The success of the United States (U.S.) Women’s National Team (WNT) has encouraged millions of young female soccer players. With television viewership records being shattered at the 2019 World Cup, these elite athletes may inspire today’s young players to pursue the next level of their game, with the hopes of earning a college scholarship, signing a professional contract, or maybe donning that coveted red, white and blue jersey. However, the opportunity to achieve those dreams remains beyond reach for many girls due to the expenses associated with youth sport.

In recent years, the cost of youth sports has skyrocketed. During this time, physical activity levels decreased among youth from low-income backgrounds, and soccer exemplifies this change. Through informal interviews with several parents and coaches in the Northeast, we learned that a town recreational league costs anywhere from $200-$500 per season, and there are usually at least three seasons per calendar year (spring, summer, fall). More competitive club teams, meanwhile, typically cost between $2000-$4000 per year. One Long Island, New York, club listed their yearly tuition for 11 and 12 years olds at $2,875, excluding uniform costs and players’ travel expenses. The most prestigious clubs come with an even higher price tag. No matter what the level, these fees do not cover the costs of family involvement (such as hotels during tournaments) and/or training gear, which can cost thousands. Needless to say, the costs of participating quickly accumulate. Even though many clubs offer scholarships and financial aid, many families still struggle to get their children to and from practices and games.

Examining the Socioeconomic Backgrounds of Elite Soccer Players

Given these parameters, we wondered if playing at soccer’s top level was correlated with women’s socioeconomic backgrounds. To answer this question, we examined the social class background of elite level female soccer players. While we don’t have personal data on each player, we followed other scholars who have used athletes’ hometowns to approximate players’ socioeconomic status. We first researched the WNT roster and recorded all players’ hometowns as the place where they were born or raised. For example, Christen Press was born in Los Angeles, California but her biography indicates that she raised in Palos Verdes Estates, therefore her hometown was recorded as Palos Verdes[i]. We then looked up each woman’s hometown median income using the American Community Survey’s five-year estimates, which were based on data collected between 2013-2017. Because cost of living varies by state, we also examined how the women’s hometown median income compared to the median of their home state. This was calculated with two separate measures—the difference between the hometown and the state income and a ratio between the hometown and the state[ii].

According to our research, the average hometown income of a WNT player was $84,456. This figure is significantly higher than the US median income of $57,642. Of the 23 women on the WNT, only seven were from hometowns that fell below the US median. That means 69 percent of the athletes come from places with incomes above the U.S. median. Though 10 women’s hometowns fell below their respective state medians, only three women came from places where their hometown income fell far below the state median.  Regardless of which measure we used, middle and upper class women are overrepresented on the USWNT.

The WNT consists of elite-level talent drawn from two major feeder systems—the U.S. Youth Development program and the U.S. college system. Therefore, we also examined the income distribution of players in those pipelines. Without extensive vetted biographies, we could not discern if individuals were born and raised in different places, so we used the hometown listed on their official biography.

We collected data from two college soccer conferences on the West Coast—The Pac-12 and the West Coast Conference. This sample contained 610 players. Ultimately, we were able to collect hometown income data for 560 U.S. born female players in these two conferences.  Using the same income measures, only 100 collegiate players (17.9%) came from hometowns below the U.S. median and only 86 women (15.4%) came from places where the hometown income was far below the state median. The average hometown income for a collegiate player was $80,373. We also collected data from the Youth National Team rosters. These data include all women and girls who were on the rosters in September 2018. Of the 148 women listed on the seven youth teams, we were able to determine the hometown for 142 players. Their average hometown income was $78,920. Only 34 players (23.9%) were from hometowns below the U.S. median, and 22 players (15.5%) came from places far below the median.

Why Socioeconomic Background Matters

Overall, these data show that women from low-income communities are underrepresented in elite soccer. Pay-to-play sports enable girls from wealthy families to have more sport opportunities at all levels while constraining the chances of girls from low-income families. Further, due to the intersection of race and social class, women of color are disproportionally left out of sporting opportunities. Though the percentage of non-white players has increased since 2015, women of color still make up just over 20% of the 2019 roster. Furthermore, the five women of color who are on the team are not from low-income hometowns.

During this year’s World Cup, the fight for equal pay and treatment at the elite level has captured headlines. The 2019 team, inspired by previous generations of players, is making important strides on that front. However, we also need more measures in place that ensure soccer in the U.S. is accessible, affordable, and inclusive for future generations. Moving away from a pay-to-play model for all youth sports can help increase physical activity levels among all children while also ensuring that talented young athletes have the opportunity to strive towards the elite level regardless of their families’ income.

Jen McGovern, PhD, is an assistant professor of sociology at Monmouth University. Her research centers around how race, ethnicity, and gender interact to influence experience and opportunities within sport, exercise, and physical fitness.

Esther Wellman is a senior political science major at Monmouth University and a member of the women’s soccer team.

Notes:

[i] Becky Sauerbrunn was born in St Louis, Missouri ($38,644) but went to high school in Ladue City, Missouri ($203,205).  Because these two places are quite different, we used the median income for St Louis County ($50,936) where both places are located.

[ii] Hometowns where households earned less than 90% of the state median were far below the state median. In the dataset, this ranged from between $25 and $6930 below the median. For example, Julie Ertz is from Mesa, Arizona. At $52,155, Mesa’s median income is below the national median, but on par with Arizona’s state median ($53,510). Julie would be classified as below the U.S. median, below the state median, but NOT as far below the state median.

In 2016, Colin Kaepernick continued a tradition in US sports by staging a protest against racial injustice during the playing of the US national anthem. Following his initial protest, Kaepernick said:

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Kaepernick’s comments were in reference to a series of deaths of unarmed Black American men, such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice. Reactions to Kaepernick’s protest were split. Within the NFL and beyond, many Black athletes, performers, fans, and even some coaches and officials joined in the protest against state violence in Black communities. At the same time, many others vociferously objected while claiming to not be racist. The image above illustrates the color-blind racism of the objectors; an anti-black statement of on-going hatred (“We hated Kaepernick before…”) is modified by a racially neutral phrase (“For football reasons”). The denial of racism when protesting an anti-racist protest obscures the ongoing operation of racism as a multifaceted construct that disproportionality targets Black Americans. Moreover, it prevents understanding of the US’s failure to provide equal protections for all citizens when state violence and poverty disproportionately affects Black communities.

As the above figure illustrates, Black and White Americans tend to perceive race and racism differently. To a large extent whites take a more benign view on racialized social problems since they are less impacted by them than Blacks. This may be explained by the fact that ongoing racial segregation keeps them from having many meaningful interactions with Black people. This perceptual gap maps onto attitudes about the players’ protests; supporters of the protests tend to be Black and liberal, while opponents tend to be white and conservative. In fact, NFL fans (like other professional sports fans) have very little face-to-face interaction with players, which contributes to their deep racial misunderstandings and ill-interpretations of Black Americans. It is not coincidental then that the critics’ rhetoric has painted the protests as disrespectful, deviant, anti-patriotic, and anti-American.

To better understand how people interpret the recent protests, we interviewed 32 mostly white university student-athletes who were NFL fans and had a strong interest in the players’ protests. When we began talking to college athletes about the protests, we were well aware that perceptions of and support for or opposition to the protests were largely split along racial and political lines. What surprised us was that the liberal white supporters of the protests (similar to the critics who opposed them) did not articulate a deep understanding of what drove the players’ to protest state violence. Instead, these fans drew on what Eduardo Bonilla Silva calls “color-blind racism” via their ideological appeals to abstract, liberal conceptions of freedom and individualism. Rather than a stated concern with racial justice, support or opposition to the protests turned largely on whether or not the student interpreted the actions as patriotic.

The white student-athletes’ understandings of the players’ protests reveals much about the contemporary operation of white racial power and privilege in the US. Instead of addressing state violence and the material consequences of ongoing racial inequality, their accounts of the protests were predicated on their personal perceptions and investments in whiteness. In other words, they collectively interpreted the protests through what sociologist Joe Feagin calls a “white racial frame” that views the US and its social institutions, particularly the police and military, as the authors of prosperity, freedom, justice, and equality for everyone—even when whites enjoy what Ethnic Studies professor Evelyn Nakano Glenn calls “unequal freedoms”. As one student-athlete stated, “The players should be punished… Go protest somewhere else where it isn’t disrespecting the nation. They aren’t gaining respect by kneeling, all that they are gaining is disrespect. They are corrupting our nation by ruining the patriotic fun before a sports game.”

Ultimately, fans’ whiteness functioned in ways that blinded them from considering how or why race could be central to the protests. Additionally, about one fourth of the student-athletes expressed a firm white supremacist ideology that perceived players as breaking an unstated, imaginary racial contract where the bestowal of their fanship and adoration was predicated on the player protesters acting as extensions of US civic pride, freedom, and equality without reference to enduring US racial violence and oppression. The other group of respondents took an attitude of white privilege by describing the protests in racially neutral language of a civil society where all citizens have equal opportunity to engage in political protest, ignoring how they as white fans benefited from the racial injustice and inequality being protested. So while there was a clear distinction between their two positions, neither position demonstrated awareness of the everyday challenges Black players encounter on and beyond the playing field.

In both cases, we found ideas about patriotism politically disempowering for Black player protesters and Black Americans more broadly. Students that found the protests unpatriotic, unapologetically refuted the players’ rights to protest racial injustice and inequality. Instead, they characterized the players as immature, deviant, and disrespectful to the nation, veterans, the flag, and the National Anthem. Further, they argued that players had an obligation to provide them with uninterrupted entertainment since they—the fans—pay the players’ ‘inflated’ salaries. According to one student-athlete, “Yes, being a social activist is extremely important, but it needs to be done on the right platform. An NFL football game is not the one to do it at. I feel like it’s rather ridiculous to protest the US when you’re being paid millions of dollars to throw around a football, life sounds so hard for these people.”

The students who found the protests patriotic embraced protesters that acted according to liberal white ideals of civility that may have reminded them of the Civil Rights Movements. If the players were to engage in radical political action or directly challenge the surplus flow of resources into their white dominated communities, then these liberal students could easily react with the charge of incivility and deny the patriotism of the protesters even if they were still working towards racial justice. As one student-athlete stated, “They should be allowed to exercise their rights in whatever ways they want to. As long as they are not breaking any laws or causing violence by their actions, they should be free to do what every other law-abiding American is allowed to do. If their actions become violent or harmful in some way, a line would need to be drawn.”

Racism today often operates covertly, perpetuating black-white divisions between mostly Black, working-class NFL player protesters and their mostly white, affluent fans. We found that much of these white fans’ racial animus is reflective of their own misunderstanding and investment in white racial power and privilege, their overall lack of regard for Black Americans’ lives, and their desire to be entertained by Black athletic bodies. We also found market relations empowered white fans to adore black athletes on the condition that these athletes never challenge their consumer pleasures by drawing attention to the realities of institutional racism and state sanctioned police violence. As one student stated, “Freedom of speech goes out the door when you are under contract by a corporation because you technically represent them. So now because individuals within the organization are kneeling, the entire National Football League looks bad.” Their lack of knowledge and understanding of the racial experiences of the player protesters beyond the field keeps many of them from understanding the meanings and motivations of the player protesters.

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903  that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Although racial language has become more coded and indirect in the post-Civil Rights era, the NFL players’ protests demonstrates the on-going truth of Du Bois’ statement. The color line in the United States creates an unequal material reality where Black people experience far greater rates of state violence, and white people tend to poorly understand that racial reality. This leads to a contradiction between the “American Creed” that celebrates equality and a material reality of profound racial inequality. How, then, do white Americans hold two contradictory ideas in their heads without seeing the contradiction? We argue that it is in the myth of patriotism, or the idea that the United States, a nation with a long and ongoing history of racial oppression, is also the vehicle to achieve racial justice. Such an ideology is evident in the fact that the protests by Black athletes for racial justice are interpreted, both by white supporters and opponents, as being a test of patriotism, diverting attention from the systemic racial inequalities that permeate US society.

Kenneth Sean Chaplin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliate of the Department of Exercise Science, Physical Science & Sports Studies at John Carroll University. His research examines the intersections of race, class, gender, and culture in sport and higher ed. You can find out more about him at http://sites.jcu.edu/sociology/professor/kenneth-sean-chaplin/

Jeffrey Montez de Oca is an Associate Professor of Sociology and founding director of the Center for the Critical Study of Sport at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He is currently the President-elect of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport and author of Discipline and Indulgence: College Football, Media, and the American Way of Life during the Cold War (Rutgers University Press, 2013). You can find out more about him at https://www.uccs.edu/ccss/oca

Women’s professional team sports seem to be flourishing, especially basketball in China and the United States (WNBA), and various soccer leagues in Europe. The news is not so good for women’s ice hockey in North America.

The Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) discontinued operations on May 1, 2019. In the U.S., the recently established National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) is in a vulnerable position. Many of the players are hoping to develop a more stable women’s league by partnering with the National Hockey League (NHL), following the model established by the WNBA and the women’s soccer leagues in Europe.

As a sociologist of sport, I am interested in the conditions under which women and men play sports. Here, I consider some of the potential risks of partnering with a men’s league and suggest some alternative ways of developing a successful women’s hockey league.

Player solidarity

At the end of March 2019, a week after the Calgary Inferno won the Clarkson Cup (the women’s equivalent of the Stanley Cup), the CWHL announced that it was closing down because it was “economically unsustainable.” That announcement was overshadowed by a remarkable statement signed by more than 200 professional players from the CWHL and the NWHL.

The players’ statement — fittingly released on May 1st — declared that “we will not play in ANY professional leagues in North America this season until we get the resources that professional hockey demands and deserves.”

In this unusual demonstration of solidarity by professional athletes, the CWHL players highlighted the circumstances under which they had been working. Using the Twitter hashtag, #ForTheGame, the players declared:

“We cannot make a sustainable living playing in the current state of the professional game. Having no health insurance and making as low as two thousand dollars a season means players can’t adequately train and prepare to play at the highest level.”

Seeking stable alternatives

In the CWHL, salaries ranged from CDN$2,000 to $10,000 per season. In the NWHL salaries in the first season of operation (2015-16) ranged from US$10,000 to US$26,000 per season, but these were reduced in the second season, often by 50 per cent.

Players who also play for their national teams in North America and Europe are often relatively well-funded, but the majority of professional players have careers outside hockey. Some also have children. Some older players realize that the job action could mean they have played their last game of high-level hockey.

As with other forms of labour action, those who have withdrawn their labour acknowledge that any gains that are made will be most likely to benefit the next generations of players. The protesting players have recently formed a union, the Professional Women’s Hockey Players’ Association (PWHPA).

It seems that the players’ actions to improve their working conditions, as well as the overall image of women’s hockey, may follow the lead of their peers in the WNBA and European professional soccer leagues. That is, they advocate affiliating with men’s professional leagues and teams, in this case the National Hockey League (NHL) and select teams in that league.

Part of my work as Director of the Centre for Sport Policy Studies at the University of Toronto involves monitoring the rights and working (playing) conditions for athletes in professional and high performance sport.

What if players controlled the game?

Prompted by the corruption and mismanagement evident in many national and international sports organizations and by the disturbing “ownership” model of many professional team sport leagues — where players are bought and sold, drafted, traded and auctioned — I have been asking the question: “what if the players controlled the game?”

Low pay and short careers for the majority of the world’s professional athletes are accompanied by health compromising behaviours and extraordinary rates of injury that would be a topic of major concern in any other industry or institution.

In the authoritarian conditions under which most sports are played at the highest level, athletes have very little opportunity to determine the form, the circumstances and the meaning of their participation. Partnering with the NHL to form a women’s professional hockey league is likely a much better alternative than the status quo, but the billionaire owners of NHL teams are not likely to include players in their decision making.

The NHL has declared no interest in partnering with a women’s hockey league, despite the fact that such a move has been a profitable declaration of corporate social responsibility in other sports. Some women’s soccer teams in Italy and Spain are now demanding to play in the men’s team’s stadiums because of the size of their fan base. NHL team owners may be waiting until they can partner with women’s teams on conditions most favourable to themselves.

Given the solidarity demonstrated by so many of the top women players, perhaps they would be ready to consider some alternatives — player ownership, community ownership or some combination of these in order to form a league of their own.

Before the NFL Players’ Association went on strike in 1982, the union produced a pamphlet titled “We Are the Game”, which stated that the NFLPA wouldn’t only run exhibitions games, it “would create a league of several teams, owned and operated by the players themselves.” Two games were played, but the experiment failed under enormous legal resistance from team, media and stadium owners. However, the players’ recognition that “we are the game” remains a resource of hope.

Ownership

The best current example of player ownership is in roller derby, the international Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), where teams and leagues are owned by the players, for the players. A hybrid example is the U.S.-based Freedom Football League (FFL), where teams are co-owned by players, fans and investors. Crowd-funding is another potential alternative to establishing their own league, and working toward community ownership.

Community ownership is the best established model of alternative ownership. Examples can be found in soccer, with teams and leagues in at least 31 countries, and also in American football, Canadian football, Australian Rules football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey and rugby leagues.

The PWHPA might consider one of these alternatives if they do not “get the resources that professional hockey demands and deserves” from the NWHL or the NHL. Community tax bases have provided major support to men’s professional sports, including hockey, in the form of direct subsidies, tax holidays and financing stadium or arena construction. Player- and/or community-owned women’s teams would also have an equity-based right to call on community resources … For The Game.

Peter Donnelly is currently Director of the Centre for Sport Policy Studies, and a Professor in the Faculty of Physical Education and Health, at the University of Toronto.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In recent decades, sport has become recognized increasingly as an important site through which to examine broader society, including its history, culture and politics. Since the 1960s, sociologists and historians have been researching sport and leisure practices in a serious, scholarly way, with their attention initially drawn to the global, mass-spectator team sports of soccer, baseball, cricket, rugby, (American) football and basketball. The sports of golf, track-and-field, ice hockey and horse-racing also received scholarly attention, but the omission of tennis from early academic scrutiny was one “research gap” that caught the attention of social scientists. In 1983, historian William J. Baker, in a summary paper on the state of British sport history, described the scholarly marginalization of tennis as “one of the most baffling gaps in the entire literature.” The same was certainly true in North American sport history, yet only modest advances were made in the initial years following Baker’s astute observation.

By the late 1990s, the only books offering a critical perspective on this popular sport rich with cultural nuance and history were Heiner Gillmeister’s magisterial Tennis: A Cultural History and E. Digby Baltzell’s comprehensive but value-laden Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar. Even including the handful of well-researched texts authored by journalists, broadcasters and other non-academic writers—including John Feinstein, Peter Bodo, Richard Evans, John Barrett, Bud Collins and Eliot Berry—the ostensible appreciation of tennis as a subject of sociological analysis was meagre.

For the introductory chapter to my edited collection, The Routledge Handbook of Tennis: History, Culture and Politics (Routledge, 2019)—compiled with the assistance of Carol Osborne from Leeds Beckett University—I gathered statistics from journals to document the advancement of tennis scholarship. From just 14 articles published in the 1990s mentioning “tennis” in the abstract (across 20 of the leading social science journals in sport), the number increased to 37 in the 2000s and 89 in the 2010s (up through the summer of 2018). This spectacular increase in scholarly material—drawing on historical, sociological, political, media/communications and/or management perspectives—illustrates a growing appreciation for tennis and its potential as a rewarding site of critical analysis. My sense is that, even with the publication of the handbook—the largest and most comprehensive collection of tennis scholarship to date, amassing 45 chapters through the collaboration of 50 authors—we are merely scratching the surface of this potential.

Several of the chapters therein are worth highlighting in this regard. Analyses of tennis superstars and celebrities from the past—including historical work on Suzanne Lenglen, Bill Tilden, Fred Perry, Richard “Pancho” Gonzales and Arthur Ashe—highlight just some of the case studies of socio-historical relevance, in wider examinations of class, gender, sexuality and race. Complemented by analyses of living figures—such as Billie Jean King and the “Original 9,” Renée Richards, Boris Becker and Steffi Graf, Li Na, Anna Kournikova, Venus and Serena Williams and Andy Murray—critical discussions around the intersectionality of class, gender, sexuality, race and national identity abound. Thus, it has become apparent that if someone, for example, were to write a book on the physical emancipation of inter-war women through sport, the study would be deficient without discussing Lenglen—the Frenchwoman whose balletic style, courageous play, and glamorous persona made her into a global icon and an embodiment of the 1920s “New Woman”. Similarly, it would be an incomplete historical analysis to ignore Arthur Ashe’s achievements in the context of social activism around US civil rights and South African apartheid in the 1960s and 70s. The fact that his South African visa applications were rejected, personally, by that nation’s President, B.J. Vorster, makes Ashe’s repeated attempts to compete there of great significance. Similarly, would an author get away with ignoring the influence of Billie Jean King (and her colleagues within the “Original 9”) in a book about 1970s feminist advances in sport, or the achievements of the Williams sisters on debates around the intersectionality of class, race and gender in 21st century popular culture and sport? Indeed, for so many reasons, Serena Williams might well rank as one of the most culturally significant athletes, female or otherwise, of all time. To provide another example, an analysis of celebrity influences on contemporary issues of nationalism must also include Andy Murray, whose contested British/Scottish identity was mobilized repeatedly by the media since his emergence in the public eye 15 years ago, famously coming to the forefront during the recent referendum on Scottish independence. In the context of Brexit, such issues of representation demand greater attention. The above examples are of importance both within and outside of tennis, and burgeoning historical-sociological work on them brings to light the significance of tennis within discussions of socio-political movements around feminism, white privilege, neo-colonialism and national sovereignty, among several other subject areas, in both the distant and recent past.

The shifting media for communicating information about social movements and cultural phenomena have also brought new opportunities for scholarly analyses. Thus, original research to explore the place of tennis within online tennis communities, the strategic use of social media among players, and the creation and diffusion of policy discourse around mass-spectator sporting events like the Australian Open, presents fruitful avenues to explore further the sport’s contemporary position as a vehicle for societal change, identify formation and profit maximization. Further, the exploration of tennis through developments in fashion, playing styles and behavioural etiquette, and both literary and artistic depictions situates the sport as culturally noteworthy. So, as we have sharpened our critical senses of bodies as social (as well as biological) constructions, and have come to analyze how bodies are used, viewed and conceptualized, interesting if not profound insights are gained about the societal contexts in which they are situated.

Thus, it is apparent the sport of tennis has come of age as a subject of scholarship in the social sciences, and it seems opportune and well overdue to ask for “New Balls Please!” to signal the commencement of a new era in tennis scholarship. And as the sport continues to hold its own within the public arena—driven increasingly by viewership figures, sponsorship dollars and numbers of Twitter followers—it is only right that its sociological importance is recognized appropriately.

Dr. Robert J. Lake is in the Department of Sport Science at Douglas College, Canada. His research interests revolve around the sport of tennis, its history and culture, particularly in relation to issues of social class and exclusion, gender, race/ethnicity, national identity, coaching, talent development and policy. He is the author of A Social History of Tennis in Britain (Routledge, 2015), which recently won the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize awarded by the British Society of Sport History. More information, including a detailed list of publications, can be found at: http://www.douglascollege.ca/programs-courses/faculties/science-technology/sport-science/faculty/rob-lake His publications can be found, free to read/access, at: https://douglas.academia.edu/RobertJLake

On March 8, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team filed a lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation, claiming gender discrimination. This was only the most recent step in the team’s two-year old fight for more equitable resources, a fight that has inspired women athletes to push for change in other sports as well.

Reading the lawsuit, what struck me most was not evidence of disparate treatment of the women’s team compared to the men’s team, but the argument used to justify it. Specifically, U.S. Soccer argued that, “market realities are such that the women do not deserve to be paid equally to the men.”

However, this argument doesn’t easily fit the data. The women’s team has performed far better in international competition than the men’s team, which failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. In recent years the women’s team has drawn sizeable crowds and generated substantial revenue for U.S. Soccer, with record television viewership numbers for the 2015 Women’s World Cup final. In other words, the market has valued and rewarded the women’s team despite their poorer training and travel conditions and lower compensation than the men’s team.

The persistence of appeals to the “market” despite the women’s team’s recent outperformance of the men’s team suggests that the issue isn’t really the market at all. It’s about the way that women’s sports are treated differently than men’s sports, with greater hesitation to invest on the part of media and corporations and greater skepticism that reward will follow.

What I identified as the “ideology of interest” in Kicking Center: Gender and the Selling of Women’s Professional Soccer is a one-sided logic that return drives investment but not the other way around. It is an idea we apply uniquely to women’s sports, denying them resources by pointing to the size of their fan bases or corresponding revenue generation as if there were no way to improve these.

Ultimately, this logic moves responsibility for unequal patterns of investment from decision-makers within sport, media, and corporate organizations onto sports fans. Inequality diffuses across the many thousands who could be paying customers but aren’t, presumably because they just aren’t interested in the product. Appeals to market forces not only fail to recognize the two-way street that is interest and investment, but they make inequality harder to see, and thus to challenge.

Men’s sports routinely receive media and corporate investment to boost their visibility and enhance interest. Consider Major League Soccer (MLS), which saw English language TV viewership increase between 2006-2014 while the league enjoyed a broadcast deal with ABC/ESPN worth $8 million annually. A decline in viewership from 2011 to 2013, and a small decrease in average game attendance between 2012 and 2013, did not present a “market reality” that prevented a new contract in 2014 with ESPN and Fox Sports worth $75 million in rights fees.

In contrast, the National Women’s Soccer League, the regular home of many U.S. women’s national team stars, currently has no national television exposure after the league recently parted ways with A&E. This is despite an increase from 4,271 to just over 6,000 fans per game on average since 2013 and an average of 106,000 viewers across 21 regular season games on Lifetime. This is a third of the audience for MLS games on a less prominent network not known for sports coverage, and for a league that has been around less than a third as many years.

Ultimately, audiences do not emerge from thin air. Yes, preferences exist and numbers matter, but investment plays a role in generating interest. We simply don’t give women’s sports the resources, exposure, or time to reach a sizeable audience—a process that has taken decades for most men’s professional sports leagues. And, as in the case of the women’s national team, we often discount the audiences that do exist, failing to reward them in the ways we do for men’s sports audiences.

Couching low investment in women athletes and the leagues they play for in terms of existing market returns contributes to perceptions that women’s sports are inferior to men’s. The expectation of little reward and hesitance to invest on this basis create the conditions in which this perception thrives. It’s an unforgiving cycle for women’s sports where low investment damages perception and hinders interest, which then makes future investments less likely.

Recently, cracks have appeared in this cycle. Adidas announced that it would compensate this year’s Women’s World Cup winners equally to their male counterparts. This is an important start. Giving women in sport equitable resources is not only the right thing to do, it’s a smart business decision given that 84% of self-identified sports fans report an interest in women’s sports, including 51% of male fans. Soccer is the most popular sport among women under 30, with 59% reporting that they “sometimes” or “regularly” watch on TV.

There is a market for women’s sports. Historically, women’s soccer has accessed it, but it has required a leap of faith. Upon moving 1999 Women’s World Cup games into the largest possible U.S. stadiums, the theme of the tournament became a famous line from the movie Field of Dreams: “If we build it they will come.” As midfielder Julie Foudy explained, “Women’s athletics needs to know it can put on a big event and be successful. The hardest part is they don’t want to take the risk. We were fortunate enough that we had great backing to take the risk.”

The over 90,000 fans who watched the tournament final in the Rose Bowl that year remains the largest audience for a live women’s sporting event in the U.S. to date. In that case, the risk paid off. Following that example, I’ll revise the 1999 slogan for a new, 2019 Women’s World Cup era: “If we build it, there’s no guarantee they will come. But if we don’t build it, they can’t.”

It’s time to break the cycle. It’s time to invest in women’s soccer.

Rachel Allison is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University and author of Kicking Center: Gender and the Selling of Women’s Professional Soccer.

Professional athletes in the United States and Canada are increasingly discussing their personal struggles with mental health on commercial media outlets. Notably, National Basketball Association (NBA) star Kevin Love has received praise for his “courageous fight” to combat the stigmatization of mental illness in sports. In a March 2018 essay for The Players’ Tribune, Love detailed his bouts with panic attacks during the NBA season, writing, “Mental health isn’t just an athlete thing. What you do for a living doesn’t have to define who you are. This is an everyone thing.” As a successful athlete, Love has accrued lucrative endorsement deals with Banana Republic and the Built with Chocolate Milk campaign. Following the public stories of other NBA players like Channing Frye and DeMar DeRozan, national media outlets framed Love’s essay as a “courageous decision to speak candidly on mental health.”

This recent media coverage of mental health in sports, however, is concerning for several reasons. First, the coverage has primarily amplified the personal stories of successful male athletes. For example, the media attention on Love’s struggles with mental health has led to opportunities for lucrative corporate sponsorship. Love is now partnered with the personal hygiene company Schick to produce a new web series on mental health struggles among elite athletes with fellow NBA players Paul Pierce, Channing Frye, and Olympic swimming gold-medalist Michael Phelps. Due in part to this publicity, Love and Frye were featured in Nike’s recent advertising campaign for their new line of yoga apparel. Canadian professional basketball player and former NBA draft pick Royce White, due to his noted advocacy for changing mental health policies in professional sports, will be the subject of an upcoming episode of the HBO series Real Sports. However, much like the general lack of media attention given to women’s sport, there seems to be little coverage afforded to mental health in women’s sport—though approximately one-third of all female student-athletes struggle with mental health issues and professional female athletes like the WNBA’s Imani Boyette have publicly discussed their struggles.

Second, there is a notable absence of stories from athletes whose mental health struggles derailed their professional careers. For example, Delonte West is a former NBA first round pick who earned more than $16 million from 2004 to 2012. While athletes like Love now receive supportive coverage, the media attention on West’s mental health played a role in stymieing his career. In 2009, following a highly successful season starting alongside LeBron James with the Cleveland Cavaliers, West was arrested for firearms possession. Some coverage at the time detailed West’s struggles with bipolar disorder and depression, framing the struggles as an impediment to the player and his team’s success on the court. Though the Cavs “dearly love[d] their hard-nosed guard’s personality and ability,” then-Cleveland reporter Brian Windhorst wrote, West’s personal and legal problems were becoming a “challenge for the team.” From 2009 until his last season in 2012, West’s career was marked by a series of challenges, ranging from being homeless during an NBA work stoppage, to being the subject of a vicious, unsubstantiated, race-tinged internet rumor involving LeBron’s mother Gloria James. At a time in which the NBA did not have a “competent mental-health program for players,” West’s struggles were often framed as a product of individual failures, an NBA player whose “self-destructive behavior” derailed his once-promising NBA career.

It is not a coincidence that the recent media coverage of mental health in sports has prominently featured professional male athletes like Love and Royce White, who, though he has not been signed by an NBA team, has been highly successful in the National Basketball League of Canada. Such coverage has advanced narratives of individual achievement, positing mental health as an obstacle that successful athletes have overcome, their experiences inspiring them to speak candidly for the benefit of others. Though the coverage of White’s struggles has allowed for an important discussion of mental wellness protocol in professional sports, the omission of stunted athletic careers limits the possibility of highlighting the systemic failures of sport organizations in caring for the mental health of athletes. Love is framed in terms of his individual success and how he exemplifies a commercially-lucrative definition of masculinity linked to sponsored, public discussion rather than obstinate silence. The story of Delonte West, in contrast, exposes the dark side of professional basketball as an unequal social institution and highlights the systematic failure of the NBA to provide support for one of their athletes.

By omitting West’s story and struggles, the national discussion of mental health in sports exhibits important class and racial dimensions. In 2014, West, who identifies as Black and Native American, gave a candid interview with Vice Sports, in which he documented his struggles with bipolar disorder, the personal and family context surrounding his 2009 arrest, and his continuing difficulty to provide for his wife and children through professional basketball. Though he publicly rejected the rumor that he had an affair with Gloria James, and multiple media outlets deconstructed the rumor as a vicious iteration of the “locker room affair” myth, the unsubstantiated hearsay resurfaced in other articles reporting West’s candid Vice Sports interview. West, in short, continues to be racially framed as a disgraced athlete, whose personal and criminal transgressions both “explain” his story and deny him the possibility of redemption.

While athletes like Kevin Love are publicly applauded for overcoming personal obstacles, the struggles of female athletes and former athletes like Delonte West continue to be marginalized in media discussions of mental health in sports. Notably, scholars in the sociology of sport field are increasingly studying the issue of mental health. For more productive mental health awareness in sports, we must begin by highlighting the experiences of those without corporate sponsorship, those whose careers were negatively impacted by media coverage of their struggles, and the systemic inadequacies of the professional sports industry.

Samuel M. Clevenger is an instructor in Sport Management at Towson University.  He recently received his Ph.D. in Physical Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.  He teaches and studies the history and sociology of sport and physical culture in Western societies.

This year marked the 50th anniversary of one of the most iconic images of the 20th Century and the history of sport—the “Black Power” Salute by U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. With athlete activism and protests as relevant as ever, we wanted to capitalize on an opportunity to examine teammates’ reactions to Smith and Carlos’ silent protest. To do so, we collected and analyzed interviews with 59 members of the 1968 U.S. Olympic Team. Our results, recently published in the Journal of Sport Management, highlight a range of perspectives and provide insight about the context and legacy of the demonstration.

As a reminder of the backdrop against which Smith and Carlos staged their protest, after winning gold and bronze, respectively, in the 200-meter final the two men wore black socks without shoes to the medal podium and proceeded to audaciously extend black-gloved fists over their bowed heads during the national anthem in protest of state-sanctioned policies that discriminated against Black Americans. Smith and Carlos were quickly dismissed from the U.S. Olympic team for their non-compliance and endured many professional and personal hardships as a result of their activism. However, decades later, the image of the two Olympians with their fists raised has become an iconic representation of the civil rights movement.

For our study, we used an institutional theory framework to identify processes, practices, and ideas that normalize and reinforce the social order of an institution. In this case, we analyzed how Smith and Carlos’ protest negotiated with the primary institution of the Olympics. After examining each interview, we identified four principle themes with respect to teammates’ reactions: (1) competition; (2) politics; (3) entertainment; and (4) nationalism.

Competition referred to the Olympians who believed that the sacred spirit of competition should supersede all else. These teammates of Smith and Carlos consistently stated that the Olympics were the wrong forum to stage a protest because it inappropriately took attention away from other athletes who had trained just as rigorously to reach the highest level of their sport. These teammates discussed how, after a lifetime of training, their own competitive success was paramount and they could not lose focus due to political issues being raised at the Games. This prioritization of competition resulted in disagreement with Smith and Carlos, who were seen as improperly placing protest ahead of competitive success. Comments in this category often suggested that politics are profane and tarnish the Olympics, which should remain sacred.

The second theme, politics, related to the Olympians’ perspectives as to whether politics belonged in the Olympic Games. Within this theme, the U.S. team members expressed two diametrically opposed viewpoints. The first perspective was that the Olympics should be apolitical. Just as some Olympians believed the Olympics were the wrong forum to stage a protest because doing so violated the sacred spirit of competition, some also believed the Olympics were the wrong forum because the Games should be free of politics. To this end, one of the Olympians expressed, “I’m not against that salute, but I think it was the wrong venue to do it. I think the Olympics should be politically free from political movement.” The apolitical perspective was expressed by the majority of U.S. team members who referenced politics in connection with the Olympic Games. There was a small contingent of U.S. Olympians, however, who held a counter-perspective, namely that the Olympic Games are inherently political. As one Olympian explained, “There’s probably nothing more political in all of the world than the Olympic Games…You can’t bring that many cultures and peoples together without people having political agendas. It is what it is and it’s always going to be more political than more people would like.”

The theme of entertainment, meanwhile, represented how some members of the U.S. team viewed the Olympics as a cherished spectacle or celebration that was wrongly interrupted by the salute. Other team members viewed the protest as overblown or sensationalized by the media, which resulted in Smith and Carlos’ salute being a bigger story than it should have been and distracting from other noteworthy and entertaining performances. For example, one Olympian described, “So they would have these press conferences with the medal winners and all [the media] would want to talk about was, “What do you think about what [Smith and Carlos] did?” You wanted to talk about what it feels like to win the gold medal…They [journalists] didn’t want to talk about that.”

Finally, nationalism signified how important it was to members of the U.S. team to represent the United States, regardless of sociodemographic background or political viewpoints. This theme overlapped with the politics theme in that Olympic team members viewed personal politics as subservient to representing the United States, with one team member commenting it didn’t matter if one was “Black, green, brown, Jewish, Protestant, (or) Catholic.” Rather, being proud to be an American who was able to represent his or her country on an international stage was what was most important. Further, seven Olympians noted that there was a proper response to winning a medal, with one Olympian stating, “if I could have won a medal and put my hand up in the air that I’m proud to be an American and on the team.” In particular, four members of the team lauded the actions of George Foreman when he proudly waived the U.S. flag after winning a gold medal in boxing. Thus, nationalistic loyalty superseded the importance or legitimacy of Smith and Carlos’ protest.

The Olympians’ mostly negative views of the protest helped upheld the primary institution, the Olympics, as such opinions reinforced the status quo. In this case, the status quo involved not staging any form of protest at the Olympics, which would violate Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter. For many of the 1968 Olympians, it was conceivable that they did not want to jeopardize their status on the team, which may be a consideration for current athletes as well. One notable finding of our study was that the protests were viewed as a threat for the majority of the U.S. team members regardless of which of the four categories their responses fit into. Further, it is important to note that there was no clear contrast when breaking down team members’ perspectives by various characteristics (e.g., race, gender, sport). It is also important to note that there were some team members who voiced a level of support for Smith and Carlos. However, it was difficult to quantify this support, because statements of support were often qualified within one of the four themes. For example, one Olympian stated, “I was in favor of the black movement by Lee Evans, John Carlos, and Tommie Smith and empathized with them, but I believe that the Olympics should be politically free.” Similarly, another commented, “I respect them for standing up for what they really believed in, but I’m not convinced it was the most appropriate way of doing it.”

While the context of our study was an event that occurred 50 years ago, the implications are still relevant today. Consider, for example, the athlete protests that have taken center stage recently. Many prominent athletes, such as LeBron James, Megan Rapinoe, and Colin Kaepernick, have refused to “stick to sports” and instead highlighted social inequalities with the platform they have as athletes. It is likely that protests through sport will continually resurface as sociopolitical contexts evolve. Such protests should not be haphazardly dismissed or penalized. If athletes are the most important stakeholder of a sport organization and their well-being is a principal consideration, it would be sensible for those organizations to recognize the sociopolitical concerns and needs of the athletes. Otherwise, there may be a significant disconnect between athletes and sport organizations, as there was between Smith and Carlos and U.S. Olympic officials.

Dr. Brennan K. Berg is an associate professor of sport commerce in the Kemmons Wilson School of Hospitality and Resort Management at The University of Memphis.

Dr. Kwame J.A. Agyemang is an associate professor of sport management at Louisiana State University.

Dr. Rhema D. Fuller is an assistant professor of sport commerce in the Kemmons Wilson School of Hospitality and Resort Management at The University of Memphis.

One of the most interesting sociological phenomena to occur at the 2018 FIFA men’s World Cup was the diverse, multi-ethnic and migrant composition of many playing squads. Teams representing former colonizers (e.g., France and Belgium), settler-colonial nations (e.g., Australia), and former colonized territories (e.g., Algeria), all illustrated how histories and legacies of empire continue to shape patterns of citizenship, belonging, and representation in the (post)colonial sporting landscape.

When documenting these soccer trends, media and academic analyses frequently rely on the nation-state as the empirical unit of analysis and interpretive frame. This can obscure social, cultural, and political entanglements that occur on other spatial scales. In contrast, what can we learn about the current configurations of sport and (post)empire – that is, the echoes of colonialism that continue today – if we think about particular sporting localities and institutions as well as nations?

Such questions comprise the focus of my research on the present localized and spatialized associations of soccer, race, migration, and the British Empire. When an opportunity recently arose to examine these issues by way of a noteworthy sporting event, I endeavored to simply “follow the ball”. In other words, I employed what C. Wright Mills termed a “sociological imagination”, using my personal experience to uncover and connect the wider social issues and contexts to which this occasion related.

Following the ball: Everton versus Gor Mahia

In this season’s schedule for the professional men’s soccer team I support – Everton FC of the English Premier League – one fixture was especially intriguing: a friendly match (organized by East African sports betting platform, SportPesa) against Gor Mahia FC, the most successful club in Kenya. Having played each other in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania the previous year, this game was held at Goodison Park, Everton’s home stadium, in Liverpool. The visitors from Nairobi were making history as the first African club to play an EPL team in England. As a spectator at the match, on 6 November 2018, I reflected on how this milestone related, sociologically, to wider soccer and social trajectories – past and present – between Africa, Britain, this city, and my club.

Gor Mahia followed a path already trodden by African players. In 1949, eleven years before gaining independence from the British Empire, a Nigerian “national” team visited Liverpool and other English towns. They held their own against amateur opposition despite most of their team playing in bare feet. Fifty years earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century, a team toured Britain from what is present-day Lesotho; and in the years immediately succeeding the Nigerians’ visit, teams followed from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and Uganda. It was not until 1991 that Cameroon became the first African nation to play England in a full international at Wembley Stadium.

The contemporary presence of African soccer players in Britain urges consideration of how transnational migration can challenge – but also reinforce – the institutional whiteness of domestic sporting structures and cultures. At Everton (and elsewhere), migrant African stars have arguably been as important as British-born players of color in engendering more positive and inclusive attitudes and practices around race; although, sadly, racial and cultural stereotypes have persisted among some fans. Notably slower than most other teams to routinely pick multi-racial teams – with only a handful of cameo appearances from players of Black and Chinese British backgrounds for most of the twentieth century – Everton recruited its first African player, the Nigerian Daniel Amokachi, in 1994. Since then, the club has made signings from Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, DR Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa, together with several European-born players of African heritage. Yet, despite the success of myriad brilliant African players in the EPL, the relationship between African soccer and Western European teams more broadly is not without problems. Elite clubs have been criticized for profiteering from African players through exploitative talent identification and recruitment practices – what Colin King describes as the ‘features of slavery [that] have led to the underdevelopment of African [soccer]’.

Beyond the field

Studying sport sociologically requires that we look beyond its own cultures and institutions, and sometimes think outside of the current time period. By doing so, we uncover perhaps the most significant contextual dimension of this match: its staging in Liverpool.

‘The African-centered scholar can learn from the history of Black settlement in Liverpool’, writes Mark Christian, an academic authority on Black Liverpool cultures. This community differs from other long-established Black populations in Britain, as it was comprised initially and primarily by West African rather than Caribbean settlers. During the twentieth century Liverpool-born Blacks endured what Christian describes as a ‘catalogue of horrific racism’, including: anti-Black riots; oppressive state institutions; and pathological representations in media, political and even some academic discourses. The antecedents of these occurrences reside firmly in Britain’s imperial history, during which time Liverpool was, states Jacqueline Nassy Brown, ‘a seaport of incalculable national and global significance’ in the horrifying forced deportation and trade of millions of Africans as chattel slaves. Christian concludes that ‘[Liverpool’s] deep-rooted links with the slave trade make it an obvious candidate for the analysis of globalized and historical racist practices toward peoples of African descent (in all their various hues and characteristics)’.

Exclusion from the city’s principal sporting institutions and spaces has also characterized the historic Black Liverpool experience. The many Kenyan supporters at the Everton versus Gor Mahia match – women and men, drumming, singing, and blowing vuvuzelas – along with some young local residents of color highlighted a degree of progress from a time when the stadium and neighborhood (including the nearby ground of rivals, Liverpool FC) were regarded as dangerous “no go” areas for much of Liverpool’s Black population. But it underscored as well how little ethnic diversity is found across all British soccer stadiums in regular fixtures.

Linking up the play

Dominant political and popular discourses purport that we live in post-racial times and that empire is consigned to the past. In such a context, the role of critical sociology is especially important—to counter such claims, by exposing the racialized nature of contemporary sport and society. Following Ann Laura Stoler, this is not a matter of claiming that every current racial issue in sport has a direct and explicit link to colonial periods and practices; but rather of identifying and illustrating when and where local and global inequalities and trajectories in sport do have discernible connections to historical (and contemporary) racialized power structures.

Everton’s 4-0 defeat of Gor Mahia will probably be soon forgotten in the annals of British soccer history, although its significance for the pioneering visitors may be considerably greater. By their very nature, sporting events are fleeting; nevertheless, that should not obscure their capacity to make us pause, think, contextualize, and, not least, remember. Follow the ball…and see where it rolls.

Daniel Burdsey is a Reader in the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at the University of Brighton, UK; and an Associate Professor (status only) at the University of Toronto, Canada. His research currently addresses connections between (post)empire, racialized identities, decolonial thinking and anti-racist resistance in British soccer. He is a lifelong Everton supporter and a season-ticket holder at Goodison Park.

University of Brighton Sport and Leisure Cultures research group twitter: @sport_research

There is a thesis that Donald Trump’s presidency has a silver lining in inadvertently laying bare the source and extent of many contemporary problems.

This can be named the Wake-Up Call Thesis. It was expressed, for example, by Baltimore Sun columnist Tricia Bishop: “This social media president has brought our faults to the surface for all to see. So now, instead of expending energy to hide them, perhaps we can start addressing them.”

Whether this thesis bears out – that is, whether the harsh realities of a Trump presidency will alert us to long-standing problems that have been largely ignored or dismissed – remains to be seen. Moreover, Trump opponents might well argue that any silver linings are still features of the storm cloud of his presidency. But, if the first step in solving a problem is admitting its existence, the Wake-Up Call Thesis is intriguing.

As researchers studying sport and the environment – and as researchers who have had our own “encounter” with Trump – the Wake-Up Call Thesis piqued our attention. Is there a silver lining in Trump’s fraught relationship with sport, and with golf in particular?

Trump on the Tee: Trump International Golf Links Scotland

Our interest in Trump pre-dates the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Our ‘encounter’ with Trump came in 2012, concerning his then-in-development Scottish golf course, Trump International Golf Links Scotland.

The Trump company’s efforts at building Trump International Golf Links Scotland initially suffered what appeared to be a fatal blow. In 2007, the course proposal was rejected at the local level by Aberdeenshire council’s Infrastructure Services Committee in a close vote. A core concern with the development plan was that the golf course would encroach on the Foveran Links sand dunes, which are officially classified as a protected Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

But the demise of the course proposal was not a fait accompli. In a narrative twist, the proposal was “called in” for review by the Scottish government. In 2008, the Scottish government’s Directorate for Planning and Environmental Appeals recommended that course construction should go ahead, offering the following rationale: “None [of our findings] affects our overall conclusion that the economic and social advantages of this prospective development at national, regional and local level are such as to justify, uniquely, the adverse environmental consequences caused by a development on this scale and in this location” (pp. 225). The initial decision against the course was ultimately reversed.

Tripping Up Trump

Fast-forward to 2012, when we visited the course as it was nearing completion. By that point, Trump International Golf Links Scotland was embroiled in controversy. A protest movement called Tripping Up Trump (TUT) was striving to derail course construction for various reasons – most notably, the course’s environmental implications and its potential uprooting of local (human) inhabitants in the area. Residents were especially worried that Trump’s group would apply to the government for a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO), which would force residents’ removal from their land.

Trump himself butted heads with Michael Forbes, a local resident whose property lies on a proposed site for course construction. Judging from quoted excerpts, Trump’s claims ranged from hyperbolic (“Everybody thinks this is the best piece of golf land they have ever seen”) to dubious (“When completed this land will be environmentally enhanced and better than it was before”) to, in the case of Michael Forbes, coarse and pugnacious (he “lives in a pig-like atmosphere”). Having met with Forbes and been warmly welcomed into his home in 2012, we can affirm that the last of these claims is fake news.

Yet Forbes was up for the confrontation. To guard against a potential CPO, he donated a small plot of his land to TUT, who in turn initiated a mass ownership campaign. The idea was that signing over the land in this way would render the process of forced eviction impossibly complicated, as there were so many (Forbes-supporting) owners to deal with in any legal confrontation.

In the end, however, the golf course was completed. Stopping it was perhaps an impossible goal, given the government’s support of its completion. But Forbes and others were not forcibly removed. For his obstinacy, in 2012 Forbes won the ‘Top Scot’ prize at the Glenfiddich Spirt of Scotland ceremony – an award previously given to celebrities such as author J.K. Rowling and tennis player Andy Murray.

A Silver Lining? A Story of Sport and the Environment

The story of Trump International Golf Links Scotland is a multifaceted one. Among other things, it is an archetypal story of modern sport and the environment.

In recent years, the impacts of sport on the environment have received substantial attention. Sport event organizing committees, associations, and organizations have explicitly adopted an environmentalist stance – albeit one that aligns with corporate priorities, like ongoing growth and profit generation. Sport mega-events, for example, are accompanied by detailed plans for mitigating their environmental impacts. Sport leagues run environmental awareness programmes headlined by star athletes. The games go on, but with an explicit and well-publicized awareness of environmental issues.

The logic that underpins many of these initiatives is the logic of sustainable development – which means, in short, meeting the needs of the present without inhibiting future generations from meeting needs of their own. Sustainable development typically comprises the three prongs of economic, social, and environmental development (the ‘triple bottom line’).

But we have argued that sustainable development, at least in its application in sport, is deeply flawed. In theory, the triple bottom line weighs various facets of development in the interest of balancing them all. We contend that, in practice, environmental concerns tend to be considered so long as they do not intrude on social and, even more so, economic ones. Environmental goals can easily be superseded; it would seem that they are rarely, if ever, superordinate.

For a case in point, look no further than Trump International Golf Links Scotland. Recall the verdict delivered by the Directorate for Planning and Environmental Appeals: “[t]he economic and social advantages of this prospective development justify, uniquely, the adverse environmental consequences caused by a development on this scale and in this location.” In the Directorate’s report, even Trump’s organization recognized the potential loss of dynamism in the inimitable sand dune ecosystem. But the spectre of, for example, jobs and tourism made for sufficient justification.

If this critique of sustainable development is accepted, the question then becomes, How will sport’s relationship with the environment ever change? Can we make it such that the environment is considered in a more profound and meaningful way? The answer is unclear.

But what the Trump case does is lay bare the tenuous place of environmental concerns in the relationship between sport and sustainable development. Perhaps this is an initial step toward social change.

Indeed, the Trump case seems to have inspired some regret. A Scottish Natural Heritage spokesperson reportedly said recently that there has been habitat loss and damage to the dune system. The site may lose its status as an SSSI.

What’s more, former First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, having at one point championed the golf course and associated developments, reportedly now believes that Trump has broken his promise to build a world-class resort. In November 2017, The Guardian noted that the course employs the full-time equivalent of 95 people – against an earlier promise of 6,000 new jobs. If nothing else, the case should inspire even greater scrutiny of the presumed economic and social benefits of projects of this kind – and whether they should so easily supersede environmental considerations.

This is far from an academic matter. Another proposal to build a golf course on an SSSI in Scotland has recently been ‘called in’ by the government. In addition, a second course at Trump International Golf Links Scotland is still a possibility (a petition to block this recently earned more than 30,000 signatures).

To change sport’s relationship with the environment is no doubt a daunting task. But, if the Trump case has a silver lining, it is perhaps in revealing fault lines in the concept of sustainable development. It would fit the Wake-Up Call Thesis if Trump, inadvertently, were to bring this to the fore.

Brad Millington is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of Bath in the Department for Health. His research focuses predominantly on the relationship between sport and the environment and on health and fitness technologies. He is the author of two books: The Greening of Golf: Sport, Globalization and the Environment (2016, with Brian Wilson, Manchester University Press); and Fitness, Technology and Society: Amusing Ourselves to Life (2018, Routledge).

Brian Wilson is a sociologist and Professor in the School of Kinesiology at The University of British Columbia (UBC), and Director of UBC’s Centre for Sport and Sustainability. He is author of The Greening of Golf: Sport, Globalization and the Environment (2016, with Brad Millington, Manchester University Press), Sport & Peace: A Sociological Perspective (2012, Oxford University Press) and Fight, Flight or Chill: Subcultures, Youth and Rave into the Twenty-First Century (2006, McGill-Queen’s University Press). His research focuses especially on links between sport, environmental issues, peace, and media.

Sport has important political power in contemporary culture. When North and South Korean athletes marched under a unified flag during the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, it provided a powerful sign of cooperation between the two nations. Seeing the two Koreas marching together symbolized hope for reunification in the Korean peninsula. The 2018 Olympics, however, were only one chapter in a much longer story about the ways in which South Korea has invested substantial resources in attempts to foster a (global) Koreanness through success in sporting mega-events. In fact, cultural anthropologist Rachael Miyung Joo has argued that South Korea sees transnational sport as the most useful way to demonstrate the potential of a “global Korea.” Sport, in this respect, is used as a cultural apparatus to build a collective identity—what political scientist Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community.” Here, we aim to deconstruct South Korean sporting nationalism by analyzing how sport operates to establish and reinforce nationalism in South Korea.

Selective Nationalism and Korean Ice Hockey

South Korean media have often emphasized either athletes’ nationality (i.e., citizenship) or ethnicity (i.e., ancestry) in constructing a collective sense of Koreanness. When the media reported on the Olympic project of the Korean Ice Hockey Association (KIHA), naturalized athletes’ citizenship was heavily emphasized in building a sense of Koreanness. Since 2011, both the South Korean government and KIHA had been pursuing a strategy to strengthen the team leading up to the 2018 Olympics— a plan that included recruiting white players from North America. Notably, the South Korean government granted official citizenship to seven white players through a special case that enabled them to bypass the normal naturalization process, which would have included a requirement of at least five years of residence in South Korea. South Korean media quickly began to portray the newly recruited/naturalized players as Taegeuk warriors with blue eyes, highlighting their fast assimilation into Korean culture. Media emphasized the players’ love of spicy Korean food and ability to speak basic words in Korean. Favorable media representations of the naturalized players may have helped convince South Korean citizens of the players’ Koreanness despite of their lack of Korean ancestry. Their nationality as South Korean citizens signified Koreanness in this particular case.

On the other hand, ethnicity was key in forming Koreanness in the case of Hines Ward, a former National Football League player who grew up in the United States with a Korean mother and African American father. When Ward was named MVP of Super Bowl XL, South Korean media celebrated his Korean ethnicity as well as his kinship with his Korean mother. Further, the media representations reflected a process in which racial and ethnic relations among South Koreans were being redefined. Despite the fact that he was an American citizen who had grown up in the U.S., the media framed Ward as a “proud” Korean who had demonstrated the power of a global and multicultural Korea (Ahn, 2011). In so doing, South Korean society accepted him into the boundary of “Koreans” regardless of his skin color or citizenship. The media representation of, and public reactions toward Ward illustrates a case in which Korean ancestry defined Koreanness.

These examples raise questions about the ways in which either citizenship or ancestry constructs and drives South Korean nationalism in particular instances. To provide more insight about this matter, we return to some recent examples from the sport of ice hockey. Although ice hockey is not particularly popular in South Korea, the media often spotlighted the sport in the years leading up to the 2018 Olympics. In 2017, Sang Wook Kim, a South Korean ice hockey player, won the Most Points Award in the Asia League Ice Hockey (ALIH). South Korean media were quick to write articles with titles such as “Kim became the first South Korean to earn a top rank in the ALIH.” Sang Wook’s athletic achievement was perceived as foreshadowing a bright future for South Korean men’s ice hockey, which was particularly meaningful with South Korea playing host at the 2018 Olympics. While his accomplishment was impressive, such headlines were misleading. Sang Wook was actually the second player with Korean ancestry to win the Most Points Award.

The first player with Korean ancestry to win the Most Points Award was Alex Kim, a Korean-American player. He won the Most Points Award in both 2008 and 2010 while playing for Team High 1 in the ALIH. Alex Kim’s parents had migrated to Southern California in the United States, where he was born and raised. However, Alex still voiced strong “Korean pride” as a Korean-American. In an interview with a South Korean newspaper, he stated “[T]he name on the back of my uniform is special to me. I am Alex, an American, but at the same time, I am Kim, a Korean. During my career in the United States, I always tried to show that Koreans could be great hockey players.” Even though the comments emphasized his Koreanness, South Korean media seemed to downplay his Korean identity due to his U.S. citizenship. Despite Alex’s strong Korean pride, South Korean media outlets did not reciprocate this affection. Rather, the media identified Sang Wook as the first Korean player to win the award. This example illustrates the ways in which media representations demonstrate the complexities of ethnicity, race, and citizenship in South Korea. Comparing the cases of Sang Wook and Alex, it becomes evident that Korean nationalism operates in an obscure way, often as a selective apparatus.

As such, South Korean media selectively construct a discourse of Koreanness either through nationality or ancestry, implicitly framing whether an athlete should be considered “one of us.” For Alex Kim, despite his impressive performance on the ice, the media outlets did not portray him as “one of us”—in this case by drawing a line between Koreans with official citizenship and a Korean-American athlete without South Korean citizenship. Alex’s case may seem contradictory in comparison to the ways in which South Korean media framed Hines Ward as a symbol of global Koreanness. We interpret these contrasting cases as illustrating the ways in which South Korean media and society may be influenced by the broader (white) global society. In the case of Ward, he played in the highly-publicized and financially lucrative NFL, garnering substantial notoriety in the U.S. However, Alex Kim was lacking in global recognition from outside of South Korea. In this way, perceived hierarchy in the global sport context was embedded in the South Korean media representation of these players.

The acceptance of naturalized white hockey players, meanwhile, adds another layer of complexity to the South Korean media’s selective representation of players with respect to the production of nationalism. That the naturalized players did not possess Korean ancestry and could speak little Korean, yet were still embraced by the media, demonstrated the potentially racialized nature of citizenship and ethnicity in the sporting context. Because ice hockey is often thought to be a “white man’s sport,” the naturalized players were portrayed by South Korean media as saviors who were recruited to elevate the performance of South Korean ice hockey. South Korean media appeared willing to expand the boundary of “Koreanness” when there was a tangible benefit to the country—in this case, global sporting success. Ultimately, these examples help illustrate some of the ways in which whiteness is afforded privilege in South Korean society.

Doo Jae Park is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His scholarly interests focus on physical culture in the context of North American sport, specifically the intersection of race, racialization, and whiteness. His work seeks to understand how socially constructed whiteness as normative (re)produces “otherness” of Asian Americans both within Asian American ideology and in wider societal realms.

Na Ri Shin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The overall focus of her research agenda lies in the field of sport, physical culture and development, with an interest in globalization and cultural changes in particular. The aim of her research is to enhance an understanding of how globalization impacts the ways in which we manage sport, physical culture, and development. She is particularly interested in investigating sport as a cultural expansion from the West to the Tricontinental (Asia, Africa, and Latin America), and tracing the political and cultural trajectory of the expansion.