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Sport and Society in Global France

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fh/craa031

1477-4542

Niko Besnier,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

To understand the workings of globalization and its effects on everyone’s life around the world, one can do much worse than to focus on sport. In its modern incarnation (dominated by record keeping, standardization, and so on), sport was itself the object of a proto-form of globalization, as it diffused from its European origins (principally the United Kingdom) to all four corners of the world in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. But it is during the last thirty to forty years, when global capital came to reign supreme, that sport underwent the most dramatic transformations of its history: football clubs suddenly were under the control of Russian oligarchs, Qatar became a major presence in many sports, athletes began migrating around the globe in ever increasing numbers, and the money whirling around sport increased spectacularly—and with it the capacity of the pockets of sport officials at FIFA and IOC headquarters.