As part of my bumper Christmas giveaway, I've uploaded another unpublished article. I submitted this to Historical Materialism, shortly before the London Olympics, but it was rejected on the basis that, ahem, it didn't contain any historical materialism. Which seems fair enough, now I look back on it. If it wasn't so focused on the (then imminent) Olympics, I'd submit it elsewhere, but it's now too late.
The paper is called The Promises of Sport. It's an effort to locate and criticise sport within neoliberalism, in terms of the distinctive political logics that sport occasions and facilitates. As I explore, competition and competitiveness are critical political values under neoliberalism, which markets are only rarely able to exhibit, as corporate power increases. Hence sport comes to perform a key legitimating function, which markets as such (as opposed to market-like behaviour) are no longer able to.
Here is the abstract:
The neoliberal era saw rapid increase in the political and economic status of sport. Most empirical analysis of this phenomenon has sought to contain sport within prior theories of media, leisure or urban regeneration. But perhaps the relationship between neoliberalism and sport is more fundamental than this, and there are specific affinities between the two. The article identifies two ways in which sport and neoliberal politics have been mutually reinforcing. Firstly, sport acts as an icon for neoliberalism, highlighting the behaviours and moral visions that markets might once have exhibited, but no longer do. Secondly, sport acts as a potlatch for neoliberalism, providing a release for political sovereignty and executive decision, in an otherwise economised world. Now that neoliberalism has entered a state of existential ambivalence and with London’s Olympics approaching, we might also ask – what has become of sport and its fading promises?