William Watson: Pro sports will save the idea of globalization

It’s hard to imagine a purer meritocracy or a more performance-based allocation of talent than professional sports. Photo by Oli SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images

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Last Sunday, after a cancelled flight home from holiday, my wife and I were stuck in a hotel room near the Amsterdam airport — quite a nice one, actually, with a terrific buffet: thank you, Air Canada. While she did useful things, I caught up on sports, including two complete NFL games courtesy a live German-language broadcast on RTL. “Oh my God!”, the play-by-play guy kept saying as the bodies flew into each other concussively. Or maybe it was “O mein Gott!” I couldn’t really tell.

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The commentators were in-studio in Cologne but there was a sideline man live at each game doing colour spots during breaks in the action, i.e., U.S. TV time-outs. The meatiness of the barbecued ribs on offer in Houston got special attention. Language wasn’t really a problem as there was copious NFL jargon, like “cover-zero,” “zone blocking,” “deep post route,” “holding” and so on. And the CBS feed kept spewing data onto the screen in English.

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The other kind of football, which we call soccer, also got big play, of course. There was both live action and re-caps of seemingly dozens of games all over the dial, including Arsenal vs. Crystal Palace in the Women’s Super League. Based in North London, Arsenal has players from 13 countries, including Canada. Funny game, soccer: Crystal Palace was ecstatic with a 0-0 tie, Arsenal morose. As so often in life, expectations are everything.

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As one of the few neoliberal fans of globalization left these days, one thing I found striking was the dramatically diverse makeup of the players being interviewed post-game. Quite often they seemed not to be of the ethnicity or nationality commonly associated with the city or region they were representing.

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That appears to be just fine with fans. Whether you own a team or merely support one, you want it to win, which means getting the very best players available, wherever they come from. It’s hard to imagine a purer meritocracy or a more performance-based allocation of talent than professional sports.

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Another thing hard to imagine is a more globalized sports world than we have today. Also last Sunday, a German won the United States Open men’s tennis championship. On Saturday Kazakhstani Elena Rybakina had defeated Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka for the women’s title. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump was at the Irish Open, which was being played on a golf course he owns. Atypically for this era, an Irishman won — Shane Lowry — though he beat a Chilean, American, Dane and Italian to do it.

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While all this was happening, the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams were presumably recovering from jet lag after their season-opener in Melbourne before more than 100,000 Australian fans two days earlier. Or was it three? Or maybe just one?

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In December 1945, after Moscow Dynamo soccer team finished a four-game “friendly” series against British club teams, including Arsenal — a friendly series that included fisticuffs in at least one match — George Orwell wrote a famous piece on “The Sporting Spirit” in which he contested the shibboleth that sport brings peoples and countries together. Quite the contrary, he argued, nation-to-nation sport was “an unfailing cause of ill-will … war minus the shooting.”