Global Issues to Seriously Impact Sport
Over the past several months an array of global issues has emerged that are impacting countries and organisations everywhere. To be fair, many of the issues have long been evident but were unfortunately ‘swept under the carpet’, in large measure because it was thought that they may come to naught.
Thus far, 2025 has been a year of rapid change, most of them being decidedly political but with wide-reaching impact on all aspects of life across the world. The world we knew just a Few months ago in 2024 no longer exists as every day new proclamations and actions are changing the way people relate to each other.
In a sense, people are growing accustomed to waking up to a new reality each day. The determination of how one responds to these emerging realities is perplexing and lends itself to seemingly endless challenges to everyone’s comfort zone.
Changing dynamics of global leadership
For many of us the world has always been dominated by the wealthy among us. We grew up with an understanding that wealth equates power and that the powerful exercise control wherever its application yields benefit to the owner.
Global power dynamics have led to the transfer of the wealth of some nations to others, only to see the former relegated to the status of debilitating poverty and the object of some of the most debased, despicable labels imposed on successive generations.
Over centuries, we have seen changes that are all eventually based on ownership and control of the main levers of power, regardless of who once owned them. Little regard is given to those whose wealth have given rise to the rich and powerful nations of today. The former are often made to grovel an existence that barely support genuine growth and development.
Today, there is a great reversal of fortunes dictated, yet again, by the wealthy and powerful peoples and nations.
As we examine the rapidly changing world in which we live, we are daunted by the emerging mechanisms of control. In a very real sense, we are today back to decades we would have wished never to experience in our lifetime.
Where some peoples were finally able to speak freely about the rapacious exploitation that led to some of the wealthiest peoples and nations today, we are being thrown back into a reliving of those sordid historical experiences only under the guise of scientific, education advancement.
Our intelligence is being denied us, as is our history, as we facilitate AI’s usurpation of what we are creatively capable of.
Sport in today’s changing world
Over the past several decades we have witnessed the unfettered growth of sport as a career option, a pathway to incredible wealth for some and an implacable blight for others.
Sport has afforded many of the greedy to access and exploit an alternative route to ‘success’ as defined in monetary terms, allowing them to see themselves and operate as power brokers.
The meteoric rise of professional sport and the generations of wealthy individuals so spawned, continue to change the dynamic of what sport has become.
We laud the immense wealth that sportsmen and sportswomen attract today and allow the media to offer them to us as worthy of emulation. But this is allowed to continue until such time as they are of no significant value to the aforesaid media. They then become fodder for the very audiences for who they were earned immeasurable adulation.
While it is easy to reference the rise and fall of international sport icons, just as is the case with artistes, we in the Caribbean eagerly mimic and create our own sport and music legends until we deem them fallible and eagerly add to their destruction.
Values
In today’s world of sport values mean little or nothing to athletes. The media’s marketing of sport stars is not in any way dissimilar from what is done to those who rise to the top in music and art.
It is acceptable to take outstanding sport personalities and transform them into fashion icons, however debased the latter may prove to be. We watch as the media make them folk heroes with the comments they are encouraged to make, without allowing for the average child and youth to carefully analyse just how much their ‘heroes’ and ‘icons’ are straying from fundamental values of human dignity and self-worth.
When things go wrong, the same media adds to the rapid fall from grace of the ones that once elevated beyond reality. The systematic socialisation of today’s children and youths leaves them overly exposed to a simpleness of interpretation of social reality, expressed simply as naivete.
Our children and youth are encouraged to emulate what they are fed on social media, AI and emerging realities, only to grasp at the straws so readily that they have no individual persona on which to build and sustain themselves.
Today’s sport personalities quickly fade for lack of clarity of vision and the lack of personality. The only problem is that they infect so many of our children and youth that the future of sport and indeed of mankind, is under severe threat.
Hate
The recent past has seen the stunning revival of hate as a way of life. We have readily found new ways of defining hate so that it is no longer masqueraded. It is therefore not at all surprising that racism has once more become normative in sport, especially in football where salaries go through the roof and players of all sorts are made heroes and heroines.
The explosion of wars between nations appears exempt from the attention of sporting organisations, which have become far too content with the consequences of war, refugees, whom they ‘pamper’ into competing under ‘white’ (translated into ‘neutral’) flags, signalling their continued homelessness, nationless existence and systemic dehumanisation.
What is the expected outcome of paying players higher salaries in sport while paying token representation on their behalf after being completely overrun with infective racism while on the field of play, supposedly earning a living?
The world is today filed with hatred of people by others of their own kind. Yet we laud sport for breaking down the barriers of hate even as they are daily being reconstructed stronger than ever before in global history.
Today, more than ever, world leaders are themselves divided on which side they choose to pitch their tents. It is increasingly fashionable to openly castigate those who once thought that emancipation meant liberation.
Appeals for reparation, is in many parts of the world, scoffed at, if only because of the inconsistencies resident amongst the very peoples making the call.
Fair Play in sport has become a sort of fashionable response to one’s own hateful transgression against others in full view of the patrons, live or online.
Ratings inspire the next generation of traditional behaviour in sport as much as it does elsewhere in the world.
Conclusion
Good examples are as hard to find in sport as elsewhere on planet earth.
The desire to elevate sport to a panacea continues to get mixed reviews as media coverage of activities are more revealing of changing human conduct against each other, if only we are disposed to allowing ourselves the latitude of critical thinking.
In the Caribbean we call home remains Naipaul’s ‘Mimic Men’, as we consistently refuse to seek and speak truth.
Some say, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. Others respond, simply, ‘to each his own’…reality.
