If you were to ask during a conference, regardless of the audience: “Does anyone know Andrew Holness? Antonio Costa?”, very few hands would likely go up. But if you replaced those names with Usain Bolt or Cristiano Ronaldo, the opposite would happen: few arms would stay glued to their bodies. The former two are, respectively, the Prime Ministers of Jamaica and Portugal managing their countries, while the latter are “just” athletes but, in reality, global superstars who bring their countries a boost in popularity.
In a globalized world where the international stage is increasingly crowded and it is therefore quite difficult to make a name for oneself, athletic achievement has become the best way to be recognized, and furthermore, positively. At the end of the 1990s, Jacques Chirac, preparing for a tour in Latin America, wisely decided to bring along Michel Platini. The recurring question during various public appearances was: who is the guy next to Platini?
Sport is a global social factor that transcends borders as well as political, ethnic, or religious divides. Often, a child’s first contact with the outside world is through a sports star. They can admire them even if they share no nationality or skin color. They likely won’t question the deity they believe in, or whether they believe in one at all.
Radio, television, and now social media have allowed sports to conquer the world, creating a stadium with unlimited capacity. Over 2 billion people watch the finals of the World Cup or the 100 meters at the Olympics simultaneously. What other human activities can unite so many people at the same moment? Sport has extended its influence globally. Even more than Charles V’s empire, the sun never sets on football or the Olympics. Yet, compared to other empires, football has a significant difference: its expansion has been peaceful and even embraced enthusiastically by the conquered peoples. Great Britain, which invented democracy and football in the 19th century, unsuccessfully attempted to export the former by force, particularly in Iraq in 2003. In contrast, it successfully exported the latter to even the most remote places solely through example and imitation, with boundless passion.
Universal in scope, football represents the ultimate stage of globalization. However, it differs in two key ways from other facets of this phenomenon: it is not dominated by the United States, and it does not erase national identities. When the national team plays, the entire nation, beyond political, social, and cultural divergences, unites to support it. One might even argue that the traditional definition of a state—a people, a government, a territory—is no longer complete; it must now include a national football team. Sport represents the happy, smiling face of globalization.
Football is more widely spread than market economies or even the Internet. It can be played where there’s no electricity and even under authoritarian regimes. However, it’s important not to believe, as some “sociologists” who dislike sports repeatedly suggest, that football—or sports in general—is the opium of the people. Quite the contrary, it is often in the most obscurantist regimes where the practice of sport—which represents both individual and collective liberation—is prohibited. The Taliban banned both men’s and women’s sports upon gaining power, and it cannot be practiced under the regime of ISIS.
The definition of power has profoundly changed. The distinction between hard and soft power is now firmly established. Alongside pure force, which compels or imposes one’s will on another, soft power convinces, inspires admiration, or respect. Sport is a major source of soft power.
Personally, I can testify that after the 1998 World Cup and France’s victory, the first thing people talked about abroad was our national football team. Its victory and the beautiful game they played symbolized a successful diversity.
For a long time, Brazil’s football team also played the role of a positive emblem for a country that had much fewer assets to boast about. Sport has this unique quality: its power does not provoke rejection, hostility, or even hatred, as traditional strategic power can. Instead, it evokes admiration, joyful participation, and a desire for closeness.
Sports organizations have always claimed that sport and politics should not be mixed. This is both sincere and hypocritical, illustrating how easily one can become a prisoner of their own propaganda. From the outset, Baron de Coubertin, in his efforts to recreate the Olympics, had two objectives that contained a strategic aspect that cannot be overlooked. The first was to contribute to the pacification of international relations by fostering mutual understanding among nations and openness to others. If this isn’t a political goal, it’s hard to define what one could be. However, Baron de Coubertin had another goal, equally strategic but less publicly acknowledged: preparing French youth for physical exercises because the defeat against Prussia in 1870 had been interpreted as an inferiority in this regard compared to German youth. In fact, as early as 1912, he introduced into the Olympics a discipline with very militaristic characteristics: the modern pentathlon (equestrian, running, swimming, fencing, and pistol shooting), which by definition could not exist in ancient games. It actually consisted of skills that every captured officer needed to know in order to escape.
After World War I, the defeated nations were excluded from the Olympics to prevent them from taking revenge on the sporting field for their military defeat. Much has been said about Hitler’s instrumentalization of the Olympics in 1936: the swastikas waved in the Olympic stadium, the dramaturgy, the cult of the body. Yet, at the same time, Jesse Owens’ victory, with his four gold medals, shattered the theories of Aryan racial superiority. Furthermore, his friendship with the German Luz Long angered Hitler, who could hardly tolerate seeing a Black American and a blonde German embrace.
After World War II, the strategic impact of sport, particularly the Olympics, continued. The USSR participated starting in 1952, with the Games held in neighboring neutral Finland.
The East/West competition shifted peacefully and in an organized manner onto sports arenas. After each Olympiad, the USSR and the United States would tally gold medals to determine which system—socialist or capitalist—was more effective, better suited to the aspirations of youth, and more capable of achieving performance. The Olympics represent a continuation of the Cold War by other means. A competition within a competition pitted the two Germanys against each other, leading to widespread doping in East Germany.
Sport also played a vital role in decolonization and the fight against apartheid. For a young country just gaining independence, having a delegation at the Olympics or a national football team allowed for the playing of the national anthem, showcasing the flag, and unifying a people with a fragile identity behind its champions. Membership in FIFA or the IOC was almost as significant and, in any case, more visible than in the UN. Algeria existed through its football team long before becoming an independent state. From 1958 to 1961, players who had fled French championships formed a “national” football team that primarily performed in Eastern Europe and Africa. After the collapse of the Soviet and Yugoslav multinational empires, sports teams also became a quick cement for national identity.
The boycott of South Africa was initially a sporting measure before it became political. The apartheid regime was excluded from the sports movement before being sidelined from the UN, and African countries used the visibility of sport to draw international attention to the treatment of Black people in South Africa.
Charles de Gaulle was certainly not a sports enthusiast, but he understood its symbolic importance. After disastrous results at the 1960 Rome Olympics, he decided to give French sports a means of greater radiance. Understanding that restoring France’s international aura could not come with a sports humiliation, he opted to elevate the sports sector. In the daily newspaper Le Figaro, Jacques Faizant illustrated him in a tracksuit and sneakers, grumbling, “In this country, I must do everything myself.” It is somewhat in this spirit that Laurent Fabius decided in 2013 to create an Ambassador for Sport position—not out of passion but out of pragmatism.
Another illustrative example is the significance of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) in organizing globalized sporting competitions. China hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008 and is set to host the Winter Games in 2022. Brazil hosted the World Cup and the Olympics in 2014 and 2016, respectively. Russia hosted the Winter Games in 2014 and is set to host the World Cup in 2018. South Africa was the host country for the World Cup in 2010. The exception is India, whose sporting results are catastrophic. Should this be seen as a reflection of the caste system, which, although abolished, still lingers and assigns a person their place at birth? In contrast, sport allows for the exact opposite: overcoming boundaries through talent and hard work, rather than heritage or networks.
There has been much criticism regarding the allocation of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, largely on geopolitical grounds. However, FIFA’s goal is to expand its empire. When the World Cup was awarded to the United States in 1994—a country without a traditional football culture—many protested. Similar warnings were issued when the World Cup went to Asia: Japan and South Korea in 2002. There were significant concerns over the reception conditions and preparation of infrastructure for South Africa in 2010.
Likewise, the bidding process for the Olympics has always followed a geopolitical logic: Helsinki was selected in 1952 to facilitate the participation of the Soviet Union and communist countries; the choice of Tokyo in 1964 symbolized the modernization of this country and its full reintegration into the national community; Mexico in 1968 recognized the emergence of the Third World; Munich in 1972 illustrated the normalization of Germany; Moscow in 1980 was supposed to represent détente—if it hadn’t been for the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the failure to ratify the SALT II Agreements; 1988 marked the rise of Asia and the democratization of South Korea; in 1992, Barcelona highlighted Spain’s return to democratic nations.
The “ping-pong diplomacy” often refers to the visit of an American table tennis team to China, welcomed by Zhou Enlai, who delivered a message of friendship to the American people. At the time, Washington and Beijing were fiercely exchanging barbs. Kissinger emphasized the usefulness of this genuinely informal meeting in the Sino-American rapprochement on numerous occasions. Of course, this meeting did not directly trigger a major strategic shift, but it facilitated one by offering a symbolic opportunity for rapprochement that, if it had failed, would not have impinged on the sovereignty or national prestige of either power.
Sport is not a magic wand, but it can be a very useful tool if used intelligently.
Just as the strategic world is becoming multipolar, the sporting world is experiencing the same trend. The first Games in Athens in 1896 gathered 14 nations and 241 athletes. The first World Cup in 1930 took place in Uruguay with 13 nations out of 16 available spots; 3 countries chose not to make a long sea trip of fifteen days to reach Montevideo. Today, FIFA and the IOC have more members than the UN. Both manage to coexist with China, Taiwan, Israel, and Palestine, something that the world organization has been unable to achieve. At the last Olympics, over 80 nations won medals.
Malraux predicted that the 21st century would be religious. It will primarily be the century of globalized sport. Sport has become the new arena for peaceful and regulated confrontations among states, in a world where national rivalries persist but are less frequently resolved through armed conflict, where borders remain but have become porous, and where peoples doubt their identities and futures. Sport offers answers to the loss of bearings and a will to exist in a world where the concept of power still governs international relations. Sport has become an essential element in a state’s influence.
Sport now holds a place in the international public space that is unparalleled compared to its historical significance. Globalization, which compresses time and space, has granted it greater visibility. Sport has thus accelerated and broadened the effects of globalization while contributing to giving it a human face. Beyond emotions, pleasure, joy, and hopes, it is also about geopolitics.
