In less than two weeks, the biggest sporting spectacle, World Cup begins. Mike Marqusee writes in the Guardian on the economic enterprise that the World Cup is and its winners and losers. Read on.
A recent report from Oxfam - Offside! Labour Rights and Sportswear Production in Asia - reminds us that while Nike pays $16m a year to the Brazilian team, the mostly female Asian workers who make the gear are paid as little as £2.50 a day. Those who seek to unionise face dismissal. An Adidas supplier in Indonesia, where workers receive 60 cents an hour, recently sacked 30 union members who took part in a legal pay strike.
The economics and demographics of the World Cup suggest that globalisation is less a uniform wave than an irregular maelstrom. Capital and labour flow at different rates in different directions, as do images and ideas. Paradoxically, globalisation turns national identity into a prize commodity. Corporate and media interests in this country will seek to channel emotion (and spending) into support for the England team. Great numbers will follow the event not because they love football but because they have been persuaded that England’s World Cup run is important to them. Inevitably, political forces will seek to exploit that heavily hyped attachment.
One of the things that makes the World Cup compelling, sometimes disturbing, is the way the fundamentally trivial, harmless realm of sport (where accident and idiosyncrasy reign) acquires an aura of immense consequence. The pointlessly beautiful (beautifully pointless) game seems burdened with a vast weight of financial, cultural, political import. The amazing thing is that it somehow survives.
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