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THE PROMISES OF SPORT

William Davies

Williamdavies10@gmail.com

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?

Keywords

Neoliberalism, competition, sport, crisis, legitimacy, inequality, state

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Since 1896, when the first modern Olympics Games were held in Athens, sporting

‘mega-events’ have become dressed in a growing quantity of metaphysical, political and

cultural garb. The declared ‘values’ of the Olympics are constantly evolving and adapted

by each new host, but tend to return repeatedly to themes of global citizenship, optimism

and human fulfilment. Public justifications for these vast fiscal experiments slip evasively

between rationalist economic modelling, cultural vitality, sheer political bravado and then

back again. Sports have come to act as political lightening rods through which identities

and conflicts can be performed in a secure environment, as manifest in various historic

boycotts and symbolic gestures of late 20th century tournaments.

The Olympics and, to a lesser extent the soccer World Cup, have performed an

especially notable role in symbolising political and economic renewal, be it of cities,

regions or nations. Previous Olympic Games have been hosted by cities still clearing the

rubble of World War - Antwerp in 1920 and London in 1948. More recently, cities have

made great play of the fresh political and cultural start offered by a landmark sporting

event, or at least the opportunity to demonstrate how far a nation has come since

dictatorship or racial apartheid. This includes Barcelona in 1992, Sydney in 2000 and

repeated attempts by South Africa to host a sporting mega-event, finally achieved with

the 2010 World Cup. As Western cities sought routes to post-industrial reinvention

during the 1990s, the hosting of a major sports tournament or – especially in the US –

the retention or attraction of a major sports team, with all of the public investment that

went with it, was seen as a basis for renewal and a statement of ambition.

Of the ten million visitors to the London Olympics this summer, seventy per cent will

emerge from Stratford station in East London, to be shepherded through the largest ‘in-

town’ shopping centre in Europe. Ahead of them they will see signs for Marks &

Spencer, Forever21 and walkways leading them towards more than 300 shops and 70

restaurants. Looking up, they will see a logo signalling Britain’s largest casino, operating

at a scale (150 slot machines and 40 roulette and blackjack tables) that was illegal until

the Labour government’s 2005 Gambling Act. Only once they have made it through this

thicket of temptations will the Olympic Park appear before them, a fantasia of signature

architecture, private security and, looming pointlessly at the eastern end of the site, a

120-metre high sculpture and observation tower designed by Anish Kapoor.

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London 2012 has attracted its fair share of political controversy, as sporting mega-

events always do.1 This is largely an effect of the need to extend autarchic forms of

project management into the public sphere. Dissenting voices need silencing, as the

author Iain Sinclair discovered in 2008 when his book-reading in an east London library

was cancelled by the local authority without explanation, until a leaked letter revealed

that there was concern about his anti-Olympics views. Inconvenient populations need

moving, as houseboat residents of London’s Lea river experienced, when they were

banned from mooring near the Olympic site. Sponsors and dignitaries require

exceptional privileges, including VIP road lanes, that transcend norms of the liberal

public sphere. And above all, exotic security threats need anticipating, monitoring and

countering, amounting to the largest ever peacetime military mobilisation in London.2

This is an area of public finance where standard principles of budgetary discipline are

abandoned in favour of the paranoid preparation for contingency. The result is that the

original £3bn budget for the 2012 games now stands at over £11bn, while still

intoxicatingly spoken of as “on budget” by its organisers.

Despite all of this, the most prized of Olympic ingredients will be lacking: in no sense and

by no measure can 2012 possibly represent a new start for London or Britain. As a

historical political-economic portent, 2012 bears comparison to Moscow 1980, and not

Beijing 2008. Like Moscow then, London is now a city whose claims to international

supremacy are still propped up by hubris but not economic reality. London’s bid for the

Games was first announced in 2003, succeeding in 2005, at a time when the Belle

Epoque of Anglo-American finance capitalism was still in full swing. Seven years later, to

wander through Europe’s biggest shopping centre, under Britain’s biggest casino,

towards its tallest public artwork, in anticipation of the games, creates an eerie feeling of

having entered a pre-2008 timewarp.

Paul Gilroy has written about the British malaise of ‘post-colonial melancholia’, in which

the sufferer is unable to mourn the passing of global pre-eminence, instead turning

hatefully and narcissistically in upon themselves.3 As a paean to the neoliberal city and

the public private partnerships of the 1990s, London 2012 drips with a post-speculative

1 See Boykoff 2011 2 Graham 2012 3 Gilroy 2004

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melancholia, a condition in which the gambler refuses to accept when the game is over.

Iconic architecture, which served neoliberal cities as the principle bureau de change for

the exchange of financial and cultural capital for over twenty years, acquires a newly

melancholic quality, in which its glassy civic optimism now appears sadly delusional and

retrograde. Olympic bids are often justified and criticised in terms of their ‘legacy impact’,

that is, the plans they put in place for future use and upkeep of the infrastructure they

leave behind. But in one sense, the London Olympics are already a legacy before a

single javelin has been hurled in anger – a legacy of Britain’s Blair era of urban

boosterism and debt-fuelled consumption.

Sport in retrospect

A number of critics have suggested that neoliberalism has now entered a state of

existential ambivalence, both more explicit and less legitimate. It is, as Neil Smith

argues, “dead but dominant”.4 This ambivalence appears in the policy realm via eerie

revivals of various pre-2008 tropes, such as the British government’s recent attempts to

increase levels of mortgage debt, interspersed by emergency management of specific

crises. The condition of post-speculative melancholia combines a heightened

commitment to neoliberal policy measures with a reduced willingness to debate or

evaluate them – a belligerent refusal to confront the historic implications of crisis. Freud

spoke of the melancholic individual as suffering a “constitutional ambivalence”, torn

between letting go and clinging on to that which has departed.5 From a critical and

theoretical perspective, this grants us the rare opportunity to live both within and without

neoliberalism simultaneously, getting a chance to witness ‘business as usual’ in real

time, but also to appreciate quite how unusual this business always was.

From this critical vantage point, various strange neoliberal rituals can be held up for

inspection. Amongst them is sport. Between the crisis of Fordist Keynesianism and the

financial crisis of neoliberalism, the status of sport mutated and grew to an extent that

was scarcely recognised as it was happening. Sociologists identify key technological and

regulatory factors in the rising economic power of sports organisations. Yet much of this

sits within broader theories of media, tourism, consumption and postmodernity.

4 Smith 2011 5 Freud 2005, p. 216

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Increased television coverage and picture quality during the 1960s created the

conditions for rapid growth of sports sponsorship during the 1970s. In the UK, the

banning of televised tobacco advertising in 1965 (which turned tobacco companies

towards television sponsorship) and the extension of copyright to cover sports clothing in

1968 were both important ingredients in the political economy of sport that would follow.

Revenue from sponsorship and television rights soared over the 1980s and ‘90s, with

the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics representing a landmark in commercialisation. The 1984

games were also notable for being the first to be judged economically in terms of the

surplus for the host city, initiating a debate about the fiscal rationality of mega-events

that has continued ever since.

The political status and profile of sport rose commensurately. Policies to increase

participation in sport were first developed in Britain by the Labour government in 1975,

but by the 1990s had become viewed as a route to nearly any social good one cared to

mention, from health to community development to urban regeneration. Between 1989-

96, the British political and middle classes performed an extraordinary volte face with

respect to football, aided by the internationalisation of media and player labour markets,

in which the ‘national game’ went from being a source of shame and fear, to being one

of a newly inclusive post-industrial national identity. Where Margaret Thatcher had

treated all sports with something approaching disdain (and had publicly questioned

whether England should be permitted to play in the 1990 World Cup on account of

hooliganism amongst fans), every Prime Minister since has felt required to voice their

enthusiasm for sport. Rupert Murdoch’s satellite broadcaster paid £307m for exclusive

rights to broadcast English soccer in 1992; by 2006, it was paying £1.3bn for non-

exclusive rights.

There is copious economic, geographic and medical literature dedicated to

understanding the impact of sport on individual bodies, ‘communities’, local economies

and cultural identities. Some of this is focused on the impact of mega-events such as the

Olympics, some on ‘grass-roots’ participation, and others on the various intermediary

levels or connections between the two. Some of it is produced by governments and

businesses seeking to justify expenditure on elite sports and mega-events, and must be

treated with suspicion. But, all too often, even the critical research on sport runs up

against a vacuum of justification, which makes empirical evaluation virtually impossible:

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many of the stated rationales for sporting involvement and sporting excess are

impossible to pin down. The political and economic promises that get made for sport,

and especially for sporting mega-events, are typically so vague in the first place that it is

often impossible to ascertain whether or not they have been delivered on, although

efforts to gauge the benefits scientifically have typically found them to be exaggerated.6

Too often, the distinction between the value of amateur sporting participation and that of

elite sports is blurred, with a presupposition that the two are mutually reinforcing; this is

one claim that has been firmly falsified, though will no doubt reappear.7 The dominant

justification for hosting mega-events, that it serves to regenerate a local urban economy,

has never received strong empirical endorsement, but avoids public falsification by

remaining sufficiently vague in its claims.8

There is apparently nothing that matches sport, as a basis on which to suspend the

norms of the contemporary liberal public sphere. In 2010, the BBC was roundly criticised

by 10 Downing Street and by the former England football captain and BBC sports pundit,

Gary Lineker, for daring to broadcast a documentary criticising the corruptions of FIFA,

the football world governing body, at a time when England was bidding to host the 2016

World cup. To such examples one should add another crucial area of the liberal public

sphere that goes on holiday where sport is concerned: positivist and utilitarian social

science. The evidence, appraisal and evaluation that accompanies all public spending in

modern policy-making becomes mysteriously toothless where sport is concerned, or is

suspended altogether. Why must there be more sport? Why must £11bn be spent on

transforming a marshy corner of East London? The only honest answer is that nobody

really knows.

It may be more critically productive to acknowledge the exceptional status of sport in this

regard, and then to ask how and why this exceptional status has been accorded. The

economic and social benefits of an event such as London 2012 have already been

debated tirelessly, and will continue to be for years afterwards. This is a search for the

extrinsic value of sport. But what if we were to treat this mega-event as a peculiar

symptom of neoliberalism that, unlike all other public goods of this era, is largely

6 See McCartney et al 2010 7 New York Times, 2012; The Guardian, 2011a 8 Horne 2007

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independent of any cost-benefit analysis or other functionalist justification? What if sport

itself carries intrinsic value for the constitution of neoliberalism? What can we say about

the specific affinities of neoliberalism and sport – as opposed to other forms of

consumption, urban investment, tourism, media content – that enables a form of political

exception to hold sway. In the endless search for the effects, benefits and costs of sport,

enthusiasts and critics have largely forgotten to look inside the arena of competition.

Given the elevated profile of sport in our melancholic not-quite-post-neoliberal era, it is

with the actual practices and spectacles of sport that any critical investigation ought to

begin.

In the rest of this article, I identify moral and political affinities between sport and

neoliberalism, in the hope that these affinities might tell us something about the

neoliberal era whose continued existence is now mired in ambivalence and melancholia.

All regimes of political economy depend on modes of justification for their survival, not as

afterthoughts but as component parts of their construction and maintenance.9 Sport

provides neoliberalism with two varieties of justification. Firstly, sport acts as an icon for

neoliberalism, exemplifying the forms of competitive behaviours that are to be valued

across economy and society. This represents an implicit acceptance that actually

existing markets are incapable of playing this role within neoliberalism, dominated as

they are by monopolistic and corporate interests.

Secondly, sport acts as a potlatch for neoliberalism, providing a political release from the

otherwise constant calculative, utilitarian rationalities that are pushed into all corners of

economic and public life. The irrational excesses of political sovereignty, nationhood and

ego are released via sporting ritual. There are of course other scenes of potlatch in

neoliberal societies, especially at the interface of consumption and aesthetics (as the

notion of post-modernism has highlighted); but there is no other form that is

simultaneously an icon in the sense that sport is. It is therefore sport’s dual status as

both icon and potlatch of neoliberalism that might account for the status that it acquired

from the 1970s onwards in the West.

9 Boltanski & Thevenot 2006

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Sport as icon

Speaking in front of Margaret Thatcher and assembled grandees at the Conservative

Party conference in 1977, a 16-year-old William Hague (later Conservative Party Leader

and current Foreign Secretary) issued the following rallying cry:

There is at least one school, I think it's in London, where the pupils are allowed to

win just one race each, for fear that to win more would make the other pupils

seem inferior. That is a classic illustration of the socialist state, which draws

nearer with every Labour government.

The young Hague had identified a rich vein of rhetorical symbolism that would serve the

neoliberal project very well over the subsequent thirty years. Wherever there was talk of

regulating and taxing financial centres or tackling spiralling pay inequality, the response

would be that this would mess with the “level playing field”, putting one city at a

competitive disadvantage against rivals in the global ‘game’, or dissuading the “David

Beckhams” of the business world from bringing their talents to a given location. In a

notorious BBC interview prior to the 2005 election in the UK, Tony Blair was pressed on

his views regarding the rapid growth of inequality in the UK under his government. He

replied that “it's not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns

less money.” Sport was manifestly the justification of last resort.

Sport has performed a crucial role in cementing certain moral equivalences that are

crucial to how neoliberalism works as a political and constitutional project. It is

presupposed that, firstly, it is self-evidently futile to seek to reduce inequality within the

sporting arena. This is a pragmatist appeal to the very nature of competitive game-

playing. Clearly the appeal and excitement of sport (whether to a participant or a

spectator) derives from the fact that it generates inequality of outcome, in ways that

cannot be entirely foreseen. Wittgenstein argued that every game “has not only rules but

also a point”; in the case of sporting contests, inequality is part of the point.10 For these

reasons, any critique of inequality can be most easily ridiculed when applied to the

sporting arena, making sport an indispensable symbolic and moral resource.

10 Wittgenstein 2001, para 564

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A second presupposition, as manifest in Blair’s comment about David Beckham, is that

there is a legitimately semi-permeable boundary between sporting contest and the larger

‘arena’ of capitalism. Hence, inequalities which exist inside the sporting arena are

somehow legitimate expressions of inequalities that exist outside that arena, and vice

versa. Equally important, the equalities which exist inside the sporting arena (the ‘level

playing field’) can be viewed as partly representative of equalities that are available

outside in society. In this latter sense, sport comes to serve as an international,

modernised version of America’s settlement myth, in which the ‘game’ is harsh but fair.

This set of moral equivalences can be traced back to the 1880s, when

professionalisation of English football teams was first introduced and commercialisation

of baseball equipment was invented by former players, such as Spalding. Once sport is

entangled in capitalism, but not entirely dominated by it, it becomes possible to speak of

sport as an attractive example of economic inequality, and to speak of economic

inequality as a necessary effect of exciting sport. What is crucial to such arguments is

that the boundary around the sporting arena has the right level of permeability to exterior

events. Sport cannot be impervious to the influence of money, but nor can it be

determined by it, if it is to perform this crucial moral and symbolic role.

It is important not to under-estimate how important such moral rhetoric would become

during the period of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ of 1979-2008. To understand this,

we need to return to the ideals of the original neoliberal thinkers who were led by

Friedrich Hayek from the late 1930s onwards. The founding ambition of neoliberalism, in

the work of Hayek, Henry Simons in Chicago and the ordo-liberals in Freiburg, was to

produce an alternative to socialist economic planning, but which didn’t simply advocate a

reduction in the power of the state or a return to Victorian liberalism.11 The virtue of the

market, from the early neoliberal perspective, was that it generated outcomes that were

unplanned and unforeseeable. Interestingly, at least until the growing dominance of the

Chicago School in the 1950s, it was this emphasis on uncertainty of outcome that served

far more heavily as a neoliberal justification for the market than more traditional liberal

economic arguments, such as the promotion of individual freedom or maxmisation of

welfare. And the reason why the market guaranteed uncertainty of outcome was thanks

to one of its central properties: competition. 11 For an excellent introduction to the neoliberal pioneers see Mirowski & Plehwe 2009

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Designing and enforcing market competition was to serve as the raison d’etre of the

state, in the early neoliberal imagination. Anti-trust law and regulation offered the state

an opportunity to be actively involved in shaping the form or ‘order’ of the economy, but

without dictating outcomes. Equally, as Simons stressed in his 1934 Positive

Programme for Laissez-faire, monopoly represented just as much as a threat to freedom

as an over-bearing socialist state. The prescriptions emanating from Hayek and the

ordo-liberals during the 1940s urged an active anti-trust regime, that attacked dominant

firms and preserved the market as an arena in which equal rights were upheld by rule of

law, and where uncertainty was guaranteed by the price system.

There was a strong tradition of neo-Kantian idealism and moralism fuelling this critical

project, which Chicago School economists would later treat with some disdain.

Especially amongst the European neoliberals of the 1930s and ‘40s, it was the essential

idea of competition as a perfectly fair, unplanned process that provided an organising

principle, which the state would be tasked with imposing upon the economy through law.

Institutionally speaking, markets were valuable only to the extent that they conformed to

(or were made to conform to) this abstract idea. Hayek insisted that Victorian liberalism

was simply one historical manifestation of the transcendent liberal principle, namely that

unplanned outcomes were de jure superior to planned ones. The status of markets

within neoliberalism is contingent, rather than necessary; other institutional mechanisms

might be equally successful at securing the idea of spontaneous, unplanned, competitive

activity. This might include sport, indeed the rhetoric of the ordo-liberals often defined

the task of the state as providing the appropriate rules for the ‘game’ of competitive

capitalism.12

From the 1950s onwards, the Chicago School abandoned this emphasis on the

marketplace as an open and fair competition, governed by rule of law, in favour of a

more sceptical and empirical analysis, which highlighted the potential efficiencies of

monopoly and conglomeration. So long as corporations were acting in pursuit of profit

and market share (and not seeking to co-operate with each other), the argument

12 For example, Walter Eucken advocated a model of competition which “not only includes traditions, laws and customs, but the spirit in which men live and keep to 'rules of the game” quoted in Labrouse & Wiesz, 2001, p. 100.

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developed by Chicago economists Aaron Director and Ronald Coase, soon followed by

conservative lawyers Richard Posner and Robert Bork, was that dominant and predatory

industrial strategies could still deliver efficiencies to shareholders and consumers, and

should therefore be permitted by regulators. This argument came to the rescue of

American corporations during the 1970s, just as they were facing a profitability and

international competitiveness crisis, leading to a drastic reduction in the scope of

competition enforcement in the US, which later infiltrated Europe.13 Ironically, given the

image of neoliberals as ‘market fundamentalists’, by the time that neoliberal ideas

infiltrated states, the idealistic commitment to markets as spaces of freedom, fairness

and entrepreneurship had largely disappeared from conservative theories of regulation.

Neoliberal policy-making may have greatly increased the freedom of particular financial

and managerial elites, but it is not clear that it did so through promoting or defending

markets, at least not in the form of ‘level playing fields’ as imagined by Hayek and his

early associates.

From the 1970s onwards, sport came to provide the template for Hayek’s original

competitive ideal that the institutions of neoliberal capitalism not credibly able to. Hayek

had offered the twentieth century a stark binary choice: either there is socialism leading

to totalitarianism or there is inequality. ‘Actually existing’ neoliberalism of 1979-2008

certainly delivered on the promise of increased inequality, as a raft of books has recently

detailed.14 But the virtue of inequality was not simply that it produced difference in the

form of class, but that it arose in unpredictable ways, thanks to dynamics of the

competitive process. With the rise of Chicago-style neoliberalism, in which large players

are permitted to dominate or oust smaller players in an opportunistic fashion, and

economic power is legitimately translated into political power, the notion that inequality

was arising in unpredictable ways became harder and harder to maintain. But without

that notion, the central legitimating claims of neoliberalism fall to pieces.

It is in this respect that the moral equivalences involved in grass-roots sport, professional

sport and the similarities between the two became all the more crucial in an iconic

sense. Not only is the result of a sporting contest unplanned, so, it seems, is the identity

of the millionaire star of the future. Grass-roots and elite level sports must retain some

13 See Davies 2010 14 See Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009 and Hacker & Pierson 2011.

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symbiotic relationship for this process of legitimation to work. Conversely, socialism

becomes framed as a form of institutionalised antipathy not only to elite success and

reward, but also to more innocent forms of inequality formation in the playground and

park.

Sport as potlatch

An irony of Hague’s 1977 “classic illustration of the socialist state” was that actually

existing socialist states had demonstrated an appetite and proficiency to win elite

sporting contests that outstripped their capitalist rivals. Since first entering a national

team to the summer Olympics in 1956, the USSR had topped the medal table on all but

one occasion. The Soviet Union can be credited with having invented elite sports policy,

by bestowing heavy political and ideological symbolism upon international sport, long

before many Western policy-makers had begun to consider their role in supporting

national sporting prowess.15 Britain saw rapid growth in elite sports public investment

and planning over the course of the 1990s, thanks in small part to heightened interest in

sports amongst political elites (John Major being the first UK Prime Minister to speak

publicly about his enthusiasm for sports) and in large part due to the creation of the

National Lottery in 1994 to fund such policies. While the lottery ticket-holders may have

remained true to the Hayekian spirit of unplanned inequality, sports policy-makers and

governing bodies borrowed from the Soviet example and became set upon long-term

performance targets for national athletes and teams. A more localised equivalent

occurred in the US at the same time, whereby public money was poured into sports

stadia, under auspices of place-branding and regeneration.

It is a paradox of sporting contests that these spectacles of competitive spontaneity

require and permit unusually high levels of planning, public investment and organisation.

Sport possesses a uniquely iconic status within neoliberalism, for embodying a set of

moral equivalences that were once perceived in the ideal competitive market, but which

never quite materialised in neoliberal capitalism itself. The public demonstration of

inequalities that are fair, unplanned and not entirely sealed off from the society beyond

the arena does crucial work in maintaining legitimate order, and rendering the idea of

socialism ridiculous. However, sport also offers the neoliberal state the opportunity to 15 See Allison & Monnington 2002

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throw off its suffocating economic rationalisation for a moment. Somehow, wherever

sport is concerned, cautious and managerial politicians discover a form of charismatic,

immanent authority and sovereignty that is otherwise debarred from them. In this sense,

sport also represents a crucial form of potlatch under neoliberal political economy, a

periodic festival of unmeasured politics.

Sport is now seized by British politicians to demonstrate a passion, fearlessness and

disregard for economic reason. Carl Schmitt’s idea of “the political” as the self-

legitimating decision apparently finds a haven in sports policy. In his last year as Prime

Minister, Gordon Brown declared that he would make London’s hosting of the 2018

World Cup his “personal mission”.16 The Coalition government that followed Brown was

united around a programme of vicious austerity, without any dissenting voices from the

Liberal Democrat partners, until the Education Secretary went too far by announcing

£162m of cuts to school sports and finally the consensus was publicly broken.17 In one

very clear indication that the measured economic rationality that normally pervades the

neoliberal state was to be suspended in favour of a more excessive sovereign ire, it was

announced that the penalty for ticket touts (or ‘scalpers’ as they are known in the US)

would be quadrupled to £20,000 where 2012 Olympic tickets were concerned.18 There is

some irony that the precepts of the Law and Economics movement, which had

convinced lawyers and judges to conceive of law and punishment in terms of rational

economic incentives, were suspended quite so drastically to prevent a form of disruptive

entrepreneurship.

A similar form of exceptional treatment is accorded to the organising committees of

major sports, such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA. So desperate are

cities and nations to win favour from these bodies, when competing to host tournaments,

and so focused are they on succeeding once a tournament is under way, that the

organisers manage to evade norms of regulation and audit that permeated the rest of

neoliberal society under the rubric of ‘governance’. It often seems that the more vigorous

the competition going on within the arena or between different arenas, that the less

16 The Guardian, 2009a 17 The Guardian, 2010. 18 The Guardian, 2011b

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competition is imposed upon the body overseeing these contests. The sporting rule-

makers are exempt from economic rules.

The rhetoric of elite sports policy becomes dictatorial regarding future outcomes, in ways

that would smack of socialist ‘planning’ were it transported into other policy areas. The

Chief executive of UK Sport, Liz Nicholl, informed the BBC in 2011 that Britain "will be

top four in the medal table at the [2012] Olympics and second at the Paralympics, and

we'll win more medals across more sports. I can be confident because of where we are

and what the current performances indicate.”19 While one set of policy-makers is

celebrating uncertainty in a liberal sense, another is claiming to eradicate it in a fiercely

bureaucratic sense.

These are paradoxes which cut to the heart of the Hayekian political project. In contrast

to classical economic liberals from Adam Smith onwards, neoliberalism treats

competition as something to be artificially generated, regulated and sustained. It has

always been a constructivist project, which seeks to take certain ideals, principles and

evaluative techniques (largely identified with the marketplace) and push these into all

corners of economy, society and state.20 The defining paradox of neoliberalism is that it

depends on state sovereignty in order to pursue this constructivist project. It seeks to

produce a world without authoritative public economic plans, but pursues this as a public

plan in its own right, and pursues it with use of authoritative state apparatuses. There is

a contradiction at the heart of this venture, in that, as Jamie Peck suggests, “neo-

liberalism’s curse has been that it can live neither with, nor without, the state”.21

What is at stake here is a conflict between measured and unmeasured forms of power,

or what Michel Foucault characterised as the distinction between ‘governmentality’ and

sovereignty. As public sector workers, professions and scholars can testify, the major

effect of neoliberal politics has been to push quantification and measurement into more

and more corners of public and institutional life. The phenomenon of audit, which arose

as solution to the 19th century separation of ownership and control of businesses, is

adapted in order to impose ‘transparency’ upon many other non-market domains of 19 BBC Sport, 2011 20 See Mirowski 2009, Postface: Defining neoliberalism. In Mirowski & Plewhe (2009) The Road From Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Harvard. 21 Peck 2008

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society, in the hope of making them objectively comparable. But unmeasured and

invisible forms of sovereign power are held in reserve, in order for this project to be

pursued. For the ordo-liberals, this would be judicial in form (i.e. rule of law), though the

later neoliberal movement would bestow increased authority upon executive sovereignty.

The political project of subjecting all forms of social and political relations to quantitative

audit cannot be self-auditing. The authority of such a project must be derived from

elsewhere.

One way out of this problem has been to establish forms of meta-audit, which seek to

subject the nation state to economic evaluation and comparison, from the vantage point

of neoliberal think tanks such as The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Since the late 1970s, the work of business strategist Michael Porter has been influential

in ranking nations according to their levels of ‘competitiveness’, which subjects even

executive decision-making to a form of efficiency audit. The authority of the mountaintop

think tank or ‘guru’ becomes ultimate, in order that the authority of sovereign nation

states can be measured and compared. This generates a new global imaginary, in which

nations are analogous to corporations, seeking to out-compete one another through

strategic investment in business-friendly infrastructure, attractive regulatory and tax

regimes and correction of ‘market failures’. The term ‘UK PLC’ became a common

reference point in British policy circles, while US competitiveness think tanks issued

reports playing on this metaphor, such that “if America were a company, freedom and

exploration would be our core competencies”.22

Frameworks of international ‘competitiveness’ and ranking provided neoliberalism with a

useful imaginary, in which even international geopolitics resembled a competitive game.

At least on a rhetorical level, financial centres were pitted against each other, in a

contest to see who could attract the most ‘talent’ from the financial sector, while arts and

iconic architecture were mobilised to revive or redefine ex-industrial spaces in ways that

were attractive to mobile capital. The urban guru Richard Florida produced economic

indexes to measure and compare the cultural buzz of different cities. Achieving

distinctiveness of local or national identity, against a backdrop of the global economic

‘game’ became a policy preoccupation. David Harvey describes this well:

22 Council on Competitiveness, 2005

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The neoliberal state needs nationalism of a certain sort to survive. Forced to

operate as a competitive agent in the world market and seeking to establish the

best possible business climate, it mobilizes nationalism in its effort to succeed.

Competition produces ephemeral winners and losers in the global struggle for

position, and this in itself can be a source of national pride or of national soul-

searching. Nationalism around sports competitions between nations is a sign of

this.23

This “nationalism of a certain sort” is one that endorses inter-territorial competitiveness,

but without that leading to forms of protectionism or exit from the global game. It is a

weak form of mercantilism, which mobilises culture and business support as local

economic resources. As for Hayek, difference – in this instance geographic and cultural

difference – is re-imagined and represented as a form of relative, measurable inequality

of performance.

Yet despite the pervasiveness of this corporate-national imaginary, the problem of

sovereignty has never disappeared entirely. Sovereignty remains something that nation

states possess, but international think tanks, PLCs and gurus do not; even trans-national

regulators such as the European Commission or World Trade Organisation must derive

their sovereignty from somewhere. The financial crisis and Euro crisis have

demonstrated that the modern nation state, with its immeasurable reserves of sovereign

power, was always neoliberalism’s last resort. Immeasurable, uneconomic sovereign

power remains an invisible, unmentioned precondition of the competitive economic

game.

What happened to its unmeasured political power? Between 1979-2008, sport provided

a crucial potlatch to the neoliberal state, an opportunity to release the political pressure

that built up under circumstances in which sovereignty was suppressed or subjected to

economic measurement. The “nationalism” of a certain sort identified by Harvey, which

sport facilitated, is partly symbolic and rhetorical; but sport also creates space for

political action and executive decision to over-ride the logic of economics and ‘normal’

governmental rules. The various exceptional measures taken in the context of mega-

events demonstrate that sport does not just symbolise neoliberal nationhood, but 23 Harvey 2005, p. 85

17

provides one portal through which pent up reserves of political excess can be vented. It

is the privileged political realm in which charismatic authority and immanent decision are

sufficient to mobilise the force of the state, regardless of standard liberal procedure or

economic calculation.

Sport in crisis

As the 1970s were drawing to a close, sporting contest, both as idea and as reality,

provided an indispensable resource of legitimation and justification, that became

unchallengeable for the subsequent three decades. But now in the melancholic shadow

of London’s 2012 Olympic Park, showcasing the values, conceits and excesses of an

era that has closed, what becomes of sport? For 16-year-old William Hague, there was

comedy and nonsense in the apparently “socialist” practice of limiting inequality on the

playing field. But in 2012, it is Stratford’s sprawling consumer nightmare, oversized

public sculpture and bloated security infrastructure that now invite ridicule, quite aside

from the vapid physical contests that will take place inside the arenas, in front of elite

invited audiences.

London 2012 feels out of time, caught on the barbed wire fence between an era of

surging financialisation and the post-2008 era in which the meritocratic ideal of

competitive players on a level playing field now looks to have been a cruel lie all along.

Far from a festivity of renewal, London 2012 is the melancholic games, in which

spectators can spend two weeks imagining themselves back into a pre-2008 world.

Inside this bubble, inequalities are earned, playing fields are level and nations are

optimistic business communities, coached to a higher performance by states. Such

nostalgia is bought at the expense of refusing to allow a failed political economy to die.

To serve successfully as a source of legitimation, sport must successfully balance its

status as neoliberal icon (justifying the pursuit of inequality) and as neoliberal potlatch

(releasing sovereign decisions from economic constraints). Somehow, the contradiction

between appeals to fairness and excesses of power must be ameliorated. Occasionally

tensions between the two have risen to public consciousness. For instance, sport may

require exceptional political backing in order to retain its moral authority: unless sport is

exempted from certain aspects of competition law, then it can be overwhelmed by the

18

self-reproducing inequalities of capitalism, as English football now demonstrates.24 A

distinct paradox of neoliberal authority is that, for inequalities to be produced and judged

in a neutral and objective fashion, the auditors themselves must be beyond critical

evaluation. Hosts, organisers and auditors must be granted an exception, such that the

game itself is all-consuming. These are the characteristic challenges of keeping the

competitive imaginary alive.

A crisis of neoliberal authority occurs when questions are posed regarding the intimacy

between elite contestants and the regulators of competition. If it turns out that the power

of the ‘winners’ grants them influence over referees, rule-makers and auditors, then the

entire iconic edifice of legitimate competition starts to disintegrate. The financial crisis

and its aftermath has raised this problem to public consciousness, for instance in the

discovery that credit-rating agencies were as focused upon out-competing each other for

fees as they were upon holding investment banks to account. Growing intimacy between

capitalism’s largest ‘contestants’ and their supposed masters is central to the legitimacy

crisis of the last four years. The fairness of what goes on inside a sporting arena may

remain unpolluted; but if the arena itself sits within a nakedly rigged arena of economic

combat, which has been repeatedly compared to that of sport, then the legitimacy of

sport is not unaffected.

It is equally crucial to sport’s role in the construction of neoliberal authority that there is a

credible link between elite sports and ‘grass roots’ participation. The ideal of a ladder

connecting top and bottom of society is critical to how neoliberalism seeks to maintain

some moral legitimacy. Symbolic alternation between the image of the sporting

megastar and the image of the ordinary athlete performs a crucial cultural role,

reinforced by Nike marketing slogans. Yet one needs only step into a high-street sports

shop in Britain in 2012 to see how frayed this relationship has now become. The

customer can purchase endless replica shirts and branded fashion-wear, until they

visibly resemble David Beckham or Michael Jordan, but it can be difficult to find

something as mundane as a pair of laces for running shoes. Mimicking the multi-

millionaire extends to everything except engaging in physical exercise.

24 See The Guardian, 2009b

19

The evidence suggesting that elite sports don’t simply distract individuals from

participating in sports (by providing another televised spectacle to watch) but actively

dissuade them from doing so, on the grounds that they feel inferior and embarrassed by

their body shape, is devastating to the idealised Hayekian vision of a society organised

as a vast patchwork of overlapping competitions and tests. Where society offers only a

choice between elite success and deserved failure, a common sense response is to

abstain altogether. That the brand of ‘Adidas’ appeared so frequently in the photographs

of England’s 2011 summer riots and lootings (many of which targeted the sportswear

chain JD Sports) hints at a newly nihilistic sporting spirit, in which the contestant draws

on all of their powers and capabilities to grab whatever they can. In this respect, the

sporting ethos has simply mimicked the capitalism that goes on beyond the arena’s

limits. Ironically, amidst the sponsorship, private security and carefully planned

consumption, sport may tell the truth about our political economy after all.

20

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