[THS] John Pilger: Why Sharks Should Not Own Sport

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25277.htm

Why Sharks Should Not Own Sport

By John Pilger

April 21, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- -As Tiger Woods returns to golf, not all
his affairs are salacious headlines. The Tiger Woods Golf Course in Dubai is costing
$100million to build. Dubai relies on cheap third world labour, as do certain consumer
brands that have helped make Woods a billionaire. Nike workers in Thailand wrote to
Woods, expressing their “utmost respect for your skill and perseverance as an
athlete” but pointing out that they would need to work 72,000 years “to receive what
you will earn from [your Nike] contract”.

The American sports writer, Dave Zirin, is one of the few to break media silence on
the corporate distortion and corruption of sport. His forthcoming book Bad Sports:
How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love (Scribner) blows a long whistle on
what money power has done to the people’s pleasure, its heroes like Woods and the
communities it once served. He describes the impact of the Texan Tom Hicks’s half-
ownership of Liverpool Football Club, which followed another rich and bored
American Malcolm Glazer’s “leveraged takeover” of Manchester United in 2005. As a
result, England’s most successful club (with Liverpool) is now 716.5 million pounds in
debt.

How long has this been going on? In 1983, you could buy a ticket to a first division
game for 75 pence. Today, the average at Old Trafford is around 34 pounds. Watch
the latest crop of parents on morose queues to buy overpriced club strips and
insignia, also made with cheap and often sweated labour, with the brand of a failed
multinational emblazoned on it. Profiteering is now an incandescent presence across
top-class sport. Sven-Goran Eriksson will trouser up to two million pounds for just
three months’ work in Ivory Coast, where half the population has barely enough to
survive. Australia’s finest, most boorish cricketers are collecting their bundles for a
few months’ cavorting in the Indian franchises. The attitude is entitlement, the kind
that less talented “celebrities” flaunt. It was in no way remarkable that in 2007-8 a
number of the heirs to Don Bradman’s Invincibles achieved what was once nigh on
impossible; they were disliked in their own country. Those high fives and air-
punching fists have become salutes not to “everyone working for each other,
everyone having a share of the rewards” (Bill Shankly), but to the voracious sponsor
and the forensic camera.

Take for example FIFA, which has effectively taken charge of South Africa for the
World Cup. Along with the International Olympic Committee, FIFA is sport’s Wall
Street and Pentagon combined. They have this power because host politicians believe
the “international prestige” of their visitation will bring economic and promotional
benefits, especially to themselves. I was reminded of this watching a documentary by
the South African director Craig Tanner, Fahrenheit 2010. His film is not opposed to
the World Cup, but reveals how ordinary South Africans, whose game is football,
have been shoved aside, dispossessed and further impoverished so that a giant TV
façade can be erected in their country.

A new stadium near Nelspruit will host four World Cup matches over 10 days. Jimmy
Mohlala, speaker of the local municipality, was gunned down in his home in January
last year after whistle-blowing “irregularities” in the tenders. An entire school, which
was in the way, has been removed into prefabricated, sweltering steel boxes on a
desolate site with a road running through it. “When the World Cup is over,” said the
writer Ashwin Desai, “it will become obvious that these stadiums are going to be
empty shells, that our money has been used for what is really a pyramid scheme”.

A community of 20,000 people, the Joe Slovo Informal Settlement, is threatened with
eviction from where they live near the main motorway between Cape Town and the
city’s airport. They are deemed an “eyesore”. Street vendors will be arrested if they
fail to comply with FIFA rules about trade and advertising and mention the words
“World Cup”, even “2010”. FIFA will earn about two and quarter billion pounds from
the TV rights, exceeding its income from the last two World Cups combined.

Incredibly, South Africa will get none of this. And this is country with up to 40 per
cent unemployment, a male life expectancy of 49 and thousands of malnourished
children. This truth about the “rainbow nation” is not what fans all over the world will
see on their TV screens, although they may glimpse an unreported feature of
modern South Africa, which is a vibrant, rolling resistance that has linked the World
Cup to an economic apartheid that remains as divisive as ever. Indeed, another kind
of World Cup for effective popular protest has long been won in the streets of South
Africa’s townships.

In his chapter on Liverpool FC, Dave Zirin describes a similar resistance that also
offers inspiration to those struggling to reclaim sport from the sharks. A fans’
organization, Share Liverpool FC, is aiming for 100,000 shareholders to buy back the
club from Tom Hicks and his co-owner, George Gillett. Liverpool fans have also
formed the Liverpool Supporters Union (LSU), which has had thousands in the streets
calling for a boycott of the Bank of Scotland if it gives Hicks and Gillett any more
credit. Remember how the boycott of Murdoch press succeeded in Liverpool following
the Sun’s lies over the Hillsborough tragedy. “If we stand together and speak with
one voice, regardless of language or accent,” says the LSU, “we can make a genuine
difference to our football club, the city of Liverpool and indeed the wider footballing
world.” On 17 April, Hicks and Gillett announced they were selling the club.
Manchester United fans are mounting a similar, principled resistance in defence of
the sport they love and which they believe rightly is theirs. We should support them.

www.johnpilger.com