Sport is normatively cast as virtuous; something to view, enjoy, participate in, develop community around, and distract from the realities of everyday life. Throughout history, in its various forms and practices, sport has been exalted as a portentous and unifying experience for communities and nations. Think of the narratives around India’s win in the 1983 Cricket World Cup which sensitized India about its potential as a country, the 1971 U.S.-China ping-pong exchange which transformed American perceptions of “Communist” China or Nelson Mandela’s conciliatory support of South Africa’s rugby team, the Springboks, long a symbol of white Afrikanerdom, during the 1995 Rugby World Cup.
In our day-to-day, we are wont to celebrate sport for nurturing teamwork, enhancing physique and building character. Sport makes for a pastime, albeit one which triggers all sorts of emotions in spectators, audiences, and players while forming bonds and networks in both the physical and virtual realms. Hence, there are fan clubs and social media sport communities which keep members captivated and engrossed in player abilities, physique, statistics and scores, even when games are not being broadcast. The question of who better Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo is, the death of Kobe Bryant, the Olympics and so on dominate conversations in several countries, including some of the most remote places in the world. The cumulative effect of this is a mass, global population which sees sport as a vital part of our societies, cultures and lives. In these ways and others, sport is seen as a force transcending ideological, cultural, racial and social boundaries.
Sport, however, like all social and cultural phenomena, is deeply implicated in power relations. While the above reasons for the exaltation of sport are true and deeply felt by many, they often conceal the role and function of unequal power relations. In sport, we can see how the gender binary is used to exclude transgender women from competing, how colonial cultures of toxic masculinity and racism are perpetuated, how the glorification of violence is normalized through entertainment, and how nationalism, ethnicism, and anti-black racism are fostered and normalised through the sense of belonging and community created by particular sporting organisations or teams. These realities are not accidental, but rather reflect the deep embeddedness of inequities in all aspects of social life, including sport. What makes the analysis of sport particularly compelling is how deeply sports are embedded in our daily lives, yet they are rarely subjected to scrutiny, particularly from a critical diversity lens.
Whenever human beings come together, for sport or otherwise, power differences and diversity issues come into play. We can think of how loyalties mobilized along lines of nationalism and ethnicity arise in stadia where fans supporting different football teams clash or how intersecting forms of dominance, such as racism, sexism, ableism, tribalism, and nationalism, are enacted, reproduced and even resisted in and outside the field of play. Considered in this way, the sporting arena literally and symbolically becomes a field for the expression of individual and collective politics, power, difference, and resistance. Conversely, political, economic and social issues constantly circulate, making their way into the sports field. Recently, FIFA, the federation that controls world football, has been embroiled in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine to the point where sport has equally become a battleground for various European interests directly and indirectly involved in the conflict. This has led to debates on the relationship between sport and politics and whether it is possible to draw a line separating the two. While these affirm the entanglement of sport and politics, we remain cognizant of the absence of sustained and systematic critiques of the power differences and diversity issues that pervade the sporting arena particularly during the mundane participation in, viewership of, networking in, sponsorship of and broadcasting of sport. Despite the issues of systemic inequality that operate through its material and discursive dimensions, sport often evades critical interrogation during efforts to make sense of social dynamics that reproduce, resist, and reframe asymmetries of power.