The Economics Of Sport
Preamble
A conversation with a regional colleague ventured into the thorny matter of the current discussions of the value of sport and whether or not the time has come for us in the Caribbean to begin discussions on ‘the economics of sport’.
At the forefront of the discussions is the colonial experience and the state in which it has negatively impacted us as people of the Caribbean.
In the latest discussions of the leaders of the member countries of CARICOM, it appears that the US has argued that they would provide certain guarantees, one of the most critical being security. The CARICOM Communique at the end of the 50th CARICOM Conference reads in part, the ‘Heads of Government noted that the US remains a valued CARICOM partner and welcomed the commitment to engage with the Region on common issues including energy security, human security, and disaster-preparedness and response’.
Since the CARICOM Conference ended, we have learnt of the agreements reached between some of the members of the regional organisation with the USA to accept ‘third party deportees’ from that country in return for some concessions and assistance. Importantly, in none of the cases mentioned, has there been any indication that the respective governments had or planned to have consultations with their respective populations ahead of the agreements reached.
Importantly, the foregoing discussions of CARICOM nations with the USA relates to the former seeking to preserve relations that they believe will allow them to keep their economic heads above water, more in respect of their own continued governance of their respective countries than anything else.
In the world of sport, the foregoing scenario is very familiar. The Caribbean countries seem convinced that they can only progress to the extent that they surrender themselves to what is perceived to be a more advanced country.
All that we have discussed thus far in the Column is captured rather extensively in Walter Rodney’s epic book, ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’.
Centuries of invasion, colonisation, slavery and exploitation has left an enduring legacy of crass, unrivalled dependency from which we have been unable to extricate ourselves.
Sport in the Caribbean
Colonisation
Prior to the arrival of the colonisers across the Caribbean the indigenous peoples practised sport. Even the most cursory observation of our region reveals an absence of what existed in sport, prior to colonisation. Such is the extent to which colonisation achieved its objective of convincing the peoples they met on arrival that they lack any official civilisation. This translates into a socialisation process aimed at creating a legacy in which the indigenous peoples were determined to be ‘primitive’ in the face of their systematic and systemic exploitation.
The reality was that wherever they encountered civilisation was more advanced, every effort was made to belittle and eventually eliminate it.
We should be reminded that colonisation in the Caribbean, was intended to transform the occupants of the countries under exploitation that nothing their possessed, had any value worth consideration as civilisation. The end result was their decimation.
The slave trade, slavery and later, indentureship, were all intended to create new societies upon the graves of the indigenous peoples. This was achieved with a fair measure of success such that today, where there are successors of the indigenous peoples, we continue the tradition of the colonisers, treating them as primitive and incapable of ever having a civilisation of their own in history.
Caribbean peoples were taught the sports of the colonisers. We were not intended to be good at any of what was being practised beyond serving the colonisers.
It is only after gaining the assurances that the process of colonisation had transformed the colonised into good, well socialised persons that the later were trusted to represent, first the colonisers, and much later, their respective countries.
So it is that several world renowned sportsmen that emerged from the Caribbean were initially representatives of the colonising nations, and later, of their respective countries. The situation of the colonising experience on our peoples was such that there were times our Caribbean athletes chose to represent the colonising country in international contests ahead of their respective countries, so well socialised were they at the time.
Post colonial
In sport, we have little show from the pre-colonial period.
Indeed, across the Americas, it is only the indigenous peoples in Canada and the USA, who managed to preserve Lacrosse, one of their original sports, through to the contemporary period. It is on the Sport Programme for LA2028, a remarkable and historic achievement.
In the Caribbean, whether colonised by the English, Spanish, French, Dutch or Portuguese, our peoples sought to master the sports brought to them by the colonisers. For many years our athletes’ successes came in the individual sports of track and field athletics and boxing. We then gained ascendancy in swimming and cycling before mastering the team sports of cricket, netball and, to some extent, football.
Sport Economics
Several talented Caribbean youths so mastered their craft in respect of sport that they became professional athletes, earning an income from showcasing their skills. We saw this in cricket before anything else, as professional leagues in the United Kingdom engaged the very best, offering them contracts and education and training in professionalism.
Learie Constantine worked assiduously with the likes of CLR James and others to use cricket as a medium for starting and successfully sustaining the Independence movement for Caribbean colonies.
Today, we in the Caribbean behave as though we have completely ignored how we were innovators in global sport, using it as a catalyst for meaningful political change in global politics. Even today, our respective National Olympic Committees (NOC) appear to spurn that aspect of our region’s leadership in global sport, even as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at the time, sought to dilly-dally, in respect of its own colonialist ethos that insisted upon amateurism as the preferred option.
Many analysts forget, adopting a sort of convenient sporting amnesia, that the IOC hastily transformed from amateurism to professionalism because the leadership understood that the Games were a colossal financial burden on hosts.
Chairman of the Summer Olympics held in Los Angeles in 1984, Peter Ueberroth, former Baseball Commissioner and US businessman, ‘supported by then-mayor Tom Bradley, created a private financing plan that relied on media rights and corporations. The Games were commercialized as never before, yes. They also turned a profit of about $225 million, some of which went to the U.S. Olympic Endowment for athletes’ use and some back to Los Angeles to what’s now the LA84 Foundation, a nonprofit that helps give kids sports equipment, facilities and coaching.’
What the IOC today refers to as ‘The Olympic Programme’ (TOP) was a direct result of the sponsorship strategy that Ueberroth used to access sponsorship of the Games of 1984. It involved ‘fewer sponsors paying more for category exclusivity would create stronger value for both the Games and the companies. Instead of a long list of small deals…a handful of partners who could proudly say they were the only official provider in their space. This meant one soda brand, one airline, one camera company. It was bold because it asked corporations to pay a premium for what had always been sold as a commodity.’
The transformation of the Olympics followed the initiatives of athletes having agents who would market them onto the professional stage, allowing both athlete and agent/manager to earn millions.
Sport – an economic commodity
In today’s world sport is an economic commodity of immense proportions. Unfortunately, this reality is yet to be understood and exploited in the Caribbean, despite the fact that we have had several athletes become millionaires in and through sport. The Stanford Cricket initiative brought to the Caribbean significant revenues for the players. Today, the Indian Premier League dominates the shorter form of the game, generating so much revenue that the IOC has taken notice and readily gave a most favourable response to the request of LA2028 to have the sport on the Games programme.
Despite the success of cricket and our cricketers, the Caribbean has not produced anything in the sport. We have never tried to create a cricket bat or even manufacture stumps and bails.
Across the Caribbean, politicians often boast of the facilities they have constructed but are woefully deficient in understanding the value of sport in society. They speak glibly of sport in national development without ever putting in place the requisite system to generate and sustain sport as an economic viability in national development.
Globally, sport has spawned a seemingly endless list of growing careers in sport but none of it has been created in the Caribbean, even as we decry our broader economic and developmental status.
At a time when we should be significantly advanced in creatively building our economies on alliances with those who are critical legacy entities and nations, we choose instead to be beggar maids to those who are creating new colonial strategies and regimes to take us back into historically abominable degradation.
