KILLINAN END - Sport and money will never be clean
Soccer’s World Cup has thrown up one of the great sporting dilemmas which occasionally rears its head. Sport is widely regarded as a positive force with good health and exercise implications for participants. It is, rightly or wrongly, an arena which churns out role models which can cover the spectrum from a humble Katie Taylor to the brash Conor McGregor. In that sense it would be argued by some that if sport and politics should be separate in an ideal world, there is too much at stake in the context of public relations for this to work in practice. How does sport reconcile the reality that it has an insatiable appetite for money with moral considerations about its source?
First things first about the World Cup in Qatar – under no circumstances should this country have been in consideration as a World Cup host purely in sporting terms alone. This is a country which did not have stadia or infrastructure when the decision was taken. There is no local League worthy of the name, no tradition, no significant background in the sport. Strangely, Qatar reached the final of Soccer’s 1981 World Youth Cup beating Brazil and England along the way, but it was a lone lighthouse in a dark ocean of irrelevance to the sport. Countries like England. Italy, Spain or Germany, could hold the World Cup at the drop of a hat. Why then would FIFA choose Qatar? You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work that one out. Again, this points to the role of money in sport and how it bends everybody to its will in the end.
Rugby has had its moments of conscience too. For decades the sport espoused amateurism and disdained those who ‘went North’ and played Rugby League for money. All the while it was accepted that the reality of amateur rugby was frayed around the edges to say the least. More recently there was a question of the name of Europe’s great club competition and its rebranding as the Champions Cup, though with the chief sponsor’s name still commonly used. In the grand scheme of things, looking at Qatar and the debate around it, the arguments around sponsorship of an alcoholic drinks company seem relatively harmless.
The 1981 Springboks’ tour of New Zealand was one of the absolute high-water marks of disputes over the intersection between sport and politics. Robert Muldoon was New Zealand Prime Minister at the time and took the diplomatic decision to speak against the tour but stopped short of calling for its cancellation. The result was a month of mayhem with one of South Africa’s provincial games postponed because of demonstrations.
The sporting prize, however, was too great – it was the Springbok’s first tour to New Zealand since 1965. Graham Mourie, All Blacks captain, refused to play but fielding a team was never going to be a problem. Apartheid South Africa ploughed along for another while riding the wave of the argument that sport and politics should not mix. In rugby terms South Africa was just too big. This was a team which could take on the Lions and the All Blacks on equal terms, and for a very long time was indispensable. Necessity can cause many people to look away.
The GAA has not been immune from debates around appropriateness down the years. Guinness was a very spectacular sponsor for hurling during the mid-90s. The company’s penchant for innovative advertising engendered in hurling much confidence in the way that it made a virtue of the ancient lore of the game and the associated warrior spirit. In time, even this connection was challenged by those who pointed out the damaging aspects of alcohol and its promotion. In any event it made commercial sense for the GAA to move to having various sponsors, but the dilution of the Guinness role had its origins in arguments of ideology.
The GAA got off relatively lightly in all of this when you consider some of its earlier sponsorships. When the Hurler of the Year award was first presented in the late 1950s the sponsor was Caltex and subsequently named Texaco. Albeit this was part of a broader Texaco sponsorship of sports awards but still the GAA’s involvement will always be front and centre given widespread presence of the organisation across the country. One can but imagine the reaction these days to a fossil fuel company sponsoring a GAA award or competition.
Likewise, the notion of the All-Stars called after a tobacco company is unimaginable these days. Yet, in 1971 when the sponsored awards began Carroll’s represented quite a creative and glamorous sponsorship. Of course, this was an era when it was common to see people in television studios smoking, pubs were thick with a pall of smoke, and the negative aspects of the habit was a slow dropping penny. This sponsorship lasted until 1978 and just a few decades later it is unimaginable. For sport, the treading of the line between the necessity of fumbling in a greasy till and the ethical questions this raises still endures. Qatar is just another front in a seemingly endless war.