Glitterati and Grit: The Perils and Possibilities of Sports Mega-Event Research

Abstract

Amid the whirling swirl of overlapping global crises—from extreme inequality and climate change to unaccountable elite power and securitized violence at the international and domestic levels—sport studies may, on their surface, appear superfluous. However, this article argues that critical academic scholarship on sports mega-events like the Olympic Games and soccer World Cup can, due to these events’ cultural power and global scope, be an effective way to simultaneously address the socio-structural problems that mark the 21st century. In this article, I argue that research on the cultural politics of sport can wedge open discursive space to challenge the hegemonic normative order and to potentially reap material gains from below. To that end, I delineate possible research avenues that sports mega-events stimulate, explicating the leverage they could achieve. Along the way, I argue for doing research and writing that is explicitly political. Last, leaning on recent examples of scholarship in sport studies and beyond, I assert the importance of concept building at the theoretical middle-level as well as writing critical descriptive histories.

Keywords

Olympics mega-events World Cup methodology scholar activism

Introduction

Living in the 21st century is intense. The world increasingly resembles a ferocious Matryoshka doll of wince-worthy social problems, from the dubious use of public money (Congressional Research Service, 2023) to turbo-charged gentrification and escalating homelessness (Dougherty, 2023) to policing that is both violent and racialized (Mapping Police Violence, 2022). All this is unfolding amid off-the-charts inequality (Oxfam International, 2023), whipsaw climate change (IPCC, 2022), and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism (Berberoglu, 2021). In such a conjuncture, sports studies may at first glance seem gratuitous, superfluous, or otherwise ornamental. But that is where sports mega-events come in. Because sports mega-events like the Olympics and the World Cup of soccer have transmogrified into such massive, sociopolitical juggernauts, they raise numerous, important questions—and vital avenues of research—for those interested in the cultural politics of sport. Researching and writing about sports mega-events can help us address each of the aforementioned dispiriting trends in ways that demand deep thought, that can command public attention, that tee up political action, and that can even generate flickers of hope.

Cultural politics is an analytical approach that values “the cultural” as a contested site for struggles over politics, whether discursive, material, or symbolic. If, as Stuart Hall suggests, cultural politics means “combining the study of symbolic forms and meanings with the study of power,” or more specifically what he calls the “insertion of symbolic processes into societal contexts and their imbrication with power” (Hall et al., 1997, p. 24, 25), then a cultural politics of sport brings that politicized intellectual task into the sphere of sport studies. The cultural politics of sport engages with battles over identity, meaning, inclusionary and exclusionary processes, and explores how all this relates to the distribution of social and economic capital inside and outside the sporting arena. Cultural politics are “not an abstract force that just floats in space and settles upon it,” notes political scientist Parenti (2006, p. 15), but materialize through a politically constructed social structure that is rooted in social relations, institutional arrangements, and history. The cultural politics of sport emerge at the crossroads of entertainment, politics, and power. It surfaces the machinations of power and ideology as they play out on the terrain of popular culture.

This article has three parts. First, leaning on research on the Olympic Games, I’ll break down what I mean by the exciting research possibilities that sports mega-event present. Second, I’ll spotlight the importance of doing research and writing that is explicitly political. Finally, I’ll make a plea for the importance of concept building at the theoretical middle-level—in the space between universal theory and particularistic histories—as well as fashioning critical descriptive histories, drawing from recent examples in sport studies and beyond.

The Olympic Games: Historical Trends, Research Opportunities

Let's be clear from the outset: sports mega-events have become sporty vectors barreling toward injustice, encompassing what Miéville (2022, p. 102) calls “piratical capitalism,” a volatile, extractive brand of rapacity that exacerbates inequality. The big dogs of sports mega-events—the Olympic Games and the soccer World Cup—conform to theorist Han's (2021, p. 21) insight that “Today's hypercapitalism transforms all human existence into a network of commercial relations. There is no area of life that can escape commercialization.” The Olympics are supported monetarily by some of the world's biggest and most powerful corporations—commercial firms like Alibaba, Coca-Cola, Intel, Samsung, and Visa—that pay millions to be associated with the Olympic brand. Each local Olympic organizing committee also forms relations with domestic sponsors: for instance, Tokyo 2020 organizers hauled in more than $3 billion from companies like Canon, Fujitsu, and Asahi Breweries, setting an all-time record (Lau, 2021). In total, television broadcasters and corporate sponsors contributed more than 90% of the revenue flowing to the International Olympic Committee (IOC): 61% of this revenue comes from broadcasters and another 30% from corporate partners, according to the organization's 2021 annual report (IOC, 2022, p. 173).

The Olympic Games specialize in the questionable spending of public money. It's Etch-A-Sketch economics in a tracksuit. For instance, the bid team for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics originally claimed the Games would cost $7.3 billion. But then, the official costs more than doubled to $15.4 billion. However, according to a government audit in Japan, the actual cost was more like $26 billion. Postponement added billions more, bringing the total to around $30 billion (Demsas, 2021). Taxpayers covered all but $6.7 billion of the price tag. These jaw-dropping cost overruns—well over 200%—not only exceed the historical average for Olympic overspending, but made Tokyo 2020 the most expensive Summer Games to date (Wade, 2020).

But the Tokyo 2020 Games conform to a wider trend. University of Oxford researchers analyzed Olympics between 1960 and 2020 for which reliable data exists and found that every single Games ran over its initially stated budget, with an average cost overrun of 172%, a markedly higher mark-up rate than other mega-projects (Flyvbjerg et al., 2021). When Vancouver-based activist Am Johal told me more than a decade ago that “The Olympics are a corporate franchise that you buy with public money,” he was not wrong (Boykoff, 2011, pp. 57–58). If you want to see a rigged regime of accumulation that facilitates trickle-up economics, one needs to look no further than the Olympic system and the IOC.

Sports mega-events materially reorganize space. The Olympics achieve this in part through their tendency to turbo-charge gentrification and displacement, the main drivers of homelessness. During the lead-in to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, more than a million people were displaced from their homes to make way for the Games, according to the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions. This annihilated the stockpile of affordable rental units, hurting local workers, many of whom were displaced without the benefit of impartial processes (Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, 2009, p. 8).

This was not merely a China problem—it is an Olympic problem. In the years before the London 2012 Games, around 1,000 residents were dislodged from their homes. Sebastian Coe, the celebrated British Olympian who chaired the London Organizing Committee, vowed in an article titled “It's Ludicrous to Claim the Olympics Will Lead to Evictions and Poverty” that the Games would regenerate East London and “create between 30,000 and 40,000 new homes in the area.” Much of this housing stock, he promised, would be “‘affordable housing’ available to key workers such as nurses or teachers” (Coe, 2007). Ten years later, only 13,000 homes had been built in the former Olympic zone, and only 11% of those were affordable to working-class Londoners on average incomes (Wainwright, 2022). Longtime residents in the Olympics’ five host boroughs experienced significant rent escalation, forcing them to relocate. In the years after the Olympics, Newham, one of the host boroughs, saw the largest spike in home prices in all of London (Horton, 2018). London Mayor Boris Johnson vowed that he would help end all homelessness in the city by 2012, but by early 2016, the number of rough sleepers had doubled (Barrell, 2016). Newham became the London borough with the highest rate of homelessness (Tobin, 2018).

Rio de Janeiro experienced intensive displacement ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics, with 77,000 evictions, many of them in favelas, the informal, high-density settlements with insecure property rights that span the city (Derks et al., 2020, p. 189). The construction of the new National Stadium for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics displaced numerous homeless individuals and decimated a public housing complex, scattering its residents around the metropolis and shattering a community (Suzuki et al., 2018). Remarkably, two women and a man who lost their homes in the Kasumigaoka public housing complex were also displaced by the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (Zirin & Boykoff, 2019).

In Los Angeles, host to the upcoming 2028 Summer Olympics, SoFi Stadium, which is slated to host the Games’ opening ceremonies, has already contributed to the displacement of working-class residents and the restructuring of material space in ways that benefit the affluent. Same for Los Angeles Football Club's Stadium, which will be used as temporary facilities for swimming, diving, and synchronized swimming competitions. As researcher Robertson (2022, p. 217) put it: LA's Olympics-inflected development advances “accumulation by dispossession around stadiums.” Her research shows that, “The city may have the sports infrastructure it technically needs to host, but that infrastructure has driven and continues to drive displacement, public subsidies for private profit, and the construction of a city oriented ever more to tourists and capital interests” (Robertson, 2022, p. 220). When the IOC chose Airbnb as an official Olympic sponsor back in 2019, it almost felt as if it were trolling critics (Boykoff, 2019). After all, around the world, Airbnb is “a significant contributing factor to gentrification” (Rabiei-Dastjerdi et al., 2022, p. 10).

The Olympics also underwrite violent and racist policing. The state of exception that the mega-events inevitably bring provides local and national police forces with an opportunity to secure all the special weapons, laws, and funding that would be difficult to obtain during normal political times (Hutchins & Andrejevic, 2021). Importantly, these weapons and laws can remain in place after the Games, coalescing into the new normal for policing.

For example, the French National Assembly fast-tracked a law enabling the use of AI-driven video surveillance to track Olympics-goers. The law, passed in 2023, allows for algorithmic video surveillance to detect and notify police of “suspicious” or “abnormal” activity in Olympic crowds, analyzing video data from drones and fixed CCTV cameras. The law is slated to remain in place through March 2025, many months after the Olympics have transpired (Zirin & Boykoff, 2023). Similarly, the Tokyo 2020 Games created serious civil-liberties concerns. In 2017, Japanese legislators jammed anti-terrorism legislation through parliament, justifying the rushed nature of its passage by asserting the need to securitize the Olympics. The legislation added hundreds of new crimes to Japanese law, including specific offenses like sit-ins to oppose the construction of new apartment buildings. The UN special rapporteur on the right to privacy said Japan's government had used fear to push through “defective” legislation (McCurry, 2017).

Around a year before the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Games began, Olympic security head Andrei Augusto Rodrigues announced that the Games would deploy 85,000 personnel, more than doubling the number of security officers in London in 2012 (Kaiser & Jacobs, 2016). Although Rio's Olympic bid acknowledged that “Brazil has no history of any significant international or domestic terrorist activity and Brazilian authorities have not identified any terrorism threats to the 2016 Games in Brazil,” the security force included 1,500 people whose sole focus was anti-terrorism (Rio 2016, 2009, p. 27). Moreover, the Rio bid explicitly conflated activism and terrorism. In a section curiously titled “Activist/Terrorist Risks” the bidders specifically flagged “issue motivated groups” that are “concerned with indigenous rights, environmental or anti-globalization issues.” (Rio 2016, 2009, p. 33). During the Games, the highly racialized favelas that dot the urban terrain in Rio were heavily policed by security forces well known for racist policing practices.

Off-the-charts inequality is one of the most stark and gruesome political markers of our current conjuncture. It has become almost prosaic to say that the richest of the rich continuously see their wealth rise astronomically. Oxfam International (2023) found that since the COVID pandemic began in 2020, the richest 1% across the globe have mopped up nearly two-thirds of all newly created wealth. This amounts to almost twice the amount of money that is held by the bottom 99% of the world's entire population. The daily gains of billionaires are bracing. Each day, their fortunes surge by $2.7 billion. Meanwhile, and not unrelatedly, these same billionaires are severely under-taxed.

How does this relate to sports mega-events? When the IOC and FIFA touch down in the host city and country, they experience tax-free status. Both groups are based in Switzerland where they can more easily avoid fiscal scrutiny. And there is no question that the Olympic chorus sings with a decidedly upper-class accent. The IOC was started by a French Baron back in the 1890s. The IOC is still disproportionately packed with aristocrats: of its 106 members, around a dozen are princes, princesses, lords, barons, and sheikhs (International Olympic Committee, 2024).

Casey Wasserman, who oversaw the successful Olympic bid in Los Angeles and now is the chair of the LA 28 organizing committee is a member of the economic glitterati through and through. He is the owner and CEO of Wasserman—a management and marketing company focused on sports that has represented numerous professional and Olympic athletes. Not coincidentally, he is also the grandson of Hollywood powerbroker Lew Wasserman, a name that opens many doors. As Sports Business Journal put it, “for Wasserman, money will never be a problem” (Schoenfeld, 2017).

Then there is whipsaw climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in 2022 that climate disruption has substantially diminished global food and water security. Today, around half of the global population experiences severe water scarcity at some point in the year. Ecosystems on land and in water have seen irreversible losses. Climate change has shifted the timing of the seasons with “Widespread deterioration of ecosystem structure and function, resilience and natural adaptive capacity” creating “adverse socioeconomic consequences” that disproportionately affect the world's poor (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022). Such Old Testament-style eco-catastrophe has serious implications for sports mega-events. Researchers have found that, due to climate change, the Winter Olympics can feasibly be staged in fewer and fewer locations (Goldblatt, 2020; Ross & Orr, 2022; Scott et al., 2015).

And yet, the IOC continues to engage in extreme greenwashing: a public display of concern for the environment and the propensity to claim credit for providing solutions while in actuality doing the bare minimum, if anything, to make material ecological improvements. One systematic analysis of sustainability follow-through in all Olympic Games between 1992 and 2020 found a significant gap between IOC rhetoric and reality (Müller et al., 2021). The authors assessed three types of sustainability: ecological, social, and economic. Overall, the researchers found that the Olympic Games achieved “medium” sustainability marks, earning 48 out of 100 points on their 9-indicator scale. With the ecological dimension, host cities averaged 44 points, while the mean for social and economic sustainability were 51 and 47, respectively. The scholars found that Olympic-style sustainability decreased over time, with the environmental dimension declining the most. In other words, as the IOC ramped up its environmental sustainability rhetoric, its follow-through weakened (Müller et al., 2021). Meanwhile, when local communities attempt to protect their natural environment, they have been steamrolled by the IOC and FIFA.

The 21st century has witnessed the rise of authoritarianism, vindictive nationalism, and incipient fascism (Berberoglu, 2021; Mishra, 2017; Naím, 2022; Robinson, 2019). Simultaneously, the International Olympic Committee has become much more authoritarian and less democratic in its approach to running the Olympics. In 2021, after IOC President Thomas Bach announced that he planned to run for reelection, IOC members heaped histrionics on Bach in ways that resembled the fawning treatment of dictators by obsequious underlings. One reverentially proclaimed, “We have one captain, and that captain is you.” Bach was then reelected with straight-up dictator numbers: 93-1 with four abstentions (Keh, 2021).

More broadly, the IOC increasingly makes big decisions behind closed doors. Bach has become ever more iron-fisted and punitive toward those who do not fall into line. Richard Pound, the most senior member of the IOC, said before his retirement in 2022, “I paid the price for publicly expressed opposition to the IOC's decisions, through my removal as chairman of OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services), as director of OCS (Olympic Channel Services) and from the Legal Affairs Commission” (Owen, 2022). If the senior member of the IOC was punished for showing the temerity to question the IOC's decisions, how can we expect junior members not to stay in line?

Under Bach's leadership, the IOC has started to resemble the very authoritarian governments that it is not only unwilling to criticize but with whom it openly collaborates. This led German investigative journalist Jens Weinreich, who has covered the IOC for more than three decades, to state, “The IOC itself is a totalitarian system. More than ever” (Boykoff, 2022a).

These economic, social, and political trends—overspending, gentrification and displacement, police militarization, inequality, greenwashing, and anti-democratic practices—form a baseline empirical reality that, in turn, creates opportunities for critical, interdisciplinary research in the cultural politics of sport. Researchers could assess Olympic promises—as lodged in bid documents and emerging from the throats of Olympic powerbrokers—and do post facto work that holds the powerful accountable. There is plenty of room for critical research on corporate sponsors of the IOC and FIFA, examining the potential chasm between PR words and real-world deeds. In addition, what are the opportunity costs for particular host cities and countries? The dynamics of mega-event-induced gentrification and displacement scream out for on-the-ground ethnographic work on and with working-class communities that are affected by the Olympics and World Cup. And those with connections to high-profile athletes could connect these athletes to the affected communities in the city or country they temporarily share. The militarization of public space could jumpstart ethnographic research that centers on marginalized populations affected by securitization processes inherent to the Olympics and World Cup. And if access can be secured, doing ethnographic work inside security networks could be remarkably revelatory (Fussey et al., 2016). In regards to inequality, researchers could investigate the conflicts of interest nestled within the folds of sports mega-events. The grifting princelings at the IOC and FIFA deserve intense scrutiny; capitalizing on the state of exception on multiple planes, their privilege and profit demand critical excavation. When it comes to mega-events, climate change, and greenwashing critical researchers could extend Müller et al.'s (2021) macro-analysis while zooming in for detailed case studies that chart the gap between green promises and delivery. An uptick in research on FIFA's sustainability promises would be most welcome, especially after the Qatar 2022 men's World Cup, which was an unequivocal exercise in greenwashing (Boykoff, 2022b; Revill, 2023). This trend is not dwindling anytime soon: Saudi Arabia is slated to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games—a calculated step on the road to hosting a future Olympics or World Cup (Ghantous, 2022; Taylor et al., 2023). Indeed, it now appears that Saudi Arabia is in pole position to host the 2034 men's World Cup after FIFA handed the opening matches of the 2026 tournament to the South American nations of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and the rest of the event to Morocco in Africa and Portugal and Spain in Europe. Finally, when it comes to the anti-democratic actions that are bricked into sports mega-events, detailed, critical analysis of the internal processes of organizations like the IOC and FIFA as well as local organizing committees could go a long way in illuminating how these groups operate. With authoritarians increasingly sportswashing their political sins while sopping up surplus capital, research in this area could generate significant public and media interest. In short, critical research possibilities abound when it comes to the cultural politics of sport.

Getting Political

Hopefully, it is clear that researching and writing about sports-mega-events can be a productive way to critically engage with the world's most burning questions. It is a topic that demands interdisciplinarity and intersectionality to fully excavate what Hall describes as “The moment of power … in the historically situated intervention of ideology in practices of signification” (Hall et al., 1997, p. 30). It is also a topic that gets sucked into the vortex of mainstream media attention. Because academics are increasingly securing traction in the press, discussing the negative externalities of sports mega-events, it might seem as if critical scholars are winning. I’m not so sure. After all, the International Olympic Committee and FIFA continue to run their events with craven brazenness, hauling in monster profits along the way. To be sure, academics, critical journalists, and human-rights workers have made enormous strides in raising discursive awareness around the ugly political underbelly of sports mega-events. But the material battle has not yet been won. To actually win—which is to say reorient the money shuffle in a more equitable direction, protect local communities, and secure a better deal for worker-athletes across the sporty board—scholars need to get political. To do otherwise is to sunbathe on a volcano.

But what do I mean by getting political? Getting political means fighting with and for what Angela Davis (2016, p. 107) calls “surplus populations” or “disposable populations,” which, she argues, are comprised largely of “people of color and immigrant populations from the countries of the Global South.” These “surplus populations” are routinely gobbled up and spit out by sports mega-events, whether through misdirected tax money that goes to Games rather than homes, or through the brass-knuckle processes of displacement and gentrification. “Disposable populations” crop up in the Global North as well, of course, including in Japan where the elderly and homeless were displaced or in Los Angeles where working-class people are being squeezed from their homes on the road to full-throttle gentrification. This “project of disposability,” as Rinaldo Walcott, puts it, is grounded in “epistemological formations of anti-blackness” that require visible political interventions (Walcott, 2021, p. 63, 66).

If politics refers to actions related to governance, whether macro-political acts involving states and governments or micro-political activities carried out by groups and individuals in the quest for power and influence, then engaging in politics means publicly confronting governmental actions, laws, and regulations in the public sphere. It can also mean challenging the discriminatory and injurious policies and practices of quasi-state entities like the IOC and FIFA as well as powerful economic entities like the corporations that sponsor sports mega-events. When the macro-politics of sport governance clash with the micro-politics of athletes and their allies, an opportunity emerges for critical scholars of the cultural politics of sport, especially when athlete-driven groups press for social justice in ways that challenge predominant power structures.

The way sport is structured for and experienced by the general public can quietly normalize the political-economic machinations of capitalist democracies, not only by reflecting capitalist relations but also by socially reproducing them. As Kalman-Lamb (2019, 517) shows how “athletic labor and spectatorship reproduce sport through mechanisms that are not merely ideological” but that “there is an affective component to this reproduction” that forms “a profound reproductive impact upon capitalism.” He notes (2019, 520) that social reproduction vis-à-vis sport “must be understood as part of intersectional systems of oppression: racism, patriarchy, and homophobic and heteronormative structures make some bodies more vulnerable than others, constraining them—in some cases even compelling them—to yield their labor in social reproductive contexts.” This points toward another way to politically engage is to spotlight what Walcott calls “the discontinuous continuity that constitutes one historical period” and to call out the injustices that are bricked into that “discontinuous continuity” (Walcott, 2021, p. 37).

Politics are anchored in questions of power, identity, rights, justice, ethics, and morality, all of which are central to the cultural politics of sport. To illustrate this, consider how politics thrum through the quotidian rhythms of the everyday sports aficionado. After waking up and switching on our mobile phone, algorithms, developed through public–private partnerships, feed us curated news. We may scoop ourselves a bowl of cereal, chosen because our favorite footballer festoons the box, thanks to a commercial sponsorship agreement. Then we slip on our jersey, made in a distant land under a particular labor regime designed to enhance capital accumulation. On that kit sits the corporate logo of a shadowy betting company or a firm that has dodged taxes by locating itself in Ireland or the Cayman Islands. We call a rideshare car, operating under local ordinances, that transports us to a stadium bearing the name of a corporate behemoth on its façade. We join our comrades and celebrate the fact that one supporters’ chant featuring a line that implores fans to “grab your women and drink your beer” has been nixed this season because of concerns from local activists and advocates that the song is sexist. Our friend mentions that the newly signed striker from Argentina has yet to join the squad because of visa issues embedded in foreign policy and international relations. We console ourselves by buying a round of local beers or coffees for our comrades—the stadium has a policy that supports local businesses and boxes out the beer-brewing behemoths. Each of these micro-acts brims with politics and scythes space for in-depth political interventions by researchers like you and me. It's up to us to create fresh political grammars for social conflicts—and, in the bigger picture, to identify, illuminate, and critique the conditions that give rise to the politics of sport, as well as the ideologies that both buttress and undercut these conditions. But, at this particular conjuncture, engaging in the messy world of politics is key.

For those keen to rethink—and even rejigger—the cultural politics of sport, there are plenty of opportunities to engage politically. Many academics have jumped into the fray, embodying what Edward Said described as the public intellectual: “Someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them)” and who does this with “an edge” (Said, 1994, p. 11). For me, scholarly social-science research is the indispensable bedrock upon which such public-intellectual work is built.

I distinguish between the public intellectual—whose interventions inhabit the mediascape—and the scholar-activist whose work with protest groups sometimes involves protesting alongside them. Public intellectuals write opinion essays for newspapers and appear as pundits on television, the radio, and podcasts. They provide quotes to journalists for their stories. Scholar-activists embed themselves in movements for extended periods. They attend meetings, they do unglamorous behind-the-scenes work, they link elbows with protesters at mobilizations, they inhale tear gas with activists, and they give speeches at public events. Public intellectuals frame and reframe political reality. Scholar-activists push to change it.

Concepts! Concepts! Concepts!

In academic research, public-intellectual work, and scholar activism, concept building is paramount. Creating original, captivating—and even catchy—concepts can help us connect the empirical dots, enabling us to skate through space and time fashioning patterns and relationships that help make sense of the whirling swirl of the now. Building innovative analytical categories is not only a vital intellectual act, but also an intellectually generous act.

Before I offer some illustrations, I wish to contend that creating grand, universal theory is overly ambitious amid the political urgency of our current conjuncture. Instead, the examples I’ll offer share a dedication to middle-level theory, or what sociologist Merton (1968, pp. 39–40), called “theories of the middle range” that zero in on “delimited aspects of social phenomena,” hovering in the theoretical space between universal laws and historiography, between covering law and description. For Merton, middle-range theorizing was meant to steer empirical research. The middle-range approach, hovering between universal grand theorizing and particularistic histories, can help us make sense of the descriptive specificity of the empirical world. Context is crucial. Action is central. Dynamism is essential.

Onward to some conceptual exemplars. In Black Reconstruction in America, DuBois (1935) differentiated between a “public and psychological wage” of the mind and the material wage one can put in their pocket. DuBois (1935, pp. 700–701) wrote,

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.

DuBois used concept work to slice to the heart of what upheld the racialized system: elections, policing, education, and the media. The use value of this concept was immense, and it was later adopted and adapted by Roediger (1999) as “the wages of whiteness.” This concept work has clear implications for sport and sports fandom. Zenquis and Mwaniki (2019, 31) found that when the US media covered the WNBA super-sister duo Nnemkadi and Chinenye Ogwumike that they engaged in “color-bland racism”—a concerted tweak of Bonilla-Silva's (2014) “color-blind racism”—whereby “the athletic feats of Black women are normalized in the context of sport” under “the assumption of Black (natural) athletic ability” which “means that it is no longer something truly special, whether acquired naturally or through hard work.” Their middle-level conceptual contribution—“color-bland racism”—is exportable, perhaps especially in the ostensibly post-racial moment in the US and elsewhere, where race remains unengaged as a lever of political understanding.

Another example of conceptual theory-building with potential use value for sport studies comes from Nancy Fraser. In her book Cannibal Capitalism, she examines the dual engines of capitalism: accumulation through exploitation and expropriation, or what she calls the “the two exes” (Fraser, 2022; Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018). The former arrives through the implicit agreement that workers succumb to under capitalism whereby they sell their labor to capitalists who legally skim off surplus value to create wealth, which certainly applies to athletes acting in concert with global sports bodies, but also to workers in the athletic apparel industry. The latter often plays out in ferocious fashion, with expropriation occurring under duress and sometimes extra-legally (Fraser, 2022, pp. 14–16; Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018, pp. 104–107). Expropriation undergirds exploitation and includes the privatization of public commons and the use of debt—such as student debt—to extract profits. To maintain profit flow, capital must vacuum up ever larger swathes of the already-marginalized population into its confiscatory vortex. Capitalism cannibalizes to reproduce itself. As a concept, it helps clarify the historical substructure of our present conjuncture. To say this is relevant to the mega-event-induced nexus of displacement and gentrification—let alone the IOC and FIFA's modes of capital accumulation—is to make an understatement. Just look at Gaffney's (2010, 2016) scholarship on how the one–two punch of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Rio Olympics enabled the simultaneous intensification of real-estate speculation and the brass-knuckle policing and displacement of already-marginalized favela populations.

Fraser also points to “boundary struggles,” the sociopolitical flashpoints that are bricked into capitalism “where production meets reproduction, economy meets polity, and human society meets non-human nature. As nodes of contradiction and potential crisis, these boundaries are both sites and stakes of struggle: at once locations where conflict erupts and objects of confrontation” (Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018, p. 167). This is relevant to studying sport's political-economic production and social reproduction as well as gendered disparities, greenwashing, and more. Along the way, Fraser reminds us the vital axis of politics when she harkens “capitalism's political conditions of possibility: its reliance on public powers to establish and enforce its constituent of norms” (Fraser, 2022, p. 12). Politics matter.

Another example of middle-range box-building arrives from geography: higienização, a word in Brazilian Portuguese that points up a particular brand of social displacement that foregrounds the colonial legacy of racism mixed with stiff-lipped class stigma. Higienização takes an already useful concept—gentrification-generated displacement—and laces it with a local exactitude that is attuned to the specific context of urban Brazil (Garmany & Richmond, 2020; Halley, 2014). This highlights the importance of reworking concepts in light of fresh developments and contexts.

Thus far, I have deliberately borrowed concepts from outside sport studies, as I believe that to carry out impactful research we need to slide outside the cozy confines of our chosen disciplines. Political scientist James C. Scott put it this way: “If half of your reading is not outside the confines of political science, you are risking extinction … Most of the notable innovations in the discipline have come in the form of insights, perspectives, concepts, and paradigms originating elsewhere. Reading exclusively within the discipline is to risk reproducing orthodoxies.” (Kohli et al., 1995, p. 37, emphasis in original). Although he was writing about his experiences in political science, the insight applies equally to all of us, regardless of our home discipline and core training.

To be sure, the field of sports studies offers examples of exportable concepts. Take, for instance, the work of Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva (2025). In their forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game, they use mixed-methods, including numerous interviews with former college football players, to examine exploitation and harm in the sport. Their theoretical centerpiece is structural coercion, which they anchor in an analysis of racial capitalism as a fundamental force that pulls young men into an exploitative vortex rooted in physical and mental harm to quite rationally pursue life opportunities that are otherwise systematically denied them. In doing so, they deploy Hatton's (2020) concept of “status coercion” to show how players are yanked forward through the system. Structural coercion draws them to campus and status coercion drives them through it. This multidisciplinary research touches on so many fields, from education and coaching to economics and psychology.

Then there is Andrews (2019) and his conceptualization of “uber-sport,” which he characterizes as a particular configuration of professional sport as a popular entertainment product rooted in corporate capitalism, consumerism, neoliberalism, and nationalism. He asserts that uber-sport is both “an empirical vehicle” and “an explanatory device” meant to generate context-rich studies rooted in corporatization, commercialization, spectacularization, and celebritization (Andrews, 2019, p. 5, 9). Importantly, his work aims to illuminate politics and processes of politicization. In that same spirit, I have, in my own work, tried to lift up concepts—whether celebration capitalism or sportswashing—to help make sense of the social, political, and economic facets of sport (Boykoff, 2013, 2022c). I certainly did not invent the idea of sportswashing, but I reworked it to include democratic contexts. The intent of this alteration was both analytical and political.

Although I’ve been touting concept building, I’d also like to advocate for writing descriptive histories from below. “Mere description” gets a bad rap. “Descriptive argument” takes five “archetypal forms,” according to political scientist Gerring (2012)—accounts, indicators, associations, syntheses, and typologies—and can ripple with inference, especially when tethered to concepts. Gerring (2012, p. 724) writes, “a descriptive argument is an argument about a descriptive relationship, which may or may not have causal implications.” Descriptive histories can also serve as a rich grist for cross-case concept building.

Just as nostalgia rarely paints a reliable portrait of the past, presentism's glimmer can distract from what matters. Sliding into a descriptive, historical register can pay big political and discursive dividends. First, one's work is more readable to a general audience. Second, it allows for a smoother slide into public-intellectual work, thereby sidestepping Pierre Bourdieu's claim that sport sociologists are “doubly dominated” in that the serious study of sport was marginalized within the field of sociology and maligned by powerbrokers in the sports world (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 153)—what sociologist Carrington (2010, p. 7) called the “double marginality” that sociologists studying sport can experience. Much has changed in the almost quarter-century since Bourdieu made that claim, and in the 13 years since Carrington wrote Race, Sports, and Politics, but in a way, much has remained the same.

Conclusion

Back in 2014, NBC paid a whopping $7.75 billion for US broadcasting rights for the Olympics through 2032 (Sandomir, 2014). NBC recently released a cheeky ad for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics featuring Paris Hilton (Hilton, 2023). The ad tees up uber-sport on a platter and clamors for a deep think on the cultural politics of sport on terrain pounded firm by thinkers like Stuart Hall, who championed reworking concepts, reshaping them to meet the political moment. In his essay “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’,” he reconceptualized popular culture—problematizing both the terms “popular” and “culture”—on the road to arguing that “Popular culture is one of the sites where [the] struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance” (Hall, 2019, p. 360). If sport is not popular culture—and if sports mega-events are not part of that popular culture, where consent is both reproduced and resisted—I don’t know what is.

Nestled inside sport as a form of popular culture sits the dialectic of resistance and restriction, or what Hall called “the double movement of containment and resistance.” (Hall, 2019, p. 348). This is the space of political struggle. Paris Hilton is right: in summer 2024, the eyes of the world will be on “the other Paris.” This global spectacle, glitzy and predictable as a rhinestone metronome, provides an opportunity for scholars to piggyjack the mega-event, piggybacking off it and hijacking it for the purpose of justice.

Because sports mega-events are not only enormously popular sport spectacles but also significant shapers of the sporting imaginary, they demand deep and determined intellectual excavation. Sports mega-events like the Olympic Games and soccer World Cups intersect with the most pressing social, political, economic, and environmental issues of our time: the use and abuse of taxpayer funds; intensified gentrification processes and attendant homelessness; policing that is violent, classist, and racialized; gobsmacking global inequality; Old Testament-style climate disruption; and the perils of ascendant political authoritarianism. Sportswashing is only intensifying as the 21st century unfolds, revealing a new-wave sporting realpolitik bracing in its scope. And because sports mega-events stretch geographically across the globe, research and writing that addresses these interlocking problems clamors for meaningful collaboration with area specialists and, when applicable, human-rights groups and grassroots activists. As I have attempted to demonstrate here, the possibilities are expansive and life is too short for academy-bound arcanity, for willful reconditeness.

With all that in mind, this article is meant to both raise and begin to address significant questions for those researching and writing about the cultural politics of sport in the 21st century. How can we rework our relationship to the cultural politics of sport, mindful that in the teeth of crisis, political engagement is vital? Yes, the 21st century is intense, but how can we evade what Said (1994, p. 110) described as “those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principal position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take” for fear of appearing “too political”? What if we embraced paradox with a glinty-eyed subversion, working through complexity with rigorous purpose, carving out fresh empirical and conceptual vectors for politics? What if we linked arms and embraced politics with vim and precision? What if all those PhDs were not simply to defend but also to go on the attack? What if.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jules Boykoff

Author Biography

Jules Boykoff is the author of six books on the politics of the Olympics, most recently What Are the Olympics For? (Bristol University Press, 2024). He teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon.

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