Sports play a giant role in contemporary society worldwide. But few of us pause to think about the larger questions of money, politics, race, sex, culture, and commercialization that surround sports everywhere. This course draws on the tools of anthropology, sociology, history, and other disciplines to give you new perspectives on the games we watch and play. It's the new and improved version of Professor Orin Starn's original "Sports and Society" for Coursera, which drew more than 40,000 students. We will focus on both popular sports like soccer (or “football,” as anyone outside America calls it), basketball, and baseball, and also lesser-known ones like mountain-climbing and fishing. You will never watch or think about sports in the same way again.
The Hypercommercialization of Sports, Part 2
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Sports and Society
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The Megabusiness of Sports
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Orin StarnProfessor
Cultural Anthropology
[MUSIC]
Let's look now at a couple of other dimensions of the hyper-commercialization
of professional sports.
And I wanna start with the concept of the superstar pitch man,
which is part of these dynamics of hyper-commercialization.
If you go back and think 120 years ago, the whole idea of a professional athlete
as this mythical figure like Odysseus or Achilles that we would all worship and
would have this great aura and who'd we look at a commercial at and think, oh,
I kind of want to get that product because famous athlete x uses it.
That concept didn't exist.
It's really not until the 1920s that you begin to get
athletes becoming big time celebrities in global culture.
In America, you have the baseball player Babe Ruth.
You have the boxer Jack Dempsey.
And it's really then that the idea, the mythical idea,
of the athlete as these modern heroes comes into being.
And it's not until later in the 20th century, though, that you get
the full-fledged engagement of superstar athletes as pitchmen, as selling stuff,
and becoming these corporate figures, these brands in themselves.
And Michael Jordan, as we discussed earlier in the class, is one of
the inventors, the alpha inventors of this idea, the corporate athlete who's selling,
doing commercials for all kinds of, Hanes underwear and Nike.
Michael Jordan has a car dealership in this area.
So here you see, and it continues up to the present, this idea of the superstar
athlete as a person who's gonna be linked up to corporate salesmanship and
pitching different products on television, on billboards, and the rest.
And also the growth of athletes themselves into these diversified
economic forces who may own part of a video game franchise, and
they have their own philanthropic foundation.
And they make money off of their jersey shares, and they invest in real estate.
The athlete as a global brand.
And in fact, when you think about it, athletes in the same way that corporations
have brand associations, Gucci, a famous expensive Italian leather.
Well, superstar pitchmen athletes, and they're mostly men,
although there are some famous female athletes who do some
selling of products and are corporate heroines, warriors, as well.
But you think about David Beckham, now retired, the soccer star.
Well, his brand was that of about sexiness and
cosmopolitanism and looking good in underwear and being a sex object.
Alan Iverson, in his day, the basketball player, his whole aesthetic or the sneaker
ads and all that sort of thing was kind of like this edgy, tattooed, hiphop guy.
So athletes themselves come to stand for particular things, and
they become brands in themselves.
Now, one of the dangers for corporations with the phenomena of the corporate
pitchman, the superstar pitchman, is that if you put too many of your
eggs in the basket of a particular superstar athlete.
And then that athlete gets into trouble, a lot of your eggs break.
So for example, what happens when, as Nike did,
you have tons of money invested in Tiger Woods, and
then he's in, all of a sudden, in the middle of a big sex scandal.
And he's on the cover of the tabloids, and he's apologizing to the nation for
cheating on his wife and all the social drama.
Well, it's a mess for your brand.
And with Tiger Woods, you see like the big Accenture, the big consulting firm.
They had Tiger Woods advertisement billboards in every airport in the world.
And when Tiger gets into trouble with his sex life, they have to go, oh,
this is not good for our brand.
They have to take down all the billboards, replace them with other billboards.
And to eat, to take this public relations hit and
to eat all the contract money that they paid to Tiger Woods.
So we had the same thing with Lance Armstrong, the doping scandals.
He won the Tour de France because he was doped up.
And all of the US Postal Service and the other corporate sponsors
also took a big image hit and financial hit themselves there.
So what you see sometimes now is that corporations are pretty leery
of doing too much with any single athlete
because they worry that they're gonna get burned if this athlete gets into trouble.
Now, [COUGH] finally, a last dimension, there are other things that
we can talk about, but the last dimension I wanna talk about in relationship
with the hyper-commercialization of professional sports.
And this is the phenomenon of what can be called the globalization
of sports marketing.
And what you see now is that the sports business,
sports capitalism, no longer knows clear cut national borders.
It's a global transnational phenomenon.
So the NBA, the National Basketball Association, the American League,
they're playing exhibition games in China, they're traveling to Europe,
they're doing GoodWill trips to South America.
Manchester United and other premier league teams are touring the United States and
other parts of the world, and athletes themselves are on the move.
Top soccer player might play for a bit in China and then maybe Japan,
then maybe Europe, and then the United States.
There's kind of this pattern now, kind of like when you're at the top
of your career, you play in one of the great European leagues.
And then maybe when you're not, you're famous and you can sell your fame, but
you're not quite as great a player, then you go to China or the United States or
some lesser soccer market.
So what you have is this globalization of sports imagination and marketing athletes
on the move, leagues trying to build their brands in different countries.
And this is all in recognition of the way that the sports market has
become a global one, and corporations have gotten very savvy about this.
There's a famous cultural geographer named David Harvey
who argues that we live now in the age of flexible accumulation.
In other words, that capitalism and corporate management has to
adapt to the realities of different, of fragmented global mark
up with different interests and different traditions and different appetites.
Capitalism has to be flexible.
You can't just produce the same old thing like you did back
in the era of Henry Ford in the early 20th century and
the classic so-called Fordist era of high industrial capitalism.
So Nike now, they now are sponsors of the Brazilian Mens Soccer Team,
not of the women, or maybe they are now, but they don't pay the women
anything near as much as we talked about in the lecture on gender and sports.
And Nike is also a sponsor in making these cool ads of the Indian cricket team.
So you'll still see Nike, this global sports giant, doing the flexible
accumulation thing of adapting itself to a heterogeneous global sports landscape.
One of the worries that has sometimes that you hear around this globalization of
sports marketing, of the sports business, is the worry that global
sports horizon is gonna get too homogenous.
It's gonna become too homogenous.
Too homogenous in the sense in particular, and the particular worry is
that soccer is gonna become simply the dominant global game everywhere and
that all other sports are gonna be relegated to minor league status.
And you definitely have seen soccer's appeal growing globally.
The United States where soccer wasn't so big 30 years ago, it's pretty popular now,
even though it's not really a major sport like football or basketball.
You see soccer in other markets gaining share.
It's certainly very popular in many parts of Africa and Asia now, or it wasn't so
popular, at least in some of those places before.
I think, frankly, that this worry that soccer is
the magical evil sports virus that's gonna take over everything and
kill off other forms of sports is really overblown.
I'm not sure it's really all that serious a worry, and
if you look at the global situation of sports,
what you notice is that yes, soccer is increasingly everywhere.
But you still have these very strong different national traditions and
tastes and likes and dislikes.
So, Aussie rules football, for those of you from Australia.
It's a giant thing in Australia but it's Aussie rules football,
it's not really played in many other countries around the world.
So there you have this adherence to a national sports version.
Yes, soccer's big in Australia, but
I've been told all over the street that Aussie rules football is actually bigger.
In the United States, baseball, which Europe, for example, is not interested in
at all, remains a giant part of the sporting brew in this country.
So I think what we're gonna see in the future is certainly soccer retaining this
global prominence but also these different situations,
different configurations of sports in different parts of the world.
And just to sum up the lecture,
what I've been talking about is the hyper-commercialization of professional
sports, what money and this age of big money has meant for sports.
And who knows what the future is gonna bring, but it's pretty clear that sports
as a hyper-commercialized enterprise, love it or leave it, is here to stay,
and that it's not as if the money is simply gonna vanish from sports.
If anything, I think we're gonna see sports get increasingly commercialized.
The commercial and money stakes increasing rather than decreasing as we go forward
into the future.
[MUSIC]
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