In keeping with the title of this quarterly magazine, a cultural offshoot of the more well-known The Economist, Tim De Lisle has produced a highly intelligent essay on the new religion we commonly refer to as sport. De Lisle starts off by offering his readers a comparison between sporting coverage in 1966, the year of England’s lone international football triumph, and 2010 when sport is ubiquitous and all-powerful. For a taste of the comparison of what corporate global sport has now become compared to the low key affair of the 1966 World Cup, De Lisle writes:

If the hype is extraordinary, so is the ambient presence. The last World Cup was all around us, on billboards, drink cans and cereal packets, on garage forecourts and millions of flag-bearing cars, in the windows of Boots the chemist and McDonald’s the burger joint( want tickets? Win tickets! Buy any large meal to play) The cup-winning captain from 1966, Bobby Moore, was on every Kit-Kat wrapper, despite having died thirteen years earlier; his team-mate Geoff Hurst, now Sir Geoff, was appointed director of football for McDonald’s and had two columns in two newspapers. The boys of 1966 were bigger in 2006 than they were in 1966.

De Lisle continues in the same vein:

The 2006 World Cup generated thousands of hours of television time, countless phone-ins and fan forums, endless blogs and eight hit records. It is not just football: something similar is happening in rugby with the 2003 World Cup and in cricket with the 2005 Ashes. And it’s not just Britain: each World Cup or Olympics makes more noise around the world than the last. American sport, in it’s different way, self contained and tightly regulated, is getting bigger too: the television audience for the 2010 Super Bowl was the biggest ever recorded in America for any programme. This spring, with another world cup looming, half the nations of Europe were strafed with giant images of the Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo in Armani y-fronts, muscles rippling like a Greek god. Which raises the question: how did sport get so big? Whodunnit, and where and when and why?

De Lisle goes on to answer his own rhetorical questions and does so in seven clear categories:

Category 1 asks; Was it Imperialism? I was a little surprised, and pleasantly so, to see De Lisle using the word imperialism, a word that has largely been supplanted with the less precise, more amorphous, globalisation or neo-liberalism. Imperialism, generally understood by students of Marx, to be the highest stage of capitalism, is more precise because it implies that a real and functioning empire is economically, politically and militarily directing things. Globalisation, on the other hand, gives the impression that the process is happening all by itself, independent of man’s will. Imperialism or globalisation; either way the most developed countries and its corporations are continuing to flourish at the expense of the least developed. Under this process, the discrepancy between rich and poor increases rather than diminishes, as the propagandists and apologists for the corporate world would have us believe.

De Lisle starts appropriately with the British Empire. Quoting Professor Joe Maguire of Loughborough University we learn, The reason sport became a world-wide phenomenon can be summed up in three words, The British Empire. In the case of football, its spread throughout South America and the rest of the world, came at the hands of, sailors of the Royal Navy, merchants and proselytising Christian groups. In other words, a rifle in one hand, a bible in the other and a football or cricket bat slung over the shoulder.

De Lisle then brings things up to date.

These days, imperial might lies partly in the hands of global commerce, and while the American football team are still relative minnows at the World Cup, plenty of big American fish are in the water. At the German grounds in 2006, the green of the pitch was often framed by the red of Coca-Cola and McDonalds. Germany has 1,200 breweries, but none of them supplied the official beer of the tournament: for the sixth World Cup running, it was Budweiser, made by Anheuser-Busch of Chicago, which paid $40 m for the alcohol rights.

The story was unchanged for the 2010 World cup in South Africa. When a Dutch brewery tried to gate crash the party they were quickly stepped on from a great height. As for the local South African food and drinks companies; they were totally priced out of the market. Imperialism still rules!

Category two asks; was it the broadcasters who have driven sport to such stratospheric heights? If you want a clear picture of just how meteoric the rise in media interest in sport has been over the past fifty years just consider this comparison. For the 1948 Olympics in London, the broadcasting rights went for somewhere between £1,000 and £1,500 about £40,000 in today’s money. For the Olympic’s return to London in 2012, the rights went for £2.5 billion. And from the words of the man himself, Mr Rupert Murdoch, we are left in no doubt as to the strategic importance of sport for the world’s media empires. We have long-term rights in most countries to major sporting events. We intend to use sports as a battering ram in our pay TV operations. So if sports are to be seen as a battering ram for Murdoch’s media empire, what does that make us, the hapless subscribers? The answer is simple; gullible mugs.

Other categories that De Lisle examines include big business, the written word, film and music and general changes in society. With respect to the written word, there is no doubt about the effects of the internet. De Lisle writes:

This trend (of sports reporting) has been accentuated by the internet, which gives written journalism endless space, greater reach, more urgency and more readers. The web brings fans together between matches; it smuggles sport into the office, as television cannot; it distributes news and non news, rumour and speculation at lightening speed; it reaches the Manchester United fan in Seoul as fast as one in Salford; it gives the punter a pulpit, and lets clubs be publishers, pushing out their own spin.

Little more needs to be said about the multi-billion business that sport has become; the Olympic Games really should be renamed the Corporate Games. De Lisle cites a number of texts that inform this subject, ‘Power and Global Sport’ by Professor Maguire being high on my summer reading list. It will no doubt give us the details but ultimately can only tell us what we already can see with our own eyes. Sport is big business and getting bigger by the day.

De Lisle makes some a very poignant points in his concluding paragraphs about how life and people are increasingly becoming atomised and how they, yearn to be part of a crowd. This isn’t developed in the article, but is probably at the very heart of our obsession with sport. As the three key pillars of social control crumble; religion, nation and family, a new social gel is needed. Sport fills the gap perfectly. The Romans had a term for their social control; bread and circuses, backed up of course with the brute force of their centurions. It seems we haven’t moved on much over the ensuing two thousand years.