MacroScan - The Global Game

Recorded history bear ample evidence of the extent to which human beings are obsessed by sport. The need to play is of course a deep urge common to all animals, but perhaps the constant need to create ever more elaborate forms of play is the most developed in humans. So our current societies' preoccupation with sport in various forms is not new.

Nor is the rise of spectatorhood -the move away from mostly playing sports to mostly watching them - such a new shift. People have always loved to watch excellence in games performed by others, and that has been used to advantage by rulers as well. Even the ancient Roman emperors knew the value of circuses when bread was in short supply.

Nevertheless, there are features in the current situation that are quite new: the tremendous expansion of the sports business, and the globalisation of it in a quite novel way. All this has been much discussed, and certainly we in India no longer need any reminding of how closely certain sports in particular are linked with business.

The business activities – and the profits to be made – do not come only from the organisation of the game itself, but also (and usually even more so) from advertising and related promotion of all sorts of other goods, as well as from more shady activities like gambling and bookkeeping. There has been much talk of how such sponsorship and other activities threaten the "purity" of a game, and of what they do to players' aspirations. But still, it is likely that many of us do not really know the full extent to which all of us – and even the players themselves – are being manipulated in the new global organisation of sports.

That is why a new book brought out (in Bengali) by a team from the Ganashakti newspaper, "Globalisation covers the sports field" (Maath dhekeche bishwayane, Ganashakti Kolkata 2003) is so fascinating. This small book manages to capture the essence of some of the major changes in the way that sports are organised and presented, the particular forms that the globalisation of sport has taken and the implications for both players and audiences.

One of the aspects that the book brings out most clearly, is how the extensive commercialisation of games has actually led to the growing unfreedom of players. In a perceptive article on the Brazilian football star Ronaldo, Debashish Chakravarty traces the evolution of the boy from the slums of Bento Roseiro, who has emerged as the game's latest and most spectacular "phenomenon". Chakravarty suggests that Ronaldo's early and harsh lessons in the role of money – such as his inability to raise the fare to travel to be auditioned to join the famous Brazilian club "Flamingo" when he was a teenager – made him understand the importance of sponsorship. This made him actively seek out and respond to agents and sponsors subsequently.

But of course such sponsorship carries its own hazards. Several articles in the book reveal Ronaldo, the illustrious and magical sportsman, to be effectively the prisoner of the sports and footwear multinational company Nike. Shantanu Dey describes how, in the infamous World Cup final of 1998, when Brazil met France, Ronaldo had convulsions the night before the match, and was declared unfit. When the Brazilian team arrived at the stadium without him, there was panic among the sponsors, and especially Nike.

Apparently at Nike's insistence (the company also sponsors the Brazilian team as a whole and had paid large amounts of money to them that year) the decision to play without Ronaldo was reversed. The suffering sportsman finally had to be injected with painkillers and somehow brought to the playing field, where he delivered one of his poorest ever performances. The player had become a commodity more valuable than his own health or abilities.

After all, the match was not simply a context between Brazil and France, but also between Nike, personified by Ronaldo, and Adidas, promoted by the French-Algerian star Zinedine Zidane. In this continuing tussle, the winning side keeps varying – that year Adidas won, but of course in 2002 Nike emerged the victor with a triumphant Ronaldo.

Football is (and has been for some time) the most globalised and commercialised of all sports. Pritam Sinha shows that the major European football clubs are hugely profitable business enterprises, which are usually part of much larger privately owned commercial empires spanning other media and entertainment activities as well.

These clubs draw into their ranks players from all over the world, and increasingly from developing countries. Indeed, for most footballers in the developing world, the dream is to be accepted into (and eventually purchased) by these clubs. Vast sums are exchanged for the "purchase" of players, who are allowed to keep some proportion of this money for themselves. In addition, of course, there is the cash to be had from advertising and promotions, as long as the player is marketable.

Of the 23 main players in the team from Senegal that won so many hearts at the 2002 World Cup, as many as 21 play in the French league. The real Senegalese football, it has been pointed out, is not played within Senegal, but in the clubs of Europe. And the local football association within the country has been reduced to little more than a talent-spotting enterprise to allow local boys to enter that hallowed world of demanding but rewarding European soccer.

Even in India, whose national team has never even qualified for the Football World Cup, this process has not just started but is getting entrenched. Shubhro Mukhopadhyay describes how Indian football teams like Mohun Bagan have become private limited companies in their own right, and try to mimic their more successful counterparts abroad by buying the lower rung international players, and so on.

Of course, the current fever is all about cricket, and Panu Bhattacharya provides a useful backdrop to the huge media hype and attention that is being lavished on the Indian cricket team. It is extraordinary the extent to which, for months in advance of the World Cup, the expectations of the masses in the country have been built up by a wide-ranging series of advertisements and obsessive descriptions in the media of the wonderful qualities of this team.

The media hype was maintained and even pushed further, despite poor performances abroad by what is after all a fairly ordinary team by international standards, simply to keep public attention – and consumer interest - focussed on the World Cup and to ensure adequate rewards for advertisers and other promoters in the process. So overarching was this concern, that even when the team played very badly in the first two matches, this too became the focus of media attention, overshadowing all other news.

On the weekend in which history was being made on streets across the world, as around 10 million people marched peacefully in more than 600 cities to protest the Bush administration's war against Iraq, most of our own print and television media did not have the time or space to describe this unprecedented set of events which may mark a historical turning point. Instead, they were all obsessed with the poor performance of the Indian cricket team in the match against Australia.

And our own cricket fans in turn, who had been led by the same media to fantasise about winning the Cricket World Cup, expressed their disappointment and anger not only through acts of aggression on the streets, but in what is now the most effective form of protest in this business. Thousands of erstwhile fans declared that they would no longer buy goods endorsed by our cricketers, thereby threatening the entire material edifice on which all the hype had been built. This move sent such shivers down the spines of sponsors that some of them were reduced to taking out large advertisements in newspapers, pleading for people to be more understanding of the cricketers!

It is not surprising that sponsors, advertisers and those involved in the business are able to generate such a frenzy of excitement among ordinary people. Of course cricket and other games provide a welcome distraction from the more depressing trends in current affairs, and allow us to forget the irritations and insecurities that increasingly plague daily existence. But that is not the only reason.

Perhaps the more significant – even if subliminal – reason has to do with the vicarious satisfaction that is provided by the evidence of how individual achievement, in some sports at least, can become the means for social and economic advancement. This is all the more satisfying when other instances of such mobility have become less apparent.

In fact, sport – like other forms of entertainment – is one of the few remaining means of individual social mobility in a world in which economic stratification is increasingly defined by access to quality education, and where actual mobility has become more restricted. The rags-to-riches stories of Ronaldo and others, or the success of the possible boys-next-door like Virender Sehwag, create a sense of fulfilment in all of us, even more so because there a few such stories in other fields.

This may be why all of us consent to become prisoners of this new and ever more ambitious industry, as players or as spectators, and why we allow the actual game to be only the smallest part of the much more important and profitable game that is being played out by the corporate world.