linked, said one of the authors, Michael Serazio , an assistant professor of communication who teaches a course on sports, media and culture at Boston College.

“In the minds of those fans, the anthem and the [American] flag and the military are possibly interlocking in a way that to protest in the presence of one is to protest all of those elements,” he told Journalist’s Resource .

Serazio teamed up with Emily A. Thorson , an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, to investigate the relationship between sports fandom and certain political attitudes. They discovered they’re closely intertwined, “despite what some fans and commentators might wish to believe,” they write in the resulting research article, published in Public Opinion Quarterly .

They found that, generally speaking, Republicans are no more likely than Democrats to identify as sports fans. However, all sports fans in the United States are more likely to have right-leaning beliefs about the armed forces and economic mobility. Fans are more likely than non-fans to say they support the military and believe a person’s economic success is a direct result of his or her hard work.

“Ideological messaging is omnipresent in sports culture,” Thorson and Serazio write. “This study takes a first step toward unpacking the complicated relationship between sports and politics.”

The findings are based on the results of a survey conducted in November 2016, shortly after San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick shocked fans by sitting on his team’s bench during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police violence.

Kaepernick’s refusal to stand spurred a national debate about the appropriateness of big-name athletes protesting at sporting events. Other football players who followed his lead have been called “unpatriotic” for sitting or kneeling during the anthem at the start of games.

Serazio said the timing of the survey was a coincidence. However, a number of the people who participated mentioned Kaepernick’s protest and made comments such as “disrespecting the national anthem should be immediate cause for termination.”

The survey, which focused on a nationally representative sample of 1,051 adults, asked questions about sports fans’ identity, their political attitudes and their opinions about the politicization of sports.

Here are some of the other findings:

American football is the most popular sport in the U.S., with 56 percent of adults identifying as fans. Thirty-eight percent are baseball fans and 26 percent said they are basketball fans. Meanwhile, 34.7 percent of women and 18.7 percent of men say they don’t follow any sport and don’t consider themselves sports fans.
Basketball fans of all races are more likely to identify as Democratic and liberal than individuals who do not follow basketball. The researchers didn’t find similar links between political party and other types of sports.
Political conservatives are much more likely to say they oppose the mixing of sports and politics.

Looking for more research on sports topics? Check out our write-ups on football concussions , the economic impact of Olympic games and gender equity in high school athletics.

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Denise-Marie Ordway

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Sport and Politics

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International Sporting Governing Bodies and Organizations
Sport Governance and Policy
Sport and National Politics
Sport and International Politics
The Cultural Politics of Sport
Social and Political Activism in Sport
The Politics of Sporting Mega-Events
Sport and Development

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Sport and Politics by Bryan Clift , Jacob J. Bustad LAST MODIFIED: 26 November 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0294

Since the early 1980s, the study of sport and politics has developed into a robust area of academic scholarship. Despite this growth, sport is often considered a phenomenon not associated with politics. Coupled with the popular perception that sport is too trivial or insignificant for serious research, sport and politics are not often connected or given significant consideration. One impetus for scholars of sport and politics is to demonstrate the important relationship between the two. As it has advanced, the study of the relationship between sport and politics has become an interdisciplinary endeavor. No one home of sport and politics exists. Decentralized, its study appears in a diversity of disciplines, notably within and in relation to cultural studies, economics, history, kinesiology, literature, geography, management, media and communications, political science, sociology, or urban studies. Political science alone is comprised of a range of fields and subfields (e.g., administration, policy, political theory, political economy, international relations, etc.). Acknowledging this diversity, both sport and politics come with definitional challenges. Sport is often associated with a structured organized activity that is goal-oriented, competitive, ludic, and physical. But commentators, critics, and everyday usage of the term often conflate it with exercise and physical activity, which are arguably less competitive and structured activities. Politics, too, can be taken in two common, and distinctive yet overlapping conceptual frames: The first involves the people, activities, processes, and decisions in the practices of governing a defined populace. The second takes a broader sense of the power relations and dynamics between people, which goes well beyond the strict understanding of institutions and government. Within the field, there is contention around whether or not the study of sport and politics should remain focused on practices of government alone, or if the latter conceptualization should be included. Regardless of where one sits on this issue, the study of sport and politics does indeed incorporate cross-cutting ideas of “sport” and “politics.” Early research on sport and politics focused on the more governmental side of politics, examining international relations, policy, diplomacy, or political ideology within specific countries, cities, or locales. This work has flourished since the early 1980s. Simultaneously, research foci pushed the boundaries of sport and politics by including broader understandings of power. Sporting organizations, teams, federations, international organizations, events, athletes, and celebrities, as well as exercise and physical activity practices, have been brought together with a range of politicized inquiry in relation to, for example, activism, conflict resolution, disability, environmental issues, ethnicity, health, human rights, gambling, gender, metal health, peace, pleasure, race, security, sexuality, social justice, social responsibility, urbanism, or violence. As the many works cited herein attest, the study of sport and politics is a diverse and growing focus of scholarship.

There are several texts that serve as primers for the field of sport and politics. These authors address general and specific topics relevant to the field including sport governance and policy, sport and political activism, sporting mega-events, and the relationship between sport and politics within particular local and global contexts. As more recent writings, they capture the historical development of the field stemming from the early 1980s with more recent scholarship. The handbook Bairner, et al. 2016 is a broad and comprehensive account of important topics within the field, and provides detailed scholarly background to various issues, including sport and the nation; sport and political ideologies; and sport, political activism, and issues related to race, gender, and sexuality. Grix 2015 examines the involvement of the state in regard to contemporary sport governance and policy, while Abrams 2013 provides a historical perspective for examining the relationship between sport and politics in the 20th century and the implications of these histories for contemporary sport. Allison 2005 focuses on the changing dynamics of sport and national and international politics, and Markovits and Rensmann 2010 examines the role and impact of professional sport organizations and athletes within global politics.

Abrams, R. I. Playing Tough: The World of Sport and Politics . Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2013.

This book serves as an introductory resource to the area of inquiry as it presents particular historical cases as examples of the relationship between sport and politics. Most useful for undergraduate and graduate students within the initial stages of study.

Allison, L., ed. The Global Politics of Sport . London: Routledge, 2005.

This edited volume serves as a second sequel to The Politics of Sport (1986), and provides an updated analysis of the critical issues related to sport and global politics. Includes chapters by leading authors in the field.

Bairner, A., J. Kelly, and J. Woo Lee, eds. Routledge Handbook of Sport and Politics . London: Routledge, 2016.

This handbook provides a comprehensive analysis of the field through over forty chapters focused on specific areas of research. Chapters are organized in sections related to ideologies, nation and statehood, corporate politics, political activism, social justice, and the politics of sports events. Most useful for scholars and researchers engaged in the field.

Grix, J. Sport Politics: An Introduction . London: Macmillan International Higher Education, 2015.

This book lays an introductory basis for understanding “sport” and “politics” individually and in relation to one another before moving on to the more recent development of sport and politics in regard to state involvement in governance and policy. Later chapters focus on sport and national identity, sport and the media, and sport and public diplomacy.

Markovits, A. S., and L. Rensmann. Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

DOI: 10.1515/9781400834662

Gaming the World examines the cultural and political changes related to the global sport industry, specifically focusing on professional soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey.

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The Politics of Sports: Introduction to the Special Issue

Published: 17 October 2022
Volume 23 , pages 191–194, ( 2022 )

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Brad R. Humphreys 1 &
Yang Zhou 2

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Sports at all levels involves interesting governance issues. Sports involves many types of organizations including corporations, privately held companies, nonprofit organizations and international organizations. Sport contains many examples of the private provision of public goods. For example, games played by professional and college sports teams have some aspects of public goods. Local public policies, for example the subsidization of professional sports facilities, directly involve sport and represent important national issues. Organizational outcomes in sport can be readily observed and quantified facilitating empirical analysis. These aspects of sport make the topic an excellent fit for Economics of Governance , which motivates this special issue on the Politics of Sports.

The special issue, co-edited by Brad Humphreys and Yang Zhou, contains nine papers addressing interesting governance issues in sport. Two address high-profile athletic competitions that involve international organizations and the enforcement of international agreements: the Olympic Games. Two address a high-profile and current local public policy issue: the public subsidization of construction of new professional sports facilities. Three examine the relationship between state level politics and policies and the sports industry. One paper undertakes a theoretical analysis of an important economic governance issue in intercollegiate athletics: the enforcement of amateurism regulations. A final paper addresses a governance issue common to teams and leagues around the world: how to regulate interactions between fans of different teams before, during, and after competitions. Taken together, the papers in this special issue address a number of topics of interest to economists studying issues in governance and provide new insight into a number of important research areas in the economics of governance.

The subsidization of new professional sports facility construction represents a pervasive governance issue in cities across North America. Despite the private activities that take place in these facilities, state and local governments provided tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to new facility construction since 1970. Proponents of these subsidies argue that new facilities generate tangible economic benefits and provide exhaustive lists of potential economic benefits but no credible evidence that they actually occur. A large body of peer-reviewed research finds no evidence such benefits exist, highlighting the importance of a comprehensive analysis of these claims. Two papers in this special issue empirically address novel areas in this debate.

Arif, Hoffer, Humphreys, and Style analyze the impact of new professional sports facilities on inter-city migration. Facility subsidy proponents often claim that a new stadium will act as a magnet to draw new residents to cities. This paper debunks such claims, finding no evidence of any changes in migration flows in or out of cities following the opening of a new professional sports facility using a rich data set based on Internal Revenue Service tax filing information and a difference-in-differences approach.

Subsidy proponents also frequently claim that economic redevelopment around new sports facilities will increase the value of nearby property values, adding to local property tax collections. John Charles Bradbury analyzes assessed property values around a new baseball stadium in suburban Atlanta using a synthetic control approach. The paper finds no evidence of increased assessed value of nearby property, again debunking a common, but previously unanalyzed claim made by subsidy proponents. Both papers use causal inference methods, strengthening the results.

The Olympic Games represent one of the most prominent sporting events in the world. The governing body for the Game, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), is an international nongovernmental agency with substantial regulatory power and no oversight. The IOC regulates athletes and coordinates activities among hundreds of National Olympic Committees providing an interesting environment for research on governance. Two papers explore important issues associated with IOC regulations and the hosting of the Games.

Schneider, von Allmen and Munk develop evidence that IOC regulations generate spillover effects in economic activity outside Olympic-related activities. The paper exploits a change in the IOCs regulation of Olympic participation by ice hockey players in a difference-in-differences model to analyze the impact of its rule change on attendance at professional ice hockey games in North America. The results show that the rule change generated statistically and economically significant increases in attendance following the rule change, suggesting a broader impact of IOC regulations than previously believed.

Matti and Zhou analyze the impact of hosting the Games, and success of national teams in the Games, on political ideology in individual countries. The paper analyzes a series of global surveys over a forty year time frame in a regression model containing variables reflecting success of national teams in the Games and identifying countries that hosted the Games. The results show no impact of national team success, but hosting the games produced a negative impact on several forms of political ideology towards government, including confidence in the local government. The Olympic Games can affect national political beliefs.

Rodney Fort undertakes a theoretical analysis of an important aspect of the regulation of intercollegiate athletics by its governing body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Like the IOC, the NCAA, a nongovernmental organization, wields substantial regulatory power over a high-profile and economically significant economic sector, big-time college sports. Regulation of amateurism in college sports, effectively restricting the earnings of college athletes to include only college tuition and fees, room and board, and a small stipend (euphemistically called “laundry money”), represents a controversial action because the games played by these athletes generate enormous revenues for collegiate athletic departments.

Critics of NCAA amateurism regulations, while numerous, typically make unfocused, non-economic arguments in their criticism. Fort develops a political economy model to provide a solid economic foundation for this regulation and to understand the nature of the criticism leveled against these regulations. Fort also develops a model to explain how NCAA enforcement of amateurism works, which also sheds important light on NCAA governance. The key insight in the model – enforcement of amateurism regulations creates an economic transfer from athletes (including many minorities from impoverished backgrounds) to university administrators, provides important evidence supporting the need for reform of the NCAA’s governance of college sports. The model also develops testable predictions that will inform future empirical research.

Institutions matter, and this also holds true for sports. Bykova and Coates investigate the relationship between state-level economic and personal freedom and match outcomes in Major League Soccer (MLS) from 2004 to 2018 seasons in the United States, to examine the role of economic and personal freedom in determining team performance. The paper argues that when players and teams operate in an institutional environment with more freedom, it is easier for them to negotiate the contracts and execute certain strategies in the best way they deem appropriate. The authors find evidence supporting a positive effect of economic freedom on team performance, in the form of a negative effect of less freedom. High personal freedom is not found to have statistically significant effects on team performance, but low freedom is found to reduce it. These results have broader implications than just for MLS. MLS has the most control over players among the major leagues in the U.S., thus teams in other leagues may receive an even larger benefit by being located in a state with more economic freedom.

Politics shape the institutional environment for all economic activities, including sports industry. But evidence suggests that individuals and organizations in the sports industry can play a significant role in politics. In democracies, elections are affected by many factors, including donations. Political economy models predict that elected officials represent the preferences of median voters, thus demographic characteristics of political sectors represent and influence the other sectors like sports, and not necessarily via policy channels. The following two papers examine the relationship between politics and sports in two democracies, the United States and Germany.

Hayduk contributes to the literature on political donations and election cycles. In this study, Hayduk analyzes about 2,800 donations made by nearly 160 sports team owners across six professional sports leagues in the United States during the 2016, 2018, and 2020 election cycles. It finds not only donation heterogeneity across different leagues but also different effects of these donations across elections cycles. In particular, team owners’ donations accurately reflect their ideological preferences. For example WNBA owners’ donations tend to be made to more progressive candidates. Meanwhile, team owners on average make more moderate donations during presidential elections than during midterms, which can be viewed as a strategy of the owners, since the two types of elections have different donor pool sizes.

Lesch, Kerwin, and Wicker investigate the relationship between state politics and sports governance at the federal state level in Germany. The authors find that only 20.1% of the board members in sport governing bodies are women, which suggests a lack of diversity and may generate economic inefficiencies. Regression analysis finds that the share of women in sport governing bodies is positively related to the share of parliamentarians from the Social Democrats and the Green party, and the opposite relationship is found for the share of Liberals and Social party in the parliament and for the number of Conservative ministers in the state. Finding a relationship between the share of women in state political bodies and the share of women in sports governance in each state, this study identifies spillover effects from the political sector which impact the institutional environment.

Finally, Depken, Hoffer, and Kidwai analyze the impact of group identity on discrimination in an experimental setting. The paper employs power-to-take dictator games using fans of rival sports teams to generate in-groups and rival groups and finds evidence of strong differences between takings ratios for in-group and out-group members. Since sports fans frequently interact, and these interactions can generate substantial frictions, the results can help to inform sports league policy making and governance.

We thank the editors of Economics of Governance , Ami Glazer and Marko Koethenbuerger, for this opportunity to extend the governance literature to include research on governance in sport, and to highlight the important connections between governance, institutions, and sports. We believe that this special issue will be of interest to economists engaged in research in governance and in sport, and we hope these papers spur additional research in this area.

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Humphreys, B.R., Zhou, Y. The Politics of Sports: Introduction to the Special Issue. Econ Gov 23 , 191–194 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10101-022-00285-y

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The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Society

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4 Sport, Policy, and Politics

Michael P. Sam is an associate professor in the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at the University of Otago. His research comprises areas of policy, politics, and administration as they relate to the governance of sport. He has published widely in both sport studies and policy journals and has coedited three books: Sport in the City: Cultural Connections (2011), S port Policy in Small States (2016), and Case Studies in Sport and Diplomacy (2017). Sam currently serves as co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Sport Policy and Politics and is the president of the International Sociology of Sport Association.

Published: 21 September 2022
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The subject of policy and politics occupies an important place in the study of sport and society. This chapter considers the domain’s key issues, including those surrounding distribution (e.g., state emphasis on mass or elite sport), regulation (e.g., doping, match-fixing), and governance (e.g., accountability, modernization). The field of sport policy and politics is characterized by a breadth of theoretical perspectives that fall broadly within pluralist, institutional, and ideational approaches. These approaches are discussed in light of their merits and potential contributions toward understanding policy processes, program implementation, and policy outcomes. The chapter concludes with a consideration of future scholarship priorities at the nexus of sport, politics, and policy.

The subject of policy and politics occupies an important place in the study of sport and society. One reason for this is that policies continually address the delicate balance of values within a society ( Lindblom, 1959 ). A policy, for example, to exempt elite athletes from compulsory military service illustrates an enduring dilemma between the need to “treat likes alike” and the need to recognize a diverse population with different needs. Likewise, a code of conduct policy for athletes can reveal the extent to which we value collective interests (to protect commercial/public property) versus individual rights (to protect free speech). Seen in this light, policies reflect the political struggles behind having to rank, balance, or otherwise allocate priority to what we value ( Doern & Phidd, 1992 ; Sam, 2003 ).

As an empirical research subject, policy is a tangible yet notoriously broad concept since it rarely reflects a singular activity. For example, while a policy may refer to a concrete rule and regulation (such as a policy against sexual harassment), it can also be a commitment to some future action, as when the government promises $X billion to support a major sport event bid. To complicate matters, specific programs or services (e.g., scholarships or athlete cash-award schemes) are also considered policies because they are brought in to induce particular behaviors (e.g., to encourage young athletes to either delay or pursue tertiary education). Generally, then, policies represent public commitments to an issue or problem and provide the impetus for subsequent changes to organizations, budgets, programs, and practices.

This commitment often requires the mobilization of a variety of organizations. A commitment to “active communities” for example, can encompass different areas of policy, including the improvement of recreational facilities, the availability of affordable housing, and access to a range of healthcare services. Likewise, a policy commitment to Olympic success or “talent identification” might necessarily involve the coordination of many agencies and organizations, including schools, businesses, regional/municipal governments, universities, and charities/foundations. Whether these organizations are all equally committed to these goals represents a persistent challenge for policymakers ( Sam, 2011 ). Yet importantly, public authorities often also commit to inaction (a policy decision in its own right). This is evident, for example, in relation to sport and the betting and alcohol industries, where policy links are likely to remain unchanged despite their contradictions.

This chapter begins with a review of the recurring themes and persistent issues in the field. The breadth of recent research testifies to the advances that have taken place since the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics was first devoted to the subject of sport policy and its political climates in 2009. Given the quantity of valuable research and analysis that has focused on this nexus, any review such as the one put forward here is necessarily selective and should not be seen as exhaustive of the issues at play.

With that disclaimer, I will focus on sport as comprising its own stand-alone state-sponsored sector. Following Houlihan (2005) , I focus on the roles of government and their effects rather than on the policy activities of international federations or the International Olympic Committee. Unfortunately, this provides limited opportunity to consider important policy issues related to sport, such as physical education policy, the public subsidy of sports stadia, or national broadcasting policies. However, these face many of the same issues in terms of distribution, regulation, and governance which are considered below. The key issues that follow are sufficiently broad in that many of their key elements can be applied in these related contexts.

Elite Sport versus Sport-for-All: The Politics of Priorities

Insofar as policy ascribes political and resource priorities (who gets what, when, and how), it is unsurprising that much of the literature on sport policy focuses on the cleavage between elite and grassroots sport (the latter generally taken to mean “sport-for-all” and/or community/mass participation). Here, the fundamental question surrounds the extent to which authorities (i.e., governments and their agencies, national sport organizations, etc.) prioritize or privilege some concerns over others. This question derives its importance from the ongoing nature of debates among stakeholders and the significant resource distribution decisions that result from them.

At the very broad country or national level, this distributional aspect to the formulation and implementation of sport policy is a useful starting point for analysis. The relative emphasis on elite versus grassroots has become one of the key dependent variables in comparing different sport systems and organizational structures ( Green, 2006 ; Houlihan, 1997 ; Nicholson, Hoye, & Houlihan, 2010 ). This kind of analysis points to a level of convergence in state systems and their tendency to devote increasing resources to elite sport ( Houlihan & Green, 2008 ). Yet, despite the apparent convergence in what sport systems look like, there remains considerable variability, with ongoing change and adjustment clearly evident. Even in Australia, one of the first Anglo-Saxon nations to truly commit to a state-sponsored centralized system of elite athlete development ( Stewart, Nicholson, Westerbeek, & Smith, 2004 ), there have been pronounced criticisms levied at the overemphasis on garnering medals ( Crawford & Independent Sport Panel, 2009 ). Whether changes to the balance in emphasis given to elite versus grassroots sports actually materialize (and how) has become important to investigate, not least because such changes can signal transformations in the distributions of authority and resources to various organizations, programs, and budgets (e.g., Houlihan & White 2002 ).

Distributional issues like this draw in a number of important features of public policy, most notably the power of organized interests , including politicians, the business elite, and the emerging (or entrenched) cadre of professional experts that include administrators and sport scientists. Despite being a very small part of any federal/state/provincial budget (compared to health and education), elite sport maintains a particular appeal for elected officials. Indeed, it has been dubbed an “irresistible priority” for states ( Houlihan, 2011 , p. 367), and the tendency clearly reflects the jingoistic desires for politicians to legitimize and gain support for their government and party ideologies ( Allison, 2005 ). However, in countries where sport has relative autonomy from the state (e.g., Sweden, Norway), such political influence is much more muted, with the sport system itself often operating as a kind of social movement that must wrestle with issues of elitism within its own ranks ( Andersen & Ronglan, 2012 ; Bergsgard, Houlihan, Mangset, Nodland, & Rommetvedt, 2007 ; Fahlén & Stenling, 2016 ). Further, in places where sport is developed through a (relatively autonomous) federated network of national, regional, and local organizations, the tension between elite and grassroots sport has given rise to an expanding community of quasi-advocacy organizations that variously attempt to connect both sets of interests (cf. Dowling & Washington, 2017 ; Sam & Schoenberg, 2020 ). For instance, both the Canadian Sport for Life (CS4L) group and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) support high performance sport, as well as sport-for-all. For CS4L the connection is advanced by promoting physical literacy and lifelong participation, while for the CCES, elite and sport-for-all are linked by its anti-doping program and advocacy of “safe” sport for everyone.

However, within each of these systems and their priorities, other divisions along lines of race, (dis)ability, class, and gender ( Comeau, 2013 ) can readily become flashpoints in the course of framing public policy. That there are such diverse and competing interests at play draws attention to the inherently rhetorical and contested terrains of sport policy. Debates about the values of elite sport versus sport-for-all in fashioning priorities raise fundamental questions about the value of sport in advancing public health, national unity, economic growth, diversity, or community development. By and large, pronouncements about the importance of national unity tend to buttress high performance sport, while sport-for-all is supported for reasons of health promotion ( Grix & Carmichael, 2011 ). These legitimations ( Chalip, 1996 ), ideas ( Sam, 2003 ), or policy paradigms ( Sam & Jackson, 2004 ) are important to identify because they underscore a range of important research questions around the veracity of the claims ( Coalter, 2007 ) and their downstream effects. One claim often made in an attempt to tie grassroots with elite sport, for instance, is the idea of a “demonstration effect”—that watching elite athletes can inspire the public to take up participation ( Hogan & Norton, 2000 ). Yet, even though the evidence supporting this causal connection is weak, the idea that high performance sport leaves behind valuable “legacies” is a powerful rhetorical device often used to justify increased investment in the lead-up to major events ( Weed et al., 2015 ). Notably, criticisms of such causal connections most often fall into the domain of academics because all stakeholders in the elite-grassroots divide need these “convenient fictions” to be upheld (see Donnelly, 2010 , p. 85). For instance, Houlihan and White (2002 , p. 67) suggest that despite the dubiousness of the demonstration effect, stakeholders found it useful to foster a “strong link between the interests of the national governing bodies, schools and the local authorities” while maintaining the notion of a unified sports development policy.

Regulation: The Politics of Control

A second key area of sport policy focuses on the regulatory measures that are put in place to prevent unwanted elements in sport, such as doping, match-fixing, abuse, and corruption. Whereas the tensions between elite and grassroots sport speak to policy priorities and resourcing issues, the defining feature for regulatory policies is control ( Majone, 1994 ). While largely invoked to reduce unwanted individual behaviors, regulatory policies themselves are also increasingly aimed at the systems of organizations that render the behaviors more likely (see Hong, 2016 ; Hoye, Nicholson, & Houlihan, 2010 ; Waddington & Møller, 2019).

An important aspect of regulation thus concerns the nature of the “regimes,” that is, the collection of institutions and organizations that share responsibility for setting standards, monitoring, and doling out punishments for noncompliance ( Gray, 2019 ; Tak, Sam, & Jackson, 2018b ). Scholarly interest in regimes stems from the considerable diversity seen in national/local contexts, sports, and their associated norms. But focus on regimes also necessarily draws attention to the inability of global agencies such as the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to “go it alone” and tends to illuminate the increasing need for regulatory policies to be harmonized across state boundaries ( Houlihan & Preece, 2007 ).

Another distinguishing feature of regulatory policies concerns the particular tools/technologies that may be deployed to control behaviors. These “policy instruments” ( Bemelmans-Videc, Vedung, & Rist, 1998 ) can range from voluntary/noncoercive strategies (e.g., information campaigns, codes of conduct) to more obtrusive/coercive interventions (e.g., sanctions, “whereabouts” schemes for doping regulation). At the heart of these debates are normative questions around the power of the state (in partnership with nonstate actors like WADA) to influence the affairs of autonomous organizations and the extent of their authority in suspending individual freedom. With respect to the latter, an important political element in such regulatory measures concerns the consideration of individual rights and civil liberties ( Efverström, Ahmadi, Hoff, & Bäckström, 2016 ; Houlihan, 2004 ). “Whereabouts” policies, such as those that require athletes to report on their exact location throughout the year for the purposes of doping control, are controversial on the grounds of individual autonomy and rights to self-determination ( Hanstad & Loland, 2009 ). In today’s state of affairs, when sporting interests are under increasing scrutiny for a growing number of other integrity issues (e.g. bullying, harassment), the insistence that sport can (and should be left to) self-regulate has become an increasingly tenuous position (e.g., Fahlén, Eliasson, & Wickman, 2015 ). Although policy may be seen as a symbolic form of commitment, the contentious political issues behind regulation nearly always concern how much intervention is appropriate and/or legitimate ( Stone, 1997 ; Tak, 2018 ).

As one might expect, much of the research concerning regulatory policies in sport focuses on evaluation and the propensity (or failure) for interventions to shape behaviors (e.g., Houlihan, 2014 ; Møller & Dimeo, 2014 ; Tak, 2018 ; Waddington & Møller, 2019 ). However, within such assessments, it is also understood that regulatory measures can have effects beyond those that are intended. Over time, regulation can institutionalize the existing roles and responsibilities of the various stakeholders and, by extension, affirm who is to blame for failures and which organization(s) should be responsible for fixing a problem ( Tak, Sam, & Jackson, 2018a ). This, in turn, raises the possibility that, when faced with a new problem (such as harassment or bullying), authorities might seek to reproduce aspects of an existing regulatory regime, with unanticipated results. Indeed recent proposals for an international surveillance system to prevent abuse and promote athlete welfare ( Kerr & Kerr, 2020 ) are perhaps likely to eventuate for this reason, though with unknown consequences.

Governance: The Politics of Modernization

If governance is the “purposive means of guiding and steering” a community ( Kooiman, 1993 ), it follows that the search for effective governance is a persistent policy concern. The pursuit of effectiveness stems largely from the fact that central authorities seldom operate hierarchically, that is, functioning through an evident and “tidy” command-and-control structure of organizations and activities across national, regional, municipal levels. Sport systems can be remarkably complex. Thus, within any arrangement there exists a range of policies that exist to coordinate activities and programs, to make them more coherent, more responsive, and more competently delivered. That there are such needs for benchmarking exercises, audits, publications of “shared principles,” and so on illustrates the embedded structural challenges in translating policy into action ( Sam & Schoenberg, 2020 ).

While the instruments in regulatory policies can be deemed “substantive,” the policy instruments in relation to governance can be called “procedural” for the simple reason that they circumscribe how things should be done and by whom ( Howlett, 2000 ; Keat & Sam, 2013 ). For many scholars, policies aiming to “guide and steer” are tantamount to processes of professionalization and modernization since they can serve to effectively change the (problematic or entrenched) conduct of partner organizations and their decision-making processes. ( Stenling & Sam, 2019 ; Tacon & Walters, 2016 ). In Canada, “quadrennial planning” (a government-initiated planning exercise intended to make national governing bodies more accountable) was a policy instrument much discussed beginning in the 1980s ( Macintosh & Whitson, 1990 ). More contemporary modernizing policy tools include setting the terms of contracts between state agencies and national sport organizations, performance-based funding, audits, certifications, and benchmarking ( Fahlén, 2017 ; Macintosh & Whitson, 1990 ; Sam & Macris, 2014 ).

There are two elements of interest here. The first and most obvious is that national policies, strategies, and white papers can be, in themselves, fundamental steering instruments (Österlind, 2016; Sam, 2005 ). Typical of the concerns embraced in such documents are prescriptions about the system’s organizational architecture and the degree to which it should be aligned, coordinated, or centralized ( Phillpots, Grix, & Quarmby, 2011 ; Sam & Jackson, 2004 ). Thus, an important subject for scholarly analysis concerns how these policies may (re)define stakeholder roles, responsibilities, and lines of authority, as well as how they advance particular practices or principles. The second core element concerns what is at the heart of the ideas underpinning these efforts. Here, a common theme in Anglo-Saxon states is one of embracing imperatives for accountability and pushing public and nonprofit sector organizations to be more “business-like.” In terms of the ideas and discourses (see below) that encourage such sensibilities, these dominant principles have been put forward to make stakeholders self-sufficient ( Berry & Manoli, 2018 ), efficient ( Sam, 2009 ), and equitable ( Safai, 2013 ). As with issues that arise around regulation, the overriding issues concern elements of legitimacy and autonomy. Ultimately, these are foundational questions about who has (or should have) authority in controlling sport. Indeed, a global trend that falls under this broad governance question concerns the mix of public and private organizations, the power relations that result, and how these contribute to the shaping of sport policy strategies (cf. Girginov, 2016 ; Hu & Henry, 2017 ).

Within these broad policy issues, I have touched upon three general analytical dimensions that focus on interests, ideas, and institutions. However, before proceeding, it is important to briefly acknowledge the most basic approach to explain policy development, which is to see it as the product of a rational decision-making process in which:

a problem or objective is recognized;

alternative solutions are identified and analyzed;

a remedy/response is chosen and implemented;

the remedy is evaluated to correct errors.

This “stage” model of policymaking is an important heuristic in large part because the principles of rational decision-making are highly valued in contemporary organizations. Despite its intuitiveness, the approach rarely (if ever) reflects what occurs. Policymakers will often come up with solutions at the same time as the problems (if not before) with “best practice” often a catch-cry for policy reforms.

Despite these criticisms (and many others), stage models are important because they describe the policy process as a cognitive activity. This in turn sensitizes researchers to important elements in policy, such as the standards of evidence against which decisions are made ( Lindsey & Bacon, 2016 ; Smith & Leech, 2010 ), as well as the often deliberate search for and design of remedies or solutions ( Bloyce & Smith, 2010 ; Vidar Hanstad & Houlihan, 2015 ). In more practical terms, the stage model enables researchers to delimit their studies to particular stages of a fluid process, such as policy formulation ( Sam, 2005 ), implementation ( Fahlén et al., 2015 ; Skille, 2008 ; Stenling, 2014b ), and evaluation ( Bloyce & Smith, 2010 ; Lindsey & Bacon, 2016 ; Stenling, 2014a ).

As a broad field, the study of public policy is interdisciplinary and fairly agnostic in its approaches. In sport, early attention to policy arose mainly within the sociology of sport, with Marxist approaches often used to explain the emerging elite sport systems of state agencies ( Macintosh & Whitson, 1990 ; McKay, 1991 ). Sociology has continued to be a foundational discipline, as evidenced in the school of scholars using figurational sociology to unpack UK sport policy ( Bloyce & Smith, 2010 ), and also with the increasing application of Foucauldian analyses to examine sport policy’s disciplining effects ( Green & Houlihan, 2006 ; Piggin, Jackson, & Lewis, 2009b ). The subject of policy is also found in sport management, reflecting an eclectic range of perspectives that span positivist and postpositivist outlooks ( Funahashi, De Bosscher, & Mano, 2015 ; Green, 2006 ). While space limitations preclude consideration of these theories and their nuances, all approaches acknowledge, to varying degrees, the importance of interests, institutions, and ideas. With this in mind, I briefly turn to outlining these as core approaches, along with considering their application and significance in the analysis of sport policy.

Understanding interest groups is fundamental to all policy analyses. Ontologically, it is an acknowledgment that power is at least as important as the rationality assumed in the stage model outlined above. The study of interests represents a view of the policy process in which groups or individuals mobilize around specific issues and compete or cooperate to influence decision-making. In this view, policymakers (i.e., governments and their agencies) are not unitary actors; the policies that emerge are the product of complex processes of competition, bargaining, and negotiation among/between groups ( Bergsgard et al., 2007 ; Henry & Nassis, 1999 ). These groups can variously include political parties, teachers’ unions, media consortia, Olympic committees, athlete advocacy groups, and think tanks, as well as diverse state agencies with a range of mandates.

The role of groups and organizations in the policy process is important to analyze for a number of reasons. First, the study of interests is significant because of the inherent concern in politics for democratic input, representation, deliberation, and consultation. While these elements of participatory politics can be cynically viewed, there is evidence in sport of a growing number of quasi-advocacy organizations with increasingly professional lobbying capacity (cf. Comeau & Church, 2010 ; Dowling & Washington, 2017 ; Sam, 2011 ). Thus, as sport matures as an area of public policy, it is possible that this emerging “active advocacy” may ultimately transform the sector in line with its (paid) professionals rather than its traditional volunteer base ( Stenling & Sam, 2019 ). Second, the focus on interests draws attention to the influence of powerful individuals, sometimes called “policy entrepreneurs” ( Houlihan, 2005 ; Houlihan & Lindsey, 2013 ; Kingdon, 1984), who can shape the agenda by bringing different groups together and/or by shaping the dominant discourses and narratives. While such actors may include politicians and cabinet ministers, this perspective sensitizes us to other actors (such as business elites and private consultants) that, while not having formal authority, exert influence nonetheless. If these interests alert us to the “powerful,” the approach is equally attuned to the relative weakness of other interests. For example, it is apparent that one explanation for the continued privileging of elite sport is the absence of “demand groups to represent the interests of the young and the community sports participant” ( Houlihan & White 2002 , p. 222).

In the end, a focus on interest groups helps to explain policy formation, change, and/or resistance to change. However, essential questions remain regarding the relative influence of agents and, indeed more fundamentally, what enables, incentivizes, or impedes their participation in the policy process. Answers about the underlying dynamics of power ultimately rest in scholars examining why interests have access and how they gain legitimacy at various stages of the policy cycle (cf. Henry & Nassis, 1999 ; Strittmatter, Stenling, Fahlén, & Skille, 2018 ). Finding meaningful answers to such complex dynamics necessarily means considering the interplay of institutions and ideas.

Institutions

Institutional approaches are concerned with the constellation of rules, organizational arrangements, conventions, roles, and routines that enable or constrain policymaking ( Lowndes & Roberts, 2013 ; Peters, 2005 ). The approach is important from the standpoint that while agents matter and may wield considerable influence in policymaking, structures also matter a great deal in shaping the contours of political activity. At the broadest level, institutions can include the basic constitutional design of a government system (e.g., presidential vs. parliamentary), its distribution of powers (e.g., between federal and provincial/state levels) or its governance “style” (e.g., welfarist, neoliberal, corporatist). While these are understood to bring order to politics and policymaking, other meso- and micro-level structures (such as organizational configurations, statutes, and bureaucratic procedures) may also be conceived as institutions.

The importance of the approach is that it pays particular attention to the contexts surrounding policy. Just as the responsibilities and relations between federal and provincial/territorial governments can have enduring effects on sport policy ( Comeau, 2013 ), so too do the ways in which sport is funded, be it via lotteries, taxation, or private sector sponsorship ( Bergsgard et al., 2007 ). Thus, understanding basic institutional arrangements is a key starting point to any analysis of policy. Institutional approaches are evident in studies that focus on particular system types (e.g., Bergsgard & Norberg, 2010 ), policy regimes ( Tak et al., 2018b ), and policy communities ( Houlihan, 1997 ). Such analyses point to key determinants of policy implementation, such as the degree to which authority is centralized or dispersed, as well as the possibilities for and hindrances to achieving sectoral coordination. Importantly, studies anchored in these kinds of variant contexts can provide baselines for making comparisons between states, ultimately with a view toward understanding “what works” (or does not work) and under what organizational circumstances. Further, a focus on such institutional arrangements may not only be useful for post hoc explanations of policy processes; they may also help to anticipate the shape and dynamics of future political exchanges ( Lowndes & Roberts, 2013 ).

Yet what institutional approaches have the most to offer analytically lies in what institutions do ( Lowndes & Roberts, 2013 ; Peters, 2005 ). First, since institutions structure relations, they are an important consideration in explaining interest group influence. For instance, a convention of “evidence-based” policymaking can privilege actors who have the resources to produce evidence, while disempowering those having fewer resources ( Piggin, Jackson, & Lewis, 2009a ). In such a case, bigger, more established organizations may even have special public relations or advocacy units to commission research studies supporting their policy positions. At the same time, the structure of these interactions can limit who is able to participate in the policy process in the first place. Thus, institutional arrangements have been shown to channel interest group pressures in nationwide consultations surrounding new policy directions ( Sam & Jackson, 2006 ; Stenling & Sam, 2017 ). In New Zealand, for example, a national task force delineated its consultation hearings according to particular, standardized roles in the sport sector: coaches, administrators, and health advocates. This grouping of (homogeneous) stakeholders resulted in few disagreements and thus shaped the task force’s portrayal of problems as technical issues (including organizational reforms) rather than issues of a political nature (such as the setting of priorities) ( Sam & Jackson, 2006 ).

Second, institutions shape political relations by providing “cognitive scripts” and “logics of appropriateness” for actors in the policy process ( March & Olsen, 2006 ). Indeed sport organizations are likely to engage in politics far differently if they are guided by a market (an institution characterized by a logic of competition) versus a network (characterized by a logic of cooperation) versus a federation (characterized by a logic of democratic representation). More concretely, Comeau and Church (2010) identified distinctly different political strategies for women’s sport advocacy groups, depending on whether their institutionally defined role was as a co-opted insider (as with the Canadian group) or an external lobbyist (as with the US association). In this view, institutions “influence behavior not simply by specifying what one should do but also by specifying what one can imagine doing in a given context” ( Hall & Taylor, 1996 , p. 948). Operating under performance-measurement schemes and medal targets, for instance, national sport organizations have been shown to “rationally” become less responsive to issues around equity, athlete welfare, and maltreatment ( Sam, 2015 ; Sam & Dawbin, 2022 ).

An overriding contribution of this institutional approach lies in its ability to reveal how rules, procedures, routines, and practices can structure policymaking. As one early institutional theorist famously observed, “organization is the mobilization of bias,” where “some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out” ( Schattschneider, 1961 , p. 71). The approach is thus important in showing both how interests are enabled/constrained in policy debates, as well as how institutions may reinforce particular ideas and logics over time (Österlind, 2016; Stenling, 2014a ). Taken together, the utility of this kind of institutional orientation lies in its assessment of how some policies are “ruled in” as appropriate, while others are “ruled out.”

If we accept that structures are important in politics, one of the most important elements of structure surrounds the ideas, ideologies, paradigms, and storylines associated with policies ( Hall, 1993 ; Rein & Schön, 1993 ; Stone, 1989 ). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a disambiguation of the various concepts, the main theme that runs throughout this perspective is that ideas (expressed primarily through language) can play an influential role in the policy cycle.

With primacy given to the nature of rhetoric, arguments, and discourses (Kingdon, 1984; Majone, 1989 ), an ideational approach is implicitly interpretive and critical ( Piggin, 2010 ; Sam, 2003 ). It draws out alternate meanings to what on the surface may appear as accepted (or “received”) wisdom and common sense. Under this analytical lens, for example, are assessments of what has been called the “virtuous cycle,” the endless loop of seemingly logical forces posited to connect the benefits of elite sport with sport-for-all ( Grix & Carmichael, 2011 ). More broadly, the approach serves to demystify taken-for-granted postures undergirding policy logics; these can be revealed in critical interpretations of “social capital” that often reliably operate as a kind of metaphor or “policy slogan” ( Skille, 2014 , p. 341).

As with institutions, ideational dimensions provide essential context. Ideologies and values feature frequently as comparative constructs to describe deeply rooted beliefs as well as more “ephemeral ideas” that can impact sport policy ( Kristiansen, Parent, & Houlihan, 2016 ). Indeed this approach is fundamental because broad political ideas, such as efficiency ( Sam, 2003 ), transparency ( Piggin et al., 2009b ), and accountability ( Grix, 2009 ), take on special significance as they are translated into sport policy. The idea of “continuous improvement” (a feature of modernization agendas), for example, has very real consequences in terms of supporting “ratcheting” targets and the perverse “gaming” that actors sometimes undertake to conform to the idea ( Sam & Macris, 2014 ). Thus, to show participation growth and improvement, sport governing bodies inflate their participation numbers through the use of one-off “clinics” or by extending their seasons, effectively cannibalizing the participation numbers in other sports (see Keat & Sam, 2013 ).

Equally important to consider is how sport policy issues are framed ( Stenling & Sam, 2020 ), how policy problems are constructed ( Österlind, 2016 ), and how solutions are justified ( Sam & Ronglan, 2018 ). Thus focused, an ideational approach aims to uncover the discursive features underlying the claims that agents and their organizations make in policy debates. For example, in considering the timing, scope, and depth of policy intervention, there is a difference between views of athlete welfare/maltreatment as a “problem” or an “issue” and its representation as an “epidemic” or a “crisis.” Likewise, there is an important distinction between claims of doping, match-fixing, or abuse as a case of a few “bad apples” versus the assertion that these are systemic and structural problems that have their origins in previous policies. Invariably, the ideational approach brings to the fore that policy claims are strategic and support particularized interests ( Stone, 1997 ). And, in this way, the focus on frames in the ideational approach helps uncover embedded narratives, tropes, and cognitive shorthands that serve to bind together particular groups of experts, advocates, and/or practitioners.

Finally, whether the sport-specific dominant ideas surround notions of excellence ( Kidd, 1988 ), competitiveness ( Sam, 2003 ; Skille, 2011 ), or integrity ( Gardiner, Parry, & Robinson, 2017 ), the purpose of this kind of analysis is to challenge the basis of power behind policy discourses and, by doing so, question their legitimacy (e.g., in terms of their fairness, coherence, etc.). The approach thus demands critical attention to the “motherhood and apple pie” ideas often masquerading as straightforward problems and policy solutions.

In a recent special issue on “theory and methods in sport policy and politics research,” the editors of the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics remark that few scholars from political science disciplines engage with sport ( Grix, Lindsey, De Bosscher, & Bloyce, 2018 ). While not a criticism of the current field per se, the observation does highlight the tendency for scholars in this area to either echo received or limited logics or speak past one another. On the first count, Palmer (2013 , p. 82), for example, suggests that “sports policy has been restricted in the kinds of theory it adopts,” although this claim was based on only a very limited review of sport policy and politics research.

Since policy is what public authorities decide to do (or not do), we should not be surprised that it is analyzed through myriad theories and approaches. Indeed, the ontological and epistemological concerns surrounding sport policy have received considerable attention ( Dowling, Brown, Legg, & Beacom, 2018 ; Henry, Amara, & Al-Tauqi, 2005 ; Houlihan, 2005 ). It therefore seems fruitless to lament the insufficient political theory, lack of “social” theory, or even “globalization” theory as they have been applied to the area.

Presently, the field is certainly growing but has not yet become so vast that one cannot draw underlying lessons from the diverse theoretical traditions that have been embraced. For example, whether we call the agents in the process “policy entrepreneurs” or “brokers” or “influential stakeholders” is largely immaterial so long as we remain attuned to the fact that people (within their institutionally derived roles) matter. Likewise, in policy contexts, whether an idea like “sustainable development” is a goal, value, or paradigm is often indistinguishable and only empirically discoverable with respect to how the idea is articulated, by whom, and under what circumstances. Hence, the nuances between discourses, narratives, or frames are chiefly interesting insofar as they share a common concern for language, argument, and the construction of meaning (see Fischer & Forester, 1993 ).

For this reason, theories of policymaking generally show a broad acknowledgment of the interplay between ideas, interests, and institutions. In particular, Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith’s (1993) Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is highly regarded as a means of connecting the different orientations outlined above ( Green & Houlihan, 2004 ). Yet while useful as a comparative, empirical model, the ACF’s broad treatment of political context is also its weakness ( Hysing & Olsson, 2008 ), since the answer to the question “What happened?” seems invariably to be “Everything happened,” leaving little room for an assessment of what elements mattered most. Indeed, in a recent review of the ACF, the main criticism centers on the need for a more explicit use of its concepts ( Pierce, Peterson, & Hicks, 2020 ), an issue that will invariably require insights from other theoretical approaches ( Olsson, 2009 ).

In this lies one of the recurring challenges endemic to the study of sport policy and politics: whether one’s approach should be aimed toward particularity or comparability. The challenge largely plays out as a paradox in which context is highly valued, yet too little or too much of it can be cause for others to ignore the research’s relevance. Investigations, for example, establishing the uniqueness of the Scandinavian sports model can inadvertently suggest that findings in that context are inapplicable outside of it. For those studying small states ( Sam & Jackson, 2017 ), the need for comparison with other countries is usually a given (and often a condition for publication), while for researchers in larger countries, this is not always the case (e.g., Harris & Houlihan, 2016 ; Phillpots, Grix, & Quarmby, 2011 ). Perhaps the different affinities are a reflection of researchers wanting to draw parallels from another country, thereby treading carefully around the criticism that their work should be more comparative or, worse, that it is not sufficiently unique. Regardless, if we accept the prevailing logic that sport systems show at least moderate levels of convergence ( Bergsgard et al., 2007 ; Green & Houlihan, 2005 ), the predominant driver should be to adopt some comparative sensitivity to allow scholars to learn from each and every case. However, for the purposes of advancing the field, it may be unwise to over invest in metaframeworks like the ACF to achieve this lesson-drawing. Since policy is context-specific and takes place across public, private, and commercial boundaries, the continuation of a theoretical agnosticism might be better for identifying and more deeply understanding particularities, such as phenomena like modernization and governance, that cut across belief systems and coalitions.

To that end, some scholars have recently argued for a “decentered” approach to policy, such that the focal point is less on the “state” and its taken-for-granted authority and power ( Bevir, 2020 ). Instead, decentered theorists emphasize agency and “meaning-making” above all else and eschew the use of midlevel theories as explanations ( Bevir, 2020 ). For sport policy scholars, this is perhaps not so much a debate as it is an expansion of the scope of inquiry ( Goodwin & Grix, 2011 ). Indeed, much of this sentiment reflects what Henry and Ko (2014) advance as a critical realist approach in which the key questions are not only about “what works” but are also foundationally anchored in concerns about “for whom does a given policy work” and for whom does it not. Implicitly, this suggests that careful attention be paid to the variety of policies citizens create, how they amend and revise those policies, and how these policies perform ( Schlager, 2007 , p. 297).

In large part, this realist perspective seems to characterize the chief concerns adopted among scholars in the area. Importantly, it may also explain the sport policy field’s ongoing bricolage with the orientations described above (interests, ideas, and institutions), sans the promise of “completeness” offered by frameworks like the ACF. On this count, neo-institutionalists may combine rules with norms/beliefs as “conventions” ( Skille & Stenling, 2018 ) or “chains of legitimating acts” ( Strittmatter et al., 2018 ), while figurational sociologists and network theorists combine interests with institutions as “patterns of interaction” between actors ( Bloyce & Smith, 2010 ). Such theoretical diversity is welcome, not only for its own sake but ultimately because sport policies seem to share similar “politics.” Thus, findings from these diverse research strands can be viewed as “canaries in the coal mines,” alerting us to different “localized” policy possibilities as changes unfold elsewhere.

Since policy is multifaceted and encompasses elements of planning, strategizing, and debate, its analysis offers a particular vantage point. It is, on the one hand, pragmatic , in that it generally focuses on the temporary nature of solutions, the limits to rationality, and the imperfections of political bargaining. While this pragmatism and aim for relevance underlie the field, it also takes as given the place of values and political contestation. In this view, a sport policy can dictate what an athlete is allowed to ingest, just as it might establish a standard for who is considered “inactive” or “elite.” While the former says what we must do, the latter tells us who we are (fit or unfit) and to what we might be entitled (e.g., access to programs, grants, facilities, etc.). If politics is understood as “who gets what, when and how” ( Lasswell, 1958 ), it is clear why policymaking is a fundamental element underpinning virtually all public issues.

Importantly, changes in policy (or the introduction of new policies) invariably entail an attempt to alter the structure or balance of real power within/between organizations. Thus, authority and influence are not only the means to achieve desired outcomes; they are also valuable ends in themselves for those groups with a vested interest in the shape of future systems. That policy changes often appear as little more than organizational “tinkering” belies the fact that these can profoundly alter the institutional terrain and “rules of engagement” for future political contests. While “good governance” policies, for example, are undoubtedly a positive step toward reducing internal corruption, they are also political instruments that advance the creation of new “rulers” (in the form of auditors), while potentially altering conceptions of trust (see Power, 1997 ).

For these reasons, policies that address the issues of resource distribution, regulation, and governance are rarely static or complete, but are instead persistently analyzed, evaluated, and debated. Thus, to understand the inherent pragmatics and politics within these policy processes, this chapter has offered three broad, interconnected orientations that together require an understanding of

the interests that demand representation and/or coordination in policy matters (where interests may be drawn along multiple, overlapping lines such as advocates in health, education, parasport, tourism, women’s sport, etc.);

the institutions that circumscribe public policy processes, such as the basic machinery and mechanisms that steer government action and central sport authorities, as well as the policy instruments and procedural “rules of engagement” that guide behaviors;

the ideas , paradigms, and discourses that, explicitly or implicitly, underlie prevailing conceptions of public policy problems and how best to address them.

Policy research thus demands that we be aware of the inherent interplay between ideas, interests, and institutions. At a macro level, acknowledging these elements and their accordant perspectives helps to identify the various ways in which sport policies develop over time and across different contexts. At a more micro level, these orientations serve to remind us that, while sport policies can be problematic, the individuals in the process are rarely purposefully ignorant, oppressive, or short-sighted; rather, the ideas they adopt (or inherit) and the institutions in which they operate shape their assessment of what is considered “good” policy.

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Jul 17, 2023

The Correlation Between Sports and Politics

Sports are a form of entertainment that breaks through the hearts of billions of people all around the world. Yet, they also represent the social and cultural identity of groups of people. Sports can become the platform for social change, the arena where shaping public opinion is possible and the chance to spread messages. The latter characteristics are shared by a seemingly distant set of activities: politics. Sports and politics have together shaped the world that we live in today, contributing to fundamental changes but also amplifying underlying problems. Despite the notorious quote "sports and politics don't mix" by former U.S. athlete Eric Haiden, sports and politics are closely intertwined.

This essay delves into the intricate and fascinating correlation between politics and sports with the aim of illustrating how the two have influenced each other over the course of the years. The first part of the essay will illustrate how sports can become the occasion to spark patriotism, political consciousness, and social changes. In the subsequent part of the essay, it will be demonstrated the other side of the debate. In fact, the essay will analyze how sports can also become a vehicle for harmful political stances. The final part of the essay will be devoted to final conclusions.

A Different Portrayal

Many countries, perhaps the most unlikely, make great efforts for shaping future generations of successful athletes. East Germany and Cuba, despite facing serious political and economic problems, devoted an impressive amount of their national resources to make sure that their citizens could one day become successful in different sports (Cha, 2009). The reason for that, according to most scholars, is that during sports competitions and events, countries have the opportunity to portray a positive and successful image of themselves (Cha, 2009). The citizens of the country, and spectators from all over the world, will have the opportunity to observe a display of strength. This fosters a positive message to others, shaping the perception of the country among people. The 2022 FIFA World Cup hosted by Qatar is another example to show how one country might use sports events to display an image of splendor and wealth. Qatar, a relatively small country, made impressive efforts to build innovative, eco-friendly, and advanced structures made to host the football games.

As mentioned, governments might use sports events to display an ideal image of their country. This entails physical changes, such as the construction of new infrastructures and the development of advanced technologies. Yet, sometimes also political changes are necessary before hosting sports events with global reach. Sports events act, in fact, as an open door inviting millions of people, and governments, to scrutinize how the hosting country is behaving. Qatar, despite the advanced and impressive stadiums it built, was left surrounded by controversies regarding the poor working conditions of the workers involved and many scandals about corruption. Particularly significant is the role played by Mohamed Bin Hammam, Qatar’s top soccer official, in securing Qatar's right to host the event. The UK Sunday Times has in fact revealed behind the scenes of the FIFA World Cup organization, bringing to light the multiple cash handouts used to make sure that soccer officials would choose Qatar as the hosting country (Blake and Calvert, 2015). This causes one to wonder if it is always wise to believe in the image that a country puts forward on such occasions.

However, sometimes changes do happen. In 2008 China hosted the Olympic Games and the massive physical change in the country was followed by significant political changes made to appease the International Community (Cumings, 2001). China made adjustments in terms of their foreign policies, particularly in Sudan and Burma, aligning with the requests of the rest of the countries and NGOs. This was the result of heavy pressure from key figures of the International Community, such as current King Charles III, U.S. President Bush, and the United Nations (Cha, 2009).

Sports Create Nations

Moreover, winning and supporting athletes during sports events creates a feeling of unity, which leads to the creation of a feeling of patriotism, reinforcing the identity of a population. This is made particularly evident by the astonishing number of viewers that are captivated by sports events (Gift and Miner, 2017). This renewed pride and sense of belonging are capable of shaping the cultural identity of a nation. National pride is in fact essential when it comes to understanding how united a nation is, especially when a nation has been recently unified. For instance, the unification of the football clubs from North Yemen and South Yemen was the first step towards the unification of the country as a whole (Stevenson and Alaug, 2000). Sports become an arena to display political messages also for countries opposing the occupation with the aim of asserting their independence. In Ireland, sports became a channel used to express the desire for political independence from the rest of the United Kingdom (Houlihan, 1994). The Gaelic Athletic Association, established in 1884, was one of the methods to promote Irish traditions to impose Irish identity against English rule. The sense of pride for one’s own identity and nation and the desire for independence was incarnated by Olympic Winner Peter O’Connor who waved the Irish flag despite being forced to play under the British Olympic Council on the occasion of the 1906 Olympic Games in Athens (Brownwell, 2008).

Political and Social Messages in Sports

Changes need an engine that pushes people to act and change and sports can become said engine. Social movements need an arena and sports events with billions of spectators who are attracted to them are the perfect venue to display social protests. During the medal ceremony of the Athletics Olympic Games of 1068, two African-American athletes, named Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raised a black-gloved fist in a gesture called “Black Power Salute”. The salute was a symbolic response against the unequal conditions suffered by black people. The then President of the International Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, commented that the gesture was in contrast with the apolitical spirit of the Olympic Games , yet made no objections against the Nazi salute made during the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games (Churchill, 1983).

Sports Committees are also not indifferent to political news and events and do not keep a neutral stance. This was made evident in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as multiple Russian players were told to compete without national identifications replacing their flag with a white one. Moreover, FIFA suspended all Russian clubs from competing, and numerous other sanctions came from different committees ( Næss, 2022). The sum of the different responses condemning the Russian invasion brings the International Community closer and shows social and political support toward the Ukrainian victims. However, it also underlines the hypocrisy of the International Community which has blatantly ignored the massive human rights violations committed by other countries which are nevertheless allowed to host and take part in sports competitions. Sports become just another political tool used to demonstrate alliance and support to certain governments, for instance, the Qatari or Israeli governments. The two countries have in fact been involved in unjustifiable human rights violations but have not received any sanctions for their behaviors by sports organizations.

Manipulative Use of Sports

Sports, as any tool, can become capable of influencing people, especially if used by a certain category of powerful individuals. Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister during four governments between 1994 and 2011, gained much of his political consensus from passionate fans of the AC Milan Football Club, which he owned until 2017. Berlusconi was also known for his football metaphors through which he was capable of winning support from millions of Italians (Porro and Russo, 2012). Berlusconi was undoubtedly successful in hiding, or at least, distracting people from the many scandals of corruption, prostitution, and Mafia association behind his many other businesses, including sports.

Sports were also used to negatively influence political stances and assert a sense of superiority, especially by totalitarian regimes. The Soviet Union invested resources in promoting rigorous disciplines such as gymnastics which embodies principles of discipline, collective achievement, and self-control. Said principles were also the foundation of the Soviet Union regime and it was also through sports that the power of the Soviet Union was established (Parks, 2006). It is not possible not to mention the propaganda use that the Nazi regime made of sports events, such as the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Adolf Hitler did in fact use the Olympic Games and other sports events to impose the Nazi philosophy of Aryan superiority by trying to showcase the success of German athletes (Kessler, 2011).

Conclusions

In conclusion, it is fair to say that sports and politics do mix. Often times the relationship between sports and politics has a positive connotation to it. In fact, sports are a vehicle for national pride and unity, even capable of bringing people together and fighting foreign control to assert independence. Sports are also an engine for change, both physical and political. Many countries have in fact changed their policies and attitudes prior to the hosting of important sports events which are in fact a display of a country's wealth and politics. However, sometimes what a country chooses to display on the occasion of these grand sports events might be misleading.

On the other hand, it is important to note that sports, as a phenomenon with global reach and emotional connotation, can be used to foster propaganda by totalitarian regimes. sometimes, politicians might also use sports as an influencing mechanism to impose one's image in the political debate and blur the line between entertainment and politics.

The scenario is varied and the relationship between sports and politics is deeper and richer than one would imagine. Despite what one might think about such a correlation, it is impossible to deny that Eric Heiden was wrong when he said that "sports and politics don't mix".

Bibliographical References

Blake, H. and Calvert, J. (2015). The ugly game: the corruption of FIFA and the Qatari plot to buy the World Cup. Simon and Schuster.

Brownwell, S. (2008). Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China . Rowman & Littlefield.

Cha, D. V. (2009) A Theory of Sport and Politics. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 26(11), 1581-1610.

Churchill, E. J. (1983). The Olympic Story. Grolier Enterprises Inc.

Cumings. (2001). China Goes for the Gold. The Nation, 7.

Gift, T., & Miner, A. (2017). DROPPING THE BALL: The Understudied Nexus of Sports and Politics. World Affairs, 180(1), 127–161.

Houlihan, B. (1994). Sport and International Politics. Harvester Wheatsheaf; 1st edition.

Kessler, M. (2011) Only Nazi Games? Berlin 1936: The Olympic Games between Sports and Politics. Socialism and Democracy, 25(2).

Næss, E. H. (2002). The Neutrality Paradox in Sport . Palgrave Macmillan.

Porro, N. & Russo, P. (2000) Berlusconi and Other Matters: the Era of ‘Football-Politics'. J ournal of Modern Italian Studies.

Parks, J. (2007). in Stephen Wagg, David L. Andrews eds. East Plays West: Sport and the Cold War . Routledge

Stevenson, T. B., & Alaug, A. K. (2000). Football in Newly United Yemen: Rituals of Equity, Identity, and State Formation. Journal of Anthropological Research, 56(4), 453–475

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Muhammad Ali giving a black power salute ahead of a fight in Madison Square Garden.

We need to separate sport and politics. But also recognise that they’re inseparable

From Muhammad Ali’s defiance to England players ‘taking a knee’, all athletic endeavour is grounded in social context

‘F ans don’t want politics brought into football.” Many would agree with Tory MP Lee Anderson’s sentiment . And so, he carried on, in response to England footballers “taking the knee” before a match: “For the first time in my life I will not be watching my beloved England team while they are supporting a political movement whose core principles’ aim is to undermine our way of life.”

But, wait, who is it now introducing politics into football? Those taking the knee or those who insist that to do so is helping to “undermine our way of life”? Or both? And why is it that those obsessed with flying the flag suddenly find their patriotism so thin they cannot support the national team if players do a bit of kneeling? Or even cheer on opposing teams ? It seems there’s greater loyalty to the culture wars than to the nation.

As it happens, if, in some other universe, I somehow found myself in the England team, I would not take the knee. Not because I fear for our way of life, but because I agree with Crystal Palace forward Wilfried Zaha , who views it as a meaningless ritual in which he refuses to partake. But if players find it meaningful and important, let them do it.

Were I among the spectators at Wembley, I certainly would not boo; it has always felt odd to me to barrack one’s own team. But, again, if supporters want to boo that’s their right. Some may be racist, others not. What they are definitely not, though, is representative of “ the majority of England fans ”.

A majority of England fans actually support the gesture, though barely a third think it important in tackling racism . As for it being hated because it is seen as supporting the “Marxist” Black Lives Matter movement, a YouGov poll last year showed that more people support players wearing a BLM logo on their shirt than taking the knee. Like much in the culture wars, the controversy over “taking the knee” invests a relatively vapid act with some kind of deep, existential significance. Beyond the inanities and hypocrisies of the debate are, however, more profound issues, not least the untangling of the relationship between sport and politics.

Most fans would probably agree that politics should be kept out of sport. We want sporting prowess to be “pure”, expressions of sublime skill or awe-inspiring endurance that are intrinsic to the sport and capture the genius of human athleticism. When we watch Lionel Messi floating through a gaggle of defenders as if with the ball fixed to his boot, or a picture-perfect cover drive from Virat Kohli, or Simone Biles’s triple-twisting double tuck in her floor routine, too fast for the eye to follow – each transfixes us by transforming our assumptions of what is humanly possible.

But sport, even in its most inspirational moments, does not exist in a vacuum. Whether football or basketball, cricket or gymnastics, social and political contexts shape both the sport and our response to it.

The relationship between sports and politics operates at many levels. Many sports were designed to enforce social needs, from Japanese martial arts, celebrated as a means of spiritual development and social ordering, to cricket, an instrument through which Victorians sought to teach the ruling class to rule and the plebs to obey.

The cleavage between rugby union and rugby league betrays the two codes’ class origins. The Glasgow rivalry between Celtic and Rangers is deeply invested in religious sectarianism and the politics of Irish nationalism. The current row between Russia and Ukraine over the latter’s shirt at the Euros is just the latest expression of national hostilities spilling out into the sports field. And sportsmen and women have often used their platforms to make a political point, from US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising black-gloved fists on the podium at the 1968 Olympic games, to NFL quarterback Colin Kaeprenick who in 2016 first took the knee during the national anthem as a protest against racist violence, to Manchester United’s Paul Pogba and Amad Diallo raising a Palestinian flag after a Premier League match last month.

Most of us want the humanness of sporting achievement to transcend the immediacy of its political and social environment. Few want sporting tribalism to be consumed by political divisions. Nevertheless, most recognise that sport cannot be detached from its social grounding. Nor would we want it to be. For it is that grounding that imbues sport with much of its meaning.

As a child in 1970s Britain, Muhammad Ali was for me far more than a boxer. He brought an uncommon grace to the most brutal of sports. What defined him, though, was not just his skill in the ring but his attitude outside it, too – his willingness to defy the authorities, his contemptuous rejection of the expected role of a black man in a racist society, his courage in refusing to fight in Vietnam, despite the authorities stripping him of his world title and his boxing licence, his insistence that “I don’t have to be what you want me to be”.

To a boy growing up in a Britain in which racism was vicious and visceral to a degree almost unthinkable now, Ali was a soul-affirming symbol of defiance and pride. And, inevitably, he was condemned. Boxing, wrote Jimmy Cannon, the doyen of ringside writers, had never before “been turned into an instrument of mass hate”. Ali was “using it as a weapon of wickedness”.

All of which brings us back to taking the knee. Harry Kane or Marcus Rashford kneeling at Wembley this afternoon will be no Muhammad Ali moment and those who argue that it is a form of “virtue signalling” have a point. But nor is it a “Marxist” gesture or one “undermining our way of life”. Those obsessed by its maleficence are equally anti-virtue signalling.

I’m no flag-waving patriot, but I hope England win today against Croatia. And that they win their next six games, too (sorry, Scotland and Wales), which would see them crowned as European champions. For, yes, it is quite possible to separate sporting tribalism from political posturing, even as we recognise the relationship between politics and sport.

European Championship
Muhammad Ali
Black Lives Matter movement

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