Sport has been in the news for the wrong reasons, lately, and not for the first time, either.
The lid is being lifted into the extent of the Kinahan gang’s involvement in boxing and how it prevented our greatest sports heroine, Katie Taylor, from appearing in a professional bout in Ireland.
We also see how, in Gaelic games, female players are still being treated as second-class citizens with Kerry footballer Louise Ní Mhuircheartaigh highlighting her team’s lack of access to the county’s centre of excellence and others pointing out the paltry expenses female intercounty players get compared to men.
This contrasts with Kylian Mbappé’s disgusting signing on fee of €150m and an annual salary of €100m, after tax, to stay with Paris Saint-Germain. PSG are owned by the state of Qatar which will host the Fifa World Cup later this year at an estimated cost of €200 billion, but the real cost is in human lives: thousands of migrant workers have died building the infrastructure needed to host the event.
Some good news was the coming out of Jake Daniels, the 17-year-old footballer who plays for Championship club Blackpool. But why is Jake the first male English professional footballer in 32 years to do so? Perhaps it’s the homophobic toxic masculinity cloud that hangs over men’s sport — elite sport, especially.
Sports fans know about the corruption, sexism and inequalities in sport but still we consume it in huge gulps. Why?
Could it be what French academics Jean-Marie Brohm and Marc Perelman refer to as the “opium of sport”, how it facilitates “the narcotisation of the conscience”? Is sport really what they refer to as an infantilising drunkenness or narcosis, a type of fiddling while Rome burns (or while the planet is being destroyed by man-made emissions and Ukraine is being bombed to obliteration by Russia before our eyes)?
Perelman says that sport is society’s only project steamrolling modernity, eliminating all obstacles. Society has no other project, he says, except barbarian sport. Everybody is flocking to it and everybody is joining in. This is difficult to disprove.
The Premier League is the most popular sports league in the world. It is shown live in 212 territories to 643 million homes with a potential TV audience of 4.7 billion people. I’m one of those people, my home is one of those homes. ‘European Championship’ and ‘Premier League’ were the most searched terms in Google in Ireland in 2021 and Christian Eriksen was the most searched name.
In India, 93 per cent of people (1.28 billion souls) self-identify as sports fans, while 70 per cent of people in the USA follow sport and devote an average of 7.7 hours a week to it. In 2016, the financial value of sport was estimated to be $500bn in the United States and $1.3 trillion worldwide.
In 2019, 46 per cent of Ireland’s adult population — 1.7 million people — participated regularly in sport (through volunteering, attending sports events or being a member of a sports club), almost evenly split across genders. I’m sure the percentage of children participating was much higher.
The multiplicity of reasons why sport is so popular and how it has shaped my life are two of the themes of my latest book The Game. But the joy that we derive from sport comes at a serious price.
The question is: given that sport facilitates such appalling and damaging behaviour, should we avoid it altogether? By our involvement in sport, are we somehow condoning or facilitating so many abhorrent actions? Would we be better off without sport in our lives at all, so we could better manage climate change, the inequalities in Irish society and the crisis in Ukraine?
But wouldn’t that deprive our children of all the joy and togetherness they will experience this weekend and every weekend in Ireland? And the volunteerism in clubs and communities up and down the country which is such a font of wellbeing, good mental health and helping to avoid isolation?
Perhaps instead of scrapping sport, we should put it in perspective. The French philosopher Pierre-Henry Frangne says that “sport can only be ethical and virtuous through the moderation of our approach, through the restrained nature of our relationship with it, through the purpose which we confer on it — since it has none of its own, being just a game, a futile activity, even a derisory one”.
We have to be more like the children Eduardo Galeano eulogises in the epigraph of his book Football in Sun and Shadow: “The pages that follow are dedicated to the children who once upon a time, years ago, crossed my path on Calella de la Costa. They had been playing football and were singing: We lost, we won, either way we had fun.”
Rather than walking away from sport, we can work together to make it better. We can look at our choices when we consume sport and our behaviour before, during and after games — men, especially, need to look to their behaviour. We can call out the ills of sport instead of ignoring or denying them.
American sports writers Jessica Luther and Kavitha A Davidson point to the examples of athletes like Megan Rapinoe and Colin Kaepernick, who show real heroism and have made huge sacrifices to ensure sport can be better. Instead of walking away from sport, Rapinoe and Kaepernick and Luther and Davidson stand and fight for its soul.
“We have to be better,” Rapinoe said when the victorious US women’s football team was feted as world champions in New York City in 2019 and after she stood up to Donald Trump, who doesn’t have a sporting bone in his body. “We have to love more, hate less. We gotta listen more and talk less.”
Luther and Davidson say: “There is so far to go [for sport] in so many ways, but at the same time, sports like tennis are diversifying, LGBTQ+ athletes are carving out a space for themselves … women athletes and players are demanding deserving compensations, and owners and mega event organisers are subject to sustained, organised criticism. This is why we can’t all just walk away. Sports are worth saving and changing.”
Tadhg Coakley is a novelist and sports writer. His latest book, The Game: A Journey into the Heart of Sport, has just been published by Merrion Press.
